Mark Cuban may be entertained by chatbots like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google’s upcoming Bard — but he’s not ready to trust them.
Online misinformation is “only going to get worse” as artificial intelligence platforms grow and spread, the billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor said on a new episode of comedian Jon Stewart’s podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
Today, misinformation tends to spread through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter — and there are also some human guardrails, Cuban said. But with ChatGPT and other similar platforms, the machine is in control.
“After it begins to take on a life of its own … it will be difficult for us to determine what and how the machine makes those decisions, and who controls the machine,” said Kuuban.
Hundreds of millions of users have tried ChatGPT to write poetry, give advice and read recipes since the platform launched in November. But so far, the technology hasn’t shown itself to be smarter than the average human.
Sending simplistic chatbot errors is a popular social media trend. Sometimes, ChatGPT incorrectly answers math problems, refuses to answer basic puzzles and even “hallucinates” – or completely creates historical figures, events and other details that look like reality.
ChatGPT can also contradict itself, sometimes giving different answers when asked the same question over and over again.
Also, shares of Google parent company Alphabet fell more than 9% this week after Bard incorrectly answered a question about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in one of Google’s first ads for its AI platform.
A raft of Google employees have blamed CEO Sundar Pichai for Bard’s “rushed, botched” release, with the company feeling pressured to compete with ChatGPT, CNBC reported on Friday.
“Rushing Bard into the market in panic proves the market’s fear of us,” read one post on an internal Google forum seen by CNBC, along with a photo of a bird calling.
These errors indicate that the technology is still in its infancy. It’s a problem, especially for large swaths of people who don’t always fact check the claims they see on the internet, Cuban said.
“Our generation, Gen X and older, don’t understand,” Cuban said. “Gen Z and younger, they’re not only authentic, they know how to block these things… They’re more relevant to all these issues.”
Microsoft, for its part, admits that the technology behind ChatGPT isn’t perfect — though it plans to integrate it into an upcoming version of its search engine, Bing.
“Bing sometimes misrepresents the information it finds, and you may see responses that sound convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate,” says the company’s recently updated FAQ page.
In the short term, it could be a problem – a concern Cuban shares with tech billionaire Steve Wozniak. But other industry luminaries have expressed excitement about the long-term possibilities of the technology.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, for example, thinks platforms like ChatGPT represent a burgeoning technological revolution that will make a “huge impact” on health care and education, he told the German-language business newspaper Handelsblatt’s “Disturbing” podcast on Friday.
“Today, they require too much computing, they are not always accurate… But even this week, you will have an announcement from Microsoft and Google, where they are competing to lead in this space,” Gates said. “Progress over the next few years to make things better will be significant.”
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