In a recent demonstration, a Google engineer showed a visually-equipped robotic arm three figurines on a table: a dinosaur, a lion, and a whale. The engineer told the arm to “pick up the extinct animal.” The arm reached across and plucked up the dinosaur, even though the robot had not been programmed to know what a dinosaur is.
ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other “generative” AIs have been trained by filling them with the contents of the Internet—poems, legal analyses, scientific papers, travel guides, and any other items the trainers can find.
Video game producers are among AI’s most eager adopters, with employees paying the price.
In the $200-billion-a-year industry, costs have risen faster than revenues and players are always demanding something new and more exciting. Recent best-sellers “The Last of Us Part II” and “Horizon Forbidden West” cost Sony Group Corp. more than $200 million each and took hundreds of workers several years to produce.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, an AI startup created by former OpenAI employees, are collaborating in an effort to promote responsible development and use of AI.
Beneath ChatGPT’s ability to converse easily on an Internet’s worth of subjects lies the psychological wreckage of scores of Kenyan trainers: employed by a contract labor firm, squads of low-wage workers in this East African country spent thousands of hours teaching the chatbot to not talk about subjects such as bestiality, child rape, and torture.