An AI bot will soon by wasting your time!
AIs don't waste people's time. People waste people's time.
Check out this page where a user, dinesh_b, has posted a bug report about some security problem with curl (a software tool used for transferring data over the internet). You don’t need to understand the details but skip down to Dinesh’s second answer and the first word (“Certainly!”) tells you that this entire message has been generated by ChatGPT:
Go down further and read just the first sentence of each of Dinesh’s subsequent messages and you’ll notice that they’re all ChatGPT generated.
Not only that, but they are all garbage.
This is the last response from the developer after he spent a considerable amount of time patiently asking clarifying questions and trying to understand the complaint.
The messages are so bad that one wonders how dumb this Dinesh person is. You’ll notice in the first screenshot above that DineshGPT addresses his response to @h1_analyst_oscar. But… @h1_analyst_oscar does not exist and is not involved anywhere on that page. DineshGPT has hallucinated that name and sticks to it in all messages:
Keep in mind that curl is one of the most downloaded software packages on the planet and is installed on 20 billion devices (yes, I realize that this is 2½ times the number of humans on the planet; yes curl is that widespread) and it is mostly written and maintained by just one guy who does it part-time, doesn’t charge for it (and requires donations to keep it running).
And this one guy is “badger” in the screenshots above, the person whose time Dinesh is wasting.
I’m saddened (but not surprised) that an Indian guy is doing this. Even I have run into the problem of people using ChatGPT without using their brains and wasting my time.
This is a widespread problem.
A science fiction magazine is struggling with spammy ChatGPT-generated submissions of “sci-fi stories”:
Stackoverflow had to ban all Generative AI submissions because of the sudden explosion of low-quality hallucinated answers. However, it is unclear how they are enforcing this ban because there is no easy/automated way to detect whether something has been generated by a Generative AI.
Lawyers have been using ChatGPT in court submissions and ChatGPT hallucinated some case citations which did not exist. And as expected the lawyers don’t check for this and some of them have gotten into trouble with judges because of this. (I don’t know the impact of what happens when the judge also gets lazy and just assumes that the citations are accurate.)
I’m sure there are many other examples of ChatGPT being used by idiots to waste everyone’s time.
And I’m also sure that this is going to happen to you. And there is no easy/automated way to detect whether something has been generated by a Generative AI. So the question is, what are you going to do about it?
If someone demands my attention with GPT text, I will ignore it if I can. If I need someone's attention, I will try to find out a way to reach an actual human rather than spending a time with AI chatbot.
On a related note, this is a bull-case for Google. If internet is (even more) filled with GPT-generated garbage, value of a search engine. that blocks that garbage from appearing in results. increases. Google, obviously, has proven expertise in blocking the spam from the results.