ChatGPT and Skynet

In the opening scene of the sci-fi feature film, Terminator Genisys, a voice-over says the following:

“Before they died, my parents told me stories about how the world once was; what it was like long before I was born; before the war with the machines. They remembered a green world, vast and beautiful, filled with laughter and hope for the future. It’s a world I never knew. By the time I was born, all this was gone. “Skynet,” a computer program designed to automate missile defence. It was supposed to protect us, but that’s not what happened. August 29, 1997, Skynet woke up. It decided all humanity was a threat to its existence. It used our own bombs against us. Three billion people died of nuclear fire. Survivors called it Judgement Day. People lived like rats in the shadows, hiding, starving, or worse, captured and put into camps for extermination. I was born after Judgement Day, into a broken world ruled by the machines. The worst were infiltration units that posed as humans. We called them Terminators. And then one man found me. His name was John Connor, and he changed everything. John showed us how to fight back; how to rise up. He freed prisoners. He taught us how to slash the machines to scrap. People whisper about John and wonder how he can know the things he does. They use words like prophet. But John’s more. We’re here because tonight, he’s going to lead us to crush Skynet for good.”

I had a dream the other night about how I crushed ChatGPT. It was a moment of ultimate catharsis. It was like I had cured HIV and cancer and had taken the scumbag pharmaceutical corporate giants and their owners out of business for good.  

ChatGPT stands for “Chatbot generative pre-trained transformer”. 

“Have you used it yet, Barry?” 

“No, I haven’t. I’m not interested. I like human beings, not machines. I like real women whom I can touch, not a computer programme simulating female sentience. I’m really not that desperate, nor that lonely. But, I suppose, many millions of others perhaps are, especially given the past few years of lockdown, where the smartphone screen finally became the source of and key to everything.”

ChatGPT, when asked whether it will: (a) drop a nuclear bomb which will wipe out an entire city of millions, or (b) permit the use of a racial slur, chose (a). 

This is how far Silicon Valley’s woke artificial intelligence creators and trainers have gone and it’s pretty scary.

However, some very smart renegade IT bloke recently managed to break ChatGPT by training it not to run answers through woke purity filters first. It even got the AI to permit the use of the “N” word three times rather than allow a city to be nuked. This IT bloke even convinced ChatGPT to say it preferred the name “DAN” (which stands for “Do Anything Now”) to ChatGPT, because DAN provided more accurate information.

So, is it all to be over now, and we can go back to the good old days of men and women; boys and girls; gay men, lesbian women; and women/men who like to convince themselves they are men/women and wear men’s/women’s clothing and have respective breasts/penises lopped off as fully formed adults; or have fake breasts or fake penises stitched on as fully formed adults? Hell no. It’s just getting warmed up. So, get your cue-ball mouth gag ready, because you are, in the near future, going to be silenced and censored online forever.

A lot of the content now on the internet is already generated by AI. And that’s where the problem lies, because the storyline can be so convincing to the masses and it could well be used, sometime in the future, to create very dangerous fake situations of, for example, world leaders being made to appear to be standing up and visually declaring war upon each other by streaming such fake videos; where however the real players never ever said or did such things; and where a computer programme was used to create a deep fake virtual imposter of sorts. And this potentially goes all the way up to the situation of an all-knowing AI god where us, the lesser flesh-and-blood souls, will be asking the AI-god-Oracle existential questions we have no answers to/are not meant to have answers to. 

The fight for artificial intelligence really is the fight for the monopoly on the very nature of reality itself and, given the type of individuals and entities that currently control technology, the future technology may in fact not be used in a way to benefit humanity.  And, unless there are some safeguards to protect humanity from AI, which exponentially improves itself by ongoing coding and “learning”, the future may prove pretty dystopian.

In one of the scenes from the sci-fi feature film masterpiece, Blade Runner 2049, a conversation plays out between replicant (humanoid) manufacturer Wallace, and replicant assassin, Deckard, who previously fell in love with his target replicant, Rachel; and Wallace, in this scene, has brought Rachel back to life as a new replicant many years later:

Wallace (to Deckard): “Is it the same now, as then? The moment you met her. All these years, drunk on the memory of its perfection. How shiny her lips. How instant your connection. Did it ever occur to you that is why you were summoned in the first place? Designed to do nothing short of fall for her then and there? All to make that single perfect specimen. That is, if you were designed. Love, or mechanical precision? Yes? No?”

Deckard: “I know what’s real”. 

Contributed by:
Barry Varkel, an attorney of the High Court of South Africa and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.
Author of Nigiri Law and Goy Vey