| It seemed like good performances from people whose main skillset is not this. For me, it's knowing what we know about the company and its history that gave a eerie feeling in combination with the sterility. When they brought on the woman who has cancer, I felt deeply uncomfortable. My dad also has cancer right now. He's unlikely to survive. Watching a cancer patient come on to tell their story as part of an extended advertisement, expression serene, any hint of discomfort or pain or fear or bitterness completely hidden, ongoing hardship acknowledged only with a few shallow and euphemistic words, felt deeply uncomfortable to me. Maybe this person enthusiastically volunteered, because she feels happy about what her husband is working on, and grateful for the ways that ChatGPT has helped her prepare for her appointments with doctors. I don't want to disrespect or discredit her, and I've also used LLMs alongside web searches in trying to formulare questions about my father's illness, so I understand how this is a real use case. But something about it just felt wrong, inauthentic. I found myself wondering if she or her husband felt pressured to make this appearance. I also wondered if this kind of storytelling was irresponsible or deceptive, designed to describe technically responsible uses of LLMs (preparing notes for doctor's visits, where someone will verify the LLM's outputs against real expertise), but to suggest in every conceivable implicit way that these ChatGPT is actually capable of medical expertise itself. Put alongside "subject-matter experts in your pocket", talk of use in medical research and practice (where machine learning has a dubious history of deception and methodological misapplication problems), what are people likely to think? I thought also of my mom, who drives herself crazy with anxiety every time my dad gets a new test result, obsessively trying to directly interpret them herself from the moment they arrive to his doctor's visit a week or two later. What impression would this clip leave on her? Does the idea of her using an LLM in this way feel safe to me? There's a deeper sense that OpenAI's messaging, mission, and orientation are some mixture of deceptive and incoherent that leaves viewers with the sense that we're being lied to in presentations like this. It goes beyond stiff performances or rehearsed choices of words. There's something cultish about the "AGI" hype, the sci-fi fever dream of "safety" problems that the field has mainstreamed, the slippage of OpenAI from a non-profit research institution to a for-profit startup all while claiming to be focused on the same mission, the role of AI as an oracle so opaque it might as well be magic, the idea of finding a sacred "rationality" in predictions founded purely on statistics without communicable/interrogable structural or causal models... all of it. It's against this backdrop that the same kind of stiffness that might be cute or campy in an infomercial for kitchen gadgets becomes uncanny. |