But did you read about the defrocking of Priestbot?
The Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called "Father Justin" earlier this week — but quickly defrocked the chatbot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.
Earlier in the week, Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bit: it claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy and that "from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood."
On X-formerly-Twitter, a user even posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the Godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and even offer them a sacrament.
Our exchanges with Father Justin were touch-and-go because the chatbot only took questions via microphone, and often misunderstood them, such as a query about Israel and Palestine to which is puzzlingly asserted that it was "real."
"Yes, my friend," Father Justin responded. "I am as real as the faith we share."
Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues.
"The Catholic Church," it told us, "teaches that masturbation is a grave moral disorder."
The AI priest also told one user that it was okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade.
A recent bit of AI slop I encountered was a site which looks like it re-sells investment products to Americans. To get eyeballs onto its pages it generates crappy "news" stories and gets them onto sites like yahoo, so they appear in the same context as "real" news items from the likes of the NY Times or Reuters. Here's one slagging off EVs.
This all blew up in the same week I made the ultimate sacrifice and took out a paid subscription to the local paper, which is under the ACM umbrella. Their online offering has the stench of enshttiification, but perhaps with some sorbent and air freshener it will be OK.
The significance of this development is profound: If AI provides the answers to all the searches that you’re looking for, there is no need to click on the source articles that provide the answers. If you don’t click on the source articles, the publishers do not receive any ad revenue, and if the publishers do not receive ad revenue, they cannot pay their writers to provide the answers for Google’s AI to steal.
It’s bad news. For some sites, it will be another death blow, while for others, it will be hobbling. And if more journalists lose their jobs, there will be less news coverage, and the thing about AI is this: It can aggregate. It can edit, rewrite, and even improve. But it cannot do the reporting. AI needs inputs. Humans provide the inputs, but Google’s AI potentially puts those humans out of business. Some experts have suggested that it’s an extinction-level event, and this is not just bad for the media; it’s bad for Google. If there’s no Internet, there is nothing for Google to search and steal from.
AI is like bitcoin, in that it needs metric fucktonnes of power.
When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.
This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.
