Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I'm Nish Kumar.
And I'm Coco Khan.
Hundreds of millions of people now talk to AI like chat GPT every single day. But most people have no idea how it works or what the dangers are.
Chapter 2: What are the dangers of AI that most people don't understand?
Tech commentator Jamie Bartlett is here to enlighten us.
And we dig into the mailbag to answer all your burning questions. So look, artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of the biggest and fastest technological changes in history, but most people still don't understand it or the risk it poses.
The tech companies behind services like ChatGPT, Claude and the rest say the potential for progress is worth the dangers. But is that really the case? Leading technology and AI writer Jamie Bartlett and former guest of this show believes it is. His new book, How to Talk to AI, delves into the machine to understand how AI works.
And with the rise of AI, have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, it feels fake. Jamie's got some thoughts about that too in a new podcast for the BBC. Everything is fake and nobody cares. That's what it's called, not just the feeling.
Chapter 3: How does Jamie Bartlett's new book explain AI's strengths and weaknesses?
Yeah.
Jamie, you're the busiest man in tech, it seems. Welcome back.
Yeah, thank you. I guess I am. Just a busy month, that's all.
Everything is fake and nobody cares sounds like something I would have written when I was a very angsty 15-year-old on my exercise book.
It sounds like a Panic at the Disco tune, doesn't it? Anyway, that's a deep cut for the ageing millennials.
Listen, I'll say it. I was having one of the worst jobs in the Western world right now.
What is that? Writing about tech.
Oh, I see. Just because I have friends that work in the sector and the amount of people declaring themselves experts in this that know absolutely fucking nothing about it must be really frustrating for you.
Well... I'm not sure if anyone is a real expert in any of this because it's moving so fast. And I'm not sure that I am, I don't think I really do believe that the risk is worth it. I'm more worried about this than I am optimistic about where this is all going. And I mean, I was working on artificial intelligence back in 2010 on the same tech that has sort of created these chatbots.
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Chapter 4: What unique perspective does Jamie have on the rise of AI?
There's some real basic things that I think everyone needs to understand about these chatbots that we're all using for everything from personal advice as a therapist, our exercise coach, for dietary advice, for our professional work, for our personal life. And no one really knows what they're doing.
I'm trying to basically write a book for ordinary people who are suddenly using these things all the time and are slightly clueless about it.
I do want to talk to you about the substance of the book, but last week we talked about Matt Goodwin's book. Certainly there was criticism that a lot of it had been written using ChatGPT. There was ChatGPT in the few references at the back of the book. You know, he got given the nickname MattGPT. How much ChatGPT features in your book? Are we going to find that in all the references?
Yeah.
Well, I say at the end, I've got this little annex at the very end that says, I'm often asked how much did I use this in the writing. And it's weird because it's a book about it. And I run loads of tests using all these bots to show how they act and what they do and what they say. including very openly saying, I ran this chapter through it and asked for advice about how to improve it.
And this is what it said. So it's a bit of a weird one that, and there's a couple of sentences, which I also say in the book, like I just took from a large language model and slotted straight in because it was so good.
Yeah.
Wow.
The rest where I used it, it's like advice. Can you give me some feedback? Give me an idea. And that's actually I think it's best use is like an ideas assistant to bounce things off. Yeah. There's a lot of really bad uses. That is one of the few quite good uses for it if you know what you're doing. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the common misconceptions about AI and its capabilities?
Well, it's like, I'll be totally honest with you, I would rather they didn't exist. I would rather they weren't here. Thank you, end of interview. But they are here and hundreds of millions of people are using them every day and it's quite dangerous. And there are some good uses and there are a lot of quite dangerous uses. And I just want people to understand them.
Whether you like it or not, I think we are now going to be living alongside machines. And the way we communicate with these machines is going to be through our natural language, through our words. And so it's probably wise to just know how to do that well, how to speak to them properly. And if you don't want to use any of them ever at all,
great fine of course I understand your fear and I sort of share the fear but either either you just let people to their own devices with them and that's quite worrying or you try and teach them how to use it slightly better this sort of reminds me a little bit of sex education you know I mean I don't know what sex education is like now but when I was in school the teachers were very much like we'd rather you didn't okay abstinence is an option and if you want to but
If you're going to do it, this is how to do it safely. And there's a public health tone to what you're saying, which I'm sort of frustrated even in saying this, that actually this isn't coming from public health bodies or from government agencies, really. This is not the work for them.
Yes, yes. There are some guides online from these places as well. But like, for example, you know how we've all become obsessed with Dr. Google and we constantly search our symptoms and we diagnose ourselves and turn up in the doctors telling them what we've got. Well, it's sort of magnified now with chat GPT because you have a conversation with the model.
But people don't really realize that, for example, they'll put in partial symptoms or they won't put in details about their age. They won't put in details about their medical history. But they'll have a really fluent answer from a chat bot and then turn up to the doctors absolutely convinced that they know what they've got.
It's even worse than it was with Dr. Google, even more potentially dangerous. But, yeah, no one in a public health body yet is really explaining to people, like, this is how you might use them, this is why they're quite dangerous, quite risky. But, look, it is so quick. This stuff has been around for, like, three years. That's a blink of an eye.
I've been working in technology, writing about technology for 15 or 20 years, and I've never... And I thought I saw things happening quickly. I never saw anything like this.
There's a great line in the book that I think it feels partly like a mission statement for it, which is we need to learn how to control the machine or be controlled by it, right? And I think a big part of that is pushing back on the idea that the total takeover of our entire information networks by AI is inevitable. We hear this all the time.
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Chapter 6: How can AI be beneficial in personal and professional settings?
So the sort of concentration of power could be even more pronounced than it already is with existing tech. However, the way I look at it is that the numbers don't lie. The number of people that use them shows that people do find it incredibly valuable. And I can see some incredibly good uses for them.
For example, one of the best things that they are doing is you could call it a sort of style shift. Vast amounts of written language, government websites, health websites, contract language is inaccessible to you on purpose often. So you don't really understand what you're signing. And this catches people out constantly all over the world.
It's like the modern Latin that the church goers weren't ever allowed to learn.
Yeah.
These language models are actually quite good at translating that into language that everybody can understand. People who are neurodiverse find these models very, very useful often because they're able to take existing text and put it in language and format and style and tone immediately that is accessible to them.
So there's a way you can imagine a world of these models which makes language more accessible to people. One of the very first viral prompts when ChatGPT was released was, can you please explain quantum physics to me as if I was seven years old? People want to understand these ideas, but they can't. The language is too complex.
So it allows people to learn things in ways that might make sense to them. That might not be enough for the costs associated, but there are good uses. And I can foresee a world where, look, if you're using ChatGPT as your therapist, that is very, very dangerous, and I talk about that. But people are developing what you call small language models
sort of built on the big ones, which are a lot safer, which are trained specifically on sort of gold standard therapeutic data. Clinics with professional psychologists and their patients, thousands of hours of that go into these models. And some research is showing that these small language specialized therapy bots could be as good as you seeing a human therapist.
There are like hundreds of millions of people that need various types of mental health support, can't get it, can't afford it, it's not available. It is not impossible that everyone would have access to gold standard therapeutic support for practically no cost or very little cost. That would be amazing. That's not going to happen if we all just use chat GPT all the time for everything.
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Chapter 7: What role does regulation play in the future of AI technology?
And he kept saying, are you sure? Is this not a hallucination? No, this is not a hallucination. We've uncovered something really serious, really amazing. It's going to transform the stock market. It's going to transform all of this. And it could bring down the entire world's internet because the encryption standards, we can break them now with chrono-arrhythmics.
So this guy's running around terrified. terrified. He thinks he's in possession of the world's most dangerous secret. The whole thing was made up. And the thing is, when a machine is sort of lying or hallucinating, the longer a conversation goes on for, it uses the data as part of its conversation to inform its next answer.
So if it lies or it hallucinates, and then you kind of repeat the hallucination back, it will start to believe it more itself. So you can easily get sucked into this world. And we tend to associate fluent, sort of well-written, coherent, well-structured sentences with something that's probably accurate. But a machine, there's not really any relationship between the style of it
and how accurate it's likely to be. So the reason this happens is because, as you know, they are sort of next-word probability machines. Now, it's a little bit more complex than that because if they were just next-word probability machines, every question you asked it would give you the same answer, more or less. But it doesn't. It always gives you a different answer.
In fact, if you ask it a complex question 10 times in a row, it will give you a quite different answer 10 times in a row. And obviously, when you start replicating that over millions and billions of prompts, sometimes it will give you a really random, weird, outlying answer. It sucked up vast amounts of the world's written information, and some of that is not true. Some of that is inaccurate.
So Gemini, Google's Gemini thought that I was dead. People were asking it about me, and it kept saying Jamie Bartlett sadly died in 2023. What?
What?
Because there's another person called Jamie Bartlett who died in 2023. It can't really tell the difference between the Jamie Bartletts. This guy was an actor. But it's seen the word died in 2023 next to the words Jamie Bartlett so often that it was statistically the most likely sort of set of answers.
Wow.
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Chapter 8: How do conspiracy theories influence public perception of technology?
And it's such a waste of energy. The example of the therapy bot is exactly that. We are using these colossal, single, multi-purpose models for lots of very, very specific tasks where we do need far more specialized models. Some people call them small language models. This is where it gets a bit complicated.
They'd be built on top of the big ones because the big ones, the sort of frontier models, the Claudes and the ChatGPTs and Lama from Meta, are the ones that have learned the rules of basic language, which is why they're able to so fluently communicate with us.
But on top of that, you can sort of fork them or create fine-tuned versions of them that have very particular rules to follow as well and new data sets they're trained on. Like a lot of the world's best academic research when it comes to therapy is behind paywalls, in books that these models haven't seen. You need to train them on that stuff.
very, very strict safety rules about them and sort of rebuild them, if you like, for this specific purpose. And if you can do that, I think there's a world in which people use lots of different small language models for very particular tasks, which will be less likely to hallucinate. They'll probably be safer. We wouldn't get fooled quite so often by them.
We wouldn't get sucked in so often by them.
After the break, stay with us because we'll have an appearance from a special guest, Jimmy Botlett.
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