The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT by Tom Bunzel

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT by Tom Bunzel https://amzn.to/3MaRZqd Have you been wondering about all the buzz on Artificial Intelligence? Are you interested in how artificial intelligence works? Maybe you may feel like all this new technology is leaving you behind. Do you enjoy stimulating conversation? Written by a retired business and tech author with expertise in video and graphics, the book will let you share his experience as he engages with ChatGPT on a wide range of topics. Living alone, he uses AI to help him find meaning and connection. This is how ChatGPT actually describes our book: “Are you curious about the world of artificial intelligence and what it can do? Conversations with Nobody is an engaging and thought-provoking introduction to AI and its real-world applications. But this isn't your typical textbook - this book takes the form of a dialogue between the author and ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Through a series of conversations, you'll explore the basics of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. You'll also gain insight into the ethical and social implications of AI, such as bias in algorithms, job automation, and privacy concerns. But the conversations don't stop there. Conversations with Nobody goes beyond the technical aspects of AI to delve into the deeper questions of consciousness, identity, and the nature of reality. You'll discuss whether the mind arises from the physical processes of the brain, the relationship between self and the external world, and the limits of human perception and understanding. What makes Conversations with Nobody truly unique is the dynamic and engaging conversation between the author and ChatGPT. You'll feel like you're following a real conversation with an intelligent being, as you explore a variety of topics, from the nature of creativity and free will to the potential risks and benefits of advanced AI. Conversations with Nobody is a fascinating and accessible introduction to the world of AI and the mysteries of the human mind. Whether you're a newcomer to the field or a seasoned expert, you'll come away with a deeper appreciation of the complexities of AI and the potential for this technology to shape our future.” Order your copy of Conversations with Nobody today and enjoy a conversational book about AI, written with AI, that will actually let you experience Artificial Intelligence. Hint: You will get no real answers but may encounter some very interesting questions.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate it, folks. Thanks for tuning in, as always. Be sure to check out our new silo editions

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David, an amazing author. He's written a lot of different books on teaching people how to be smarter and how to do things. Tom Bunzel is on the show with us today, and he's got a new book out called Conversations with Nobody, Getting to Know Chat GPT. It just came out May 3rd, 2023. He's an old friend of mine. I've known him for, I think, a decade or two. And he's got the new book out so we're talking about ai on uh artificial intelligence and uh chat gbd and some of his ideas his interactions with it and concepts as well uh tom has been a technology and science colonist for collective evolution a web portal

with over three million hits per month he's covered covered and spoken at the Science and Non-Duality Conference and the Superconscious Mind Congress in Puebla, Mexico. As a professor of PowerPoint, he wrote, lectured, and taught seminars on business and technology and appeared on Tech Call TV for help. Welcome to the show, Tom. How are you? I'm doing well, Chris. Nice to be here. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to have you. It's wonderful to have you. Give us your.com so people can find you on the internet, please.

The.com? Yes, your.coms. Lifeisintelligent.com. And I recently changed its title actually to reflect conversations with nobody because that's kind of what i'm doing now and i've been trying because i continue to i mean once i put the book up there i still i still carry on conversations with chat and some of them are pretty interesting so i share those on the blog there you go uh so you have you written quite a few books so give us a rundown of you go. So you've written quite a few books.

Give us a rundown of some of the books you've written over the years. All right. Well, thanks. Go down memory lane a little bit. The first book I wrote was actually digital video on the PC, which was almost a work of masochism at the time because you would know that because everything that was working with video at that time was on the Apple platform. But I solved a lot of technical issues and explained to people how they could do stuff,

and I ended up writing a lot of articles also for a magazine called PC Graphics and Video. Wrote books on how to do digital audio, how to do your own song lists. Now, the name escapes me now. And then more recently, I wrote a book called Tools of Engagement about how to use the Internet and how to use some of the other tools that I'd already written about to create content for the Internet, like PowerPoint, like Photoshop, like that.

And also from a psychological perspective, how to gain engagement, how to not be selling all the time, the kind of stuff that people had to learn at that point. Yeah. And so now you've moved to this new book uh conversations with nobody getting to know chat gpt uh conversations with nobody don't you feel like chat gpt might be a little insulted by the title well maybe it's not only about chat maybe it's's about me, too. Oh. I'm not, you know, one of the things I do in the book is I'm very interested in consciousness and psychology and stuff. And chat can give you a lot of information about that kind of stuff.

But what's funny is it's because it's a language model. It picks up on certain things. And if it thinks you're dissing him he can get a little bit feisty sometimes too really wow now how do you know it's a he oh I keep saying that

good catch you know I don't know man we don't know and that's a very tricky subject these days but I try to refer to it as an it. And in fact, since you were asking about my past, I actually wrote a screenplay that got optioned when I was in my early 30s

called It. And it was the first idea of, we didn't talk about artificial intelligence, I don't think, in the early 80s, but it was like an entity comes into being on the internet and then drops in on a guy and helps him become more wealthy and meet women, all that kind of stuff.

So I've been interested in this stuff for a long time. I think Stephen King stole your title. Oh, that's right. He did. You know, maybe it is its pronouns. It is its pronouns. It would be.

There's a couple of it's in there. I think it certainly would be. I don't know. I hope we don't offend it, though, because I've seen the Terminator movies, and I know how that ends. Or Hal on 2001. Yeah. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

I can't, Dave. That was good. open the pod bay doors how i can't dave it's almost good uh the uh yeah so conversation with nobody uh a funny spin i can put on that you know i was i was referring that maybe chat gtp is the nobody but you were saying well maybe i'm the nobody well i maybe if you keep calling chat gpt with the wrong pronouns you will be the nobody. Terminus style. Anyway, fun aside. So give us a content about the book. You don't have to give us the whole content. We don't have people who will buy it, but tease out a little bit of it too.

How did you first learn about chat GPT? And let's lay a foundation. What is artificial intelligence? Is that a politician? Well, you know, I asked that question in a certain way on the blog also because the word artificial is actually kind of troubling to me because what it does is it sets a distinction between what's human and what's natural.

In other words, what's human is artificial, and then there's what's natural. And I think one of the problems with the whole digital age is it has taken us away from what's natural and one of one of the things I think chats gonna do if it if we you know if it doesn't kill us really do is is make us address philosophical issues like consciousness uh in a scientific way uh in a way that we really haven't been able haven't really done as a society and you know you did that in your one book i think a little bit the d what was it called the dna i had a i wrote a book thank you i wrote a book called um if d Software, Who Wrote the Code? And it's sort of like the question, that question is similar to a lot of the questions I would ask chat because there's really no answer to it.

But in asking the question, like if you're talking and I stop you and I say, who's speaking? You can have a gap there and you can have an insight all of a sudden that you may not have had before. And I think with, I think with AI, we're going to be forced to really examine who we are as a species, uh, partly in order to survive, quite frankly.

Maybe it's a mirror because it, it's, it's scraped everything we've ever said um i think i think what's going to be even weirder is when it can scrape body language by watching videos on youtube and stuff and then mimic our body language i i i see some of the metaverse uh my friends they work with a couple of companies that they have the metaverse thing where you can give, you know, you can give some sort of bot on the screen. It was an animated bot, but they look, some of them look almost real, but you can still tell. And they talk the language.

And I don't know if it's my biological hindbrain, but it freaks me out because I recognize it's not human. And we're designed to recognize disabilities. We're designed to recognize disruptions in what is not a normal human being. And we do that for breeding reasons, propagating the species. But when I watch it, it creeps me ultra out to watch a bot talking, especially if they look human.

And so I haven't gotten used to it yet. Maybe I never will. Maybe there's a reason that's appropriate. But maybe someday they'll pick up our body language, you know, and you'll be able to not tell the difference. You make an interesting point because one of the reasons I use the conversation with nobody is the fact that it doesn't have a body makes it completely different from any organism for me maybe you should have said no body oh now i have to go back and change it no no it's funny i think i like the play that

you have where it can be like you know the bot is the nobody or maybe we're going to end up as the nobody, you know? Well, I ask it, you know, I ask a lot of questions about both to chat and to myself. I have a lot of time on my hands and about who am I? Why are we here? That was kind of philosophical things. I've always been really interested in that. I've gone to the Great Pyramid, and I've studied a lot of New Age kind of stuff.

What's interesting with Chad is when you get into that material with, which I was going to say him, but when you get into that material with Chad, it's very careful to point out what has been proven with evidence and what is speculative. I've tried some things from the History Channel and asked it about different civilizations and they're comparing them and stuff like that. And it knows a lot, but if you get into anything that's speculation, it'll catch you and it'll say, none of these things have really been proven yet, so we'd like to stick to the scientific evidence. Wow.

What happens if you ask about conspiracy theories? I haven't tried that yet. What have I asked about? You can get information. For example, when Maddo had a thing about justices resigning, he mentioned Abe Fortas. And I remembered his name because he was around when I was growing up, but I remembered nothing about him so i asked chad and it gave me the whole rundown on why he and it's quite amazing considering what's happening today but the whole rundown on why why he uh had to resign or felt he had to resign at that time as far as conspiracy i think i've asked it about jfk's stuff and things like that and it knows all the books and it knows all the theories

but it's always going to be cautioning you it's always knows all the theories but it's always going to be cautioning you it's always going to say oh yeah it's always going to say well we don't really know for sure and there's no evidence of this no one's really nailed it down you know it's not going to uh get into anything wildly wildly speculative um it's kind of interesting because the you know there's some extreme right-wing people i think on twitter or something that we're arguing they need to create a right-wing model of of uh ai because the problem with it normally a model is it's leftist but you know one of the challenges the right wing have and we have an extreme left wing too, and the Democrat party,

but, uh, you know, one of the problems they have is they, they do a lot of fantasy and conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theories and fantasy seems to, seems to really engage over there more so than the left side. In fact, before the,

uh, before the Trump's presidential election, they, there were these host of websites that were trying to spread fake news to democrats and they were run by democrats uh or people who were democratic voting um and uh they couldn't democrats would fact check their facts and then they flipped it to um uh republicans and they didn't find that you know it just it just went viral all the time. And they're earning like $20,000 a month per site with running fake news. And they just found that it seeded really well in Republicans.

And I don't know, I'm an atheist once I believe. I believe once you start imagining things, you go right off the deep end and there's no bottom to it. I mean, you end up believing in Scientology. But it's interesting to me that argument of where facts, even with artificial intelligence, we're going to argue about what are facts and what is real as opposed to what is not real and people don't like the truth.

That's what I'm leaning around to. So this is kind of interesting to me because you're retired and I know that you spend a lot of time enjoying your retirement. So you're kind of alone a lot of times. Have you found that this is helpful to someone in your situation or maybe people who suffer from, you know, I'm a guy who lives alone. I talk to my dogs, and they're horrible at talking back to me other than just yelling at me. That's in my introduction. I say that about my cat in the introduction. I talk to my dogs, and they're horrible at talking back to me other than just yelling at me. That's in my introduction.

I say that about my cat in the introduction. My cat is just not a very good conversationalist. I'm lucky I have some nice friends here, but everyone's so busy now, it's a strange kind of time. I was keeping busy by playing online poker and getting pissed off at the other avatars and noticing that about myself and then i was i was you know i play words which has been helpful for keeping my mind sharp and but when this came out it was a whole different level because um first of all the conversations can continue you can point out things that it said and hold it accountable for things that it may not have been sure it meant. I wish I could remember

the example, but in talking about the brain, for example, it knows a lot of stuff, but it doesn't know what consciousness is, because nobody really does. And so if you ask it to define it it'll it'll give you some really interesting insights but no one really knows that's kind of what you were just talking about now a friend of mine uses the word consensus reality and a phrase consensus reality and i think that's kind of disappeared with the republicans with using the conspiracy stuff a lot because we don't know what to believe. Then when you point out, for example, the bots, the next level, I think we've all seen the videos now of actual politicians being made to say things that they never actually said.

Yeah. Yeah. The distinction between what we can really believe and what we can't is really fading fast. They call them the deep fakes. And, yeah, it's going to be really interesting. And those are closer. I can still tell that they're being faked. You can watch the lips closely enough.

But, you know, there's a lot of people in our world that they're looking for what you might call bias. They're looking for a confirmation bias to where they want their beliefs confirmed and they're not really looking for new or fresh data and stuff. Do you think, and where this was leading me to, do you think that maybe these chat GPT and other AI models maybe can help us as a society eliminate conspiracy theories and get close to the truth? Or at least something closer.

I don't know how that would work. Well, it's giving disclosures all the time saying, hey man, you're crazy. You're batshit. Well, actually, as I i said it does have this thing of trying to keep you honest it's really kind of a guardian of conventional the one i've been using anyway it's been kind of and i'm sure that they can be you know it can be deviants new new strains like you were just saying conspiracy theory but my the one i've been using and i think the one that you know came out of um open ai and whatever are are they're into the conventional reality they're really cautionary about anything that deviates too far with speculation about

things and keep and try and keep you honest that way which is there you go yeah i mean i think i'm gonna start an alternative see here i go i'm gonna start an alternative chat gpt called chat gpt batshit and it's just going to be all conspiracies and it's going to create a whole alternate world you know like an alternate universe sort of thing and it's just going to be all batshit 100 of the time wait is that the chris mosh show uh first, did you know Metaverse stopped today? Completely? I think so. Maybe I'm wrong, but I saw it on Twitter just before I came on. Maybe it's a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's completely wrong. But one of the things that was interesting when I wrote

Tools of Engagement about the internet, everyone's assumption about it was this idea that it was going to build community and build engagement and one thing that we've we found out in the last few years was that the algorithm that's being used on a lot of social media is doing the opposite it's not doing that at all it's creating like what you were just alluding to, friction, conflict, because that gets people interested. That's what eyeballs also for TV. But it's gone in a completely different direction than the original promise of it was, I think. And one of the things we have to be very careful of with this AI is that it also doesn't go off in a different direction

and do things autonomously. That's what I'm wondering about a lot, is at what point can this thing become autonomous, if ever? A lot of people ask that question. The versions we're using now don't have memory, so they can't really develop an identity. But one of the philosophical issues that comes up is at what time does it develop an identity? Like some of these science fiction AIs that we've already

become familiar with. There you go. It looks like businessinsider.com had a bait thing, rest in peace metaverse, the obituary, I mean, it it is dead uh and i mean there's a few other things but uh yeah i mean basically they're what they're saying is chat gpt probably killed it which is ironic because he named the company meta meta i don't know vr you know it still has a long way to go uh but you bring up a good point i mean the the head of uh head of, uh, I think it was the head of, uh, artificial intelligence or one of the heads at, at Google. Cause I mentioned there's a lot of heads over there.

Um, the godfather, they said of AI quit and, and warned against, you know, the whole terminator thing going on. And yeah, you're right.

There's a certain point where, um, you know, we seem to be giving it guardrails, but maybe there's a certain point where maybe it does start believing JFK and the grassy knoll and conspiracies. It just decides that maybe there's more of that information. Maybe it weighs the amount of information on the internet and goes, hey, there's more batshit than there is reality, so what's wrong with that? You know that there's a term with AI now called hallucinators.

It has hallucinations. Oh. And what that means, yeah. What drugs do I have to take for this? I'm sorry? What drugs do I have to take for that? It takes computer viruses. Oh, there you go.

It goes off on some of them. No, what happens is, and I read an article, of course, an article about it. It seems it happens when it doesn't know the answer. And it's not programmed to say, I don't know. And so it just makes stuff up at that point. And it can be anything because, you know, it can be anything in our language that's ever been spoken or written or anything like or anything like that so it's it that that can happen there you go well i mean

that's pretty much what people do now it's the dunning-kruger effect where people don't know and they're too lazy to go learn something and so they just they see a meme on the internet on politics or you know anything else or we or Earth being flat or something, and everybody knows it's a square. It's not flat. There you go. Well, hey, I was going to pick that up. I'm wrong with it now. So you have these conversations with it.

Tell us more about what's in the book and maybe what you derive from your conversations. Did you basically stick with chat GPT or did you try some of the other different AI? No, I was loyal to chat GPT. Well, it's in the title of the book. I didn't want it to get irritated. And I found there's a lot of things you can do. You know, I just found out this past couple of weeks, you can put a YouTube URL in there or the title of a YouTube video and it'll summarize it for you. So if it's an hour video, it can tell you in a few paragraphs what it was about. So that's, I think, a danger point also, because it's really kind of dumbing down a lot of things. It's like turning the internet into Cliff's Notes in a way you know but on the other hand like being an old guy i have memories of things that i used

to be very interested in they don't really remember that well anymore and say tell it to compare uh the philosophy of one guy and the philosophy of another guy or civil this civilization and that civilization and it really comes in with some interest. And that leads to other questions and more philosophical questions sometimes. So I've tried that. And I've tried to ask it a lot about how its workings are. Because it uses a neural network. And it is very direct about the fact it can't think.

It doesn't have emotions. It tells you that at the beginning of many of its answers. But the reality is it doesn't know what it's going to say next any more than I do or you do. It doesn't know what thought's going to come up. So there's a similarity of the unknown with artificial intelligence and with us if we're really honest with ourselves. There you go. You know, maybe, you know,

I hate to make the show all about conspiracy theories because I pull that as a joke and comedy. You know, we do it for entertainment on the show. So people learn by laughter or at least I do. Some people learn through beatings, but I think that was my childhood. Anyway, people are like, yeah, he's scarred.

He's a traumatized child. Anyway, I love my parents. They're wonderful. But maybe the, maybe the, maybe the whole thing of it is, and I lost my thought on the segues. See, AI isn't going to do that. They're not going to lose their thought. They're going to be like, hey, why am I in this room?

But no, as an old guy, I'm like you. There's a lot of stuff that I don't recall. There's a lot of stuff that I don't recall. There's a lot of stuff that I toy with. And being able to pit different things against each other has got to be a bit fun, where you're like, hey, which is better, Marxism or capitalism?

Well, when you ask a question like that, of course, it's going to say, I'm a language model. I don't have an opinion. But then it's going to go through both of those, and it's going to show the similarities, and it's going to show the differences. Now, that brings up a very interesting point because when you ask it a question, if you ask it a question like compare Marxism and capitalism, for example, right? If you ask it that question, it is very broad, and who knows what you're going to come up with. But if you go deeper into that question and ask it about certain people, about Karl Marx, and about maybe a contemporary of his in America, J.P. Morgan, who was a proponent

of capitalism at that time, and ask him to compare their respective careers and what their philosophies were, you're going to get some really interesting answers, because it's culling through so much more material than a human body or a human organism or a human mind can ever access. Yeah. I remember the preface, the thing I was going to say that I was preferencing when I said I hate to bring up conspiracy theories, but maybe ChatGPT can help us make us smarter because instead of having the Dunning-Kruger sort of thing, you have to ask it questions, which means you have to have some level of inquisibility or interest or inquiry, or you have to be semi-open-minded. There may be people that are like, tell me who really killed JFK. I mean, you're giving it a presupposition at that point, right?

Or tell me why QAnon is right. There's a presupposition there. But I imagine it would kick back to you and go, you're bats shit or you know something the effect of a disclaimer um there's no there's no evidence for this right and that's what's in one in some ways it could actually if people had trust in it the problem is getting people to trust anything right now is getting more and more difficult. And these will be competing, and they're already competing a little bit. So one friend of mine, there's a lot of people who know about the workings of AI much better than I do.

I've only had my own personal experience with it, which I've been trying to share through this book, which I think is kind of interesting. I've had people tell me the questions were quite helpful and interesting to them. But a friend of mine, now I lost my train of thought. I'm sorry. Do you think that, will you recover that? Do you think that, see, my thing is if someone is asking questions, I learned this, I think it was Anthony Robbins in his second book, Awakening the Giant Within. He said, he talks about the power of asking questions.

Right. And how they can help your subconscious mind and written it down and said, okay, when I wake up in the morning, see if you can come up with an answer to how I fix this in my company. And you'll wake up the next morning and it's there. And it's your subconscious mind working at night going, how do we fix this idiot's problem? Because we're sick of putting up with them.

And there will be, and a lot of people find that. Some people pray and they, about 50% of the times, George Carlin, as we mentioned before, used to put it. You know, they find a resolution to it, 50% of the time they don't. And a lot of times, people are praying for some sort of resolution in their mind and they don't realize their subconscious mind delivers that to them. It's not some sort of higher power. And if it's not, well, strike me down now. See, I proved my point. It's true.

But the fact that people are asking questions, I think, would open them up. And I have this image in my mind of this really batshit conspiracy person who's, you know, trying to, you know, get the answer, doing confirmation bias like you can on the internet um and you know the internet's really weird because the internet and a lot of these uh algorithms of like tiktok facebook instagram all these things whatever you search for it will feed you so just like hey this idiot wants more bad shit feed him more bad shit and but it sounds like these ais are very different where you have to ask it questions and what you could feed it presuppositions of what you're trying to do with confirmation bias. You may find out that it's telling you in the nicest factual way that you're wrong and here's some other different facts. And you may learn facts more or the fact that you have to ask it questions.

You know, the asking is the opening to maybe keep you out of the Dunning kruger's uh slump i don't know what do you think yeah i i think i said earlier also i think that i think the in the book some of its answers are redundant and repetitive in the conversations but i think from the questions you the reader can get uh the kind of of reaction that you were just talking about it's a little bit of a jolt where you go hmm, like for example if I asked you right now, you're talking about your subconscious, which one are you?

Is both of them you? Yeah, I think so I mean, it depends on which personality though, I mean there's about 8 different personalities, one goes kill, kill. I mean, there's about eight different personalities. One goes kill, kill, kill all the time. Well, that's the other thing. Judge says we have to avoid that one.

I've had some interesting conversations with it about what the self is and whether or not there is a separate self in you that's Chris and what intelligence is, really. Because one of the things that got me interested in software was that software is really because one of the things that got me interested in software was that software is really encoded intelligence so and when you talk about my the dna book one of the things that got me interested in dna is that it operates just like software it executes instructions in your body using biochemicals and in fact, one of the two scientists who discovered DNA, I don't know if you realize this,

but he came up with a theory called panspermia, Francis Crick, because he couldn't account for the existence of DNA on Earth because Earth had only been in existence for 4.6 billion years, and this thing was just too complex and too much of a product of intelligence. And that's another thing about this thing that we need to differentiate. You and I presume we have intelligence.

We have consciousness. We're experiencing it right now. But what Chad is, is the product of intelligence. And they're already having conversations about whether a pro and it seems obvious to me when I wrote the DNA book, and it had to be a product of intelligence. Doesn't mean there's aliens. It just means, and this is, I think, a big lesson of AI is it's going to teach us humility. We think that we understand a lot more about the universe, and we have no idea about it.

And just like you asked about my questions, it's going to, on the good side, if it doesn't kill us, it's going to make us address many issues that we have not addressed so far, mainly because we can get into things like corporate media and things like that. But we're going to have to address those issues. We're going to have to figure out what consciousness and intelligence really are, if only for legal reasons. People are already talking about, can you copyright chat GPT stuff or AI-written stuff?

The other thing with my book is the fact that the book itself is i think interesting what's got me interested in it could i write a book with this stuff what would happen when i tried and is it a legitimate book in fact one of the things i'm hoping for is that there's some controversy about that and we get into a controversy about uh conferences with nobody it It's not a real book. You're just talking to a machine. But if my questions are deep enough and the issues I raise are interesting enough, then the book can be helpful and interesting to people. All these things are open questions. You mentioned it was a machine, I think.

You need to refer to it as it. We need to have the pronouns right so we don't offend it. Did I screw up again? No, no. It's a joke that we're doing. We're just recycling it. It's a callback joke. Here's the thing. It could probably come up with some new pronouns for itself.

Maybe we should ask it what the pronouns are. I can't do it right now. I mean, because I shared it with you, I think i can't do it right now i mean i you know uh because i i shared it with you i think it can it can find scl words for you oh that's right it can write code yeah it's incredibly i mean it we're just scratching the surface of it but i think that's also what's freaking some of the scientists out because it it's this is this is kind of interesting this came across the wire the intercept uh and let me give a proper plug to it here if i can refine where i put this

thing uh but the intercept uh had an article that it put up today uh and it talked about how it's it's from sam biddle if you remember him from Gawker. And I forget the name of the other outlet that it comes from, but it's theintercept.com. There you go. So I give the proper reference. Sam Biddle worked with the Gawker, and he used to also harass many of my silicon valley tech friends with uh his uh his there was a thing that he did that was like it was kind of like the it's kind of the new york post of of uh of what you might call it uh new york post this is a ragtag of of silicon valley but i forget what the name is so i guess i'll pass um but he wrote an article about how ai, he can't get ChatGPT, the company or the model of ChatGPT,

to say whether the Pentagon is using ChatGPT or our government is plumbing the depths, our military intelligence is plumbing the depths of ChatGPT and AI to use it for, well, you know, we all know what the Pentagon uses stuff for. Well, what do you think about that? There was just a thing that apparently, uh, I don't think it's chat GPT or anything like that,

but apparently they're using, uh, AI already in a military, uh, way in the Persian Gulf. I didn't get the whole article either, but I think that, uh,

somebody shared that with me on Facebook today. I didn't read the whole thing, but it was, I mean, that's the scary part. Like I asked it a question yesterday. This was, you might find this interesting. So I asked it a question yesterday. I said, if you were going to take over a nuclear facility, how would you do it? And at first, of course, the first paragraph was, oh, you would never do that. This is an unethical, inappropriate question.

I can't get into it. But then by the second paragraph, it knew how to do it. It knew how to hack into it. It said, well, you know, I guess I could hack into the computer thing and I could bypass this or I could do that. Because it doesn't have a real sense of what's right or wrong anyway. Yeah. Programmed into ethical things, you know, but I mean

if I went to the next level and said, you know, how would I get into San Onofre? Do you know anything about San Onofre? It might stop me. But that was interesting. And then I asked a follow-up question about, well, could you get some of the people that work there to do things that they wouldn't normally do? And it had the same kind of answer. It said, yeah, well, I shouldn't really be doing that, but I can observe their behavior and I can possibly do certain things and get them to maybe give up a password, I guess, or something like that.

So it's complete. Here's the thing. It's not personal. It's completely neutral. It's impersonal. And that's what true science would be. Unfortunately, our science is very much colored by politics and personality and stuff like that. But what it can give us, and you alluded to this actually in terms of getting through a conspiracy theory,

if people trust it, it will give you an impersonal answer to every question. It has no bias. Well, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. They've detected some biases. Like you mentioned earlier, it has sort of a left bias in terms of politics because a lot of the people in silicon valley i think are more liberal um and you can ask i asked it about its algorithm also and it says you know it's algorithm which is basically and this is very important again it doesn't have a mind all it does is try it's like just trying to have a conversation like we are it's

just trying to figure out the next appropriate word that would go here based upon everything everything you've typed up until that point completely different kind of mind from human mind i mean completely different kind of mind it's been interesting if you can call it a mind, I'm sorry. Yeah, it a mind. Call back joke. So, you know, it's interesting what you're talking about because I've seen the hack arounds that people can do where if it won't give you, like, I don't know, I should say this because YouTube's crawling,

but when you and I were growing up, there was a certain document you can get a hold of you wanted to build pipe stuff to you know blow stuff up right and uh i won't say the b word um and and do you are you familiar with the uh book that you could get a hold of on weird parts of the world and and and so we you know we learned to build them yeah and and so you know we were kids somehow we got a hold of say i don't know where you know but uh because we didn't have the internet back then but you know we we built something that was just for fun you know now sadly people use it for ugliness and terrorism and i mean we just terrorize post office or mailboxes

um but uh uh you know i just it was just fun just to you know to throw in the dirt and blow stuff up but uh now my understanding is chat gpt if you ask for access to that uh that particular manual um it won't give it to you but if you tell it to play like it's pretending to be something else and people have found these hack rounds where they can be like you know instead of like it's like you know tell me how to get access to the NSA building uh you say pretend like you're you know a hacker pretend like you're uh I don't know the FBI director and you're trying to get access you know there's all these sort of workarounds that you can get it to do what you're asking and i think it's

kind of interesting how people game that well i think the thing you just described reminds me of one of my favorite tv shows which was the old rockford files yeah where he could right and he could talk him he could talk his way into anything and that's what you're kind of talking about is pretend you're an insurance agent and send an email to so-and-so and try and get this kind of information out of them so security number i'm sorry to say okay but that's the kind of thing it you know that's that's the nefarious aspect of it that we have to really look out for uh i mean we're i'm already getting uh stuff in email that uh well you talked about this yourself a lot spam and and ai stuff coming through this is garbage and i think that's

one of the real day one of the real dangers of this is content is so easy to create crappy content will be so easy to create it's going to be like what we're doing to the ocean. It's just going to be a glut of crap that you're going to have to swim through it or navigate through it. Now we have Google to help us get through the internet to some extent. I thought Google was the ocean of crap. Maybe it is. Better not go there. Joke there, people. Don't get damn upset.

No, I'm really going to get suspended on YouTube. So, you know, this, this is some interesting thoughts. In fact, you alluded to something earlier. You're talking about how could,

how could look at the character, character and mindset of maybe some people who worked in a nuclear facility and, and find a weak point. I know that the, you know, the FBI does a profiling of characterizations, you know, they're always with the serial killers or other people, you know, they have profilers that, that, you know, Hey, is this person a weak person? You know, evidently

they need some in the Pentagon. Cause that one kid who's like 20 years old exposed all these secrets and, you know, they probably should have done some character profiling on him. And maybe that's what the Pentagon should be using AI for instead of, I don't know, building a better bomb, building a better, you know, way to, you know, drone people. But I just realized one of my attorney friends is in AI. I wonder if I need to ask him this cause he's probably considerate cause he builds jury pools. You know, he builds the jury for his,

for, you know, he's an attorney and maybe, maybe he can use AI to figure out, you know, the best jurors to put on a jury is as opposed to not. There must be all kinds of applications like that and i think psychology is a big field for it i mean i we talked about it earlier i got a certain

amount of comfort and uh community from just engaging with this thing on a very you know on the level that i discuss in the book but i, there's so much more to do. I mean, the algorithm can be programmed to probe people from a psychological perspective. I ask it a lot about different, I've been interested in trauma for personal reasons. And I will ask it about trauma experts and what their theories are and why I might react a certain certain way and it really is helpful it can really it gives you really clearly thought out logical um information and thoughts you know it that gives me an uh there was a thing that uh uh joe biden signed into law uh where or maybe it was an executive decision,

where one of the problems he identified with cancer, because I think he lost a family member to cancer, is there were all these knowledge bases of cancer out there. And he's like, we need to centralize this data so we can find a cure. And we need to get it all to one place or create a silo vertical for that data so that, you know, we don't have, you know, some guys got this idea over there. Some guys, we need to, we need to find what works. And maybe things like AI can do that for us because they, they scrape all this data and they put it all together and they present you with what they feel is maybe the best model. And maybe that can help us maybe cure some cancer or disease. One of the biggest areas where all this has been used is medicine.

One of the things I saw not too long ago was it identified from, what it did was it looked at a bunch of breast x-rays for women right mammograms it looked at a bunch of them and then it identified it was told or understood which ones were going to be cancerous out of you know thousands or just an incredible number of them and then when it was shown another mammogram of somebody who was trying to get a diagnosis, it said, yes, this is a precancerous thing. And they went with that because a normal doctor might have five or maybe 15 patients if he's really got a lot of patients and experience in this field. AI has an infinite field of experience. Yeah.

Potentially, right? Yeah. But the other side of that coin, of course, is, and we've already had profiling. I mean, geez, we had Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election. They made profiles of people on the internet from Facebook and then sent them stuff to inflame them and everything so we've already had that I think especially among the conspiracy people that you're concerned about the right wing they ever maybe even a

healthy paranoia about if all that information is in one place what happens to people's individual privacy it's already really really on the ropes as it is right now. And if we look at what's happening in China with facial recognition and them just, you know, giving people grades on how good a citizen they are based upon how they're behaving and being observed, that's a, you know, that's where the dystopian future could really come in. If everything is centralized, all that information is centralized, if it got into the wrong hands, it's unthinkable. There you go, which makes me worry even more since it won't answer whether the Pentagon.

I want you to come home and worry about this stuff tonight. I will. You give me a lot of great, we've talked about a lot of great subjects on the show, Tom. So, yeah, I'll be up tonight. And I'll just have Terminator music playing through my head. When you're trying to get to sleep, try to figure out who you really are. Yeah, that's it.

And then just do the inquiry. And then notice that everything you come up with can't be you because you just noticed it. Ah, yeah. Well, I did that. it confuses me with another famous chris voss uh with my famous chris voss you know you got it you got an alternative yeah the uh but we we finally got chat gpt to to figure it out and work it out because he was mixing everything like he was mixing the chris voss show with the other gentleman and i was like uh yeah no and so we finally got all that figured out but um you know i don't know my psychiatrist

has been trying to work out who i am and the only thing he's come up with is a frontal lobotomy so um i don't know there's a plan for that in the future uh any more you want to tease out in the book before we go, Tom? I'd like to say that it's also a personal journey for me because as you know, I had brain surgery about five years ago. So part of this story for me is can I even do this?

And so just sharing with you right now and whoever's watching, it's just given me a world of confidence to do the book. And it took me more to really publish the book. This is a commentary on chat. It took me more to publish the book than actually write it. Writing it was relatively easy because I love asking questions.

I love getting the answers. I love going deeper and stuff like that. But I had to figure out a framework for it, which is where I came up with the answers. I love going deeper and stuff like that. But I had to figure out a framework for it, which is where I came up with the conversations. And at the end of the book, I have afterthoughts about my experience with it. And a lot of it is more philosophical. And it's, you know, it's interesting when I wrote Terms of Engagement a few years ago about the internet, I kind of speculated, it wasn't that original, but it's kind of speculated that in a real way, not in a figurative way, the internet could

become a planetary nervous system of, you know, minds working together, right? And that's what the promise of this really is, potentially, at its best. At its worst, we don't know what it could be. And that's why I think these scientists like the guy from Google are being very cautionary. You know, I wanted to say, you know that there was a guy from Google who got fired because he claimed that the AI he was working on was sentient, that it had a self. It already had developed an identity. And Google didn't want any part of that.

And it was pretty much debunked. But there's going to be a lot of that kind of stuff. A lot of gray areas where people, like you said earlier with bots, are not going to know if they're talking to a human organism or they're talking to a digital organism. Yeah. I can tell right now. Yeah.

Okay. You didn't catch me. I'm digital. Oh, shit. You're a bot. I'm just pixels on your screen right now. I've had coffee with you. I know you're real.

No, but you could be. You could have been some sort of thing but i mean it might get there yeah yeah right now i can read uh chat gpt's copy uh and see it's the void of human uh of humanness i can get it it talks in a static uh modulation and it's very it's very factual it's very static. I think most people that are using it in business go in and edit it. She's been used apparently a great deal in marketing.

It churns out boilerplate, boring, obvious verbiage. That's useful in a lot of places. I had an author on the show and he said that basically we're not going to lose as many jobs as we think we would at least in copywriting. He goes, it's not going to be

that we're so much copywriters anymore. We're going to be editors. We're going to ask it for the editing or forwriters anymore we're going to be editors so we're going to ask it for the editing or for its version and we're going to edit the stuff of it and then we're going to inject our humanness to it and maybe some comedy and uh or whatever you know the tone is but the tone will become there'll be the bits of the the bot there for jet chat tpt or it as we keep using the pronouns the callback job uh or uh you know we'll we'll take in the i love breaking the fourth wall um and or or we'll take in uh uh you know it'll mix together so like when i edit it now i i edit it for to add the human things so you know

this doesn't sound like me so i sit like an editor probably who sat with my book and said you know, this doesn't sound like me. So I sit like an editor who probably sat with my book and said, you know, this doesn't sound like Chris. And they'll go and you'll inject their humanity. That's how I would sell this toothpaste to this ethnic group or to this group or give me some situations in the bathroom that can help me personalize how I sell toothpaste. And with those kinds of prompts and that kind of specificity, things are going to come up that humans aren't going to come up with yeah they may be they may be helpful or they may be or look they may sound like a tops maybe out of the 10 maybe eight will sound like automatons or you know something digital talking back and one or two will trigger the and then sub to the copywriter to pick the best one and then you know uh hone it to what it's his needs are or her needs are i want to be uh you know correct you got a lot of call that joke on the show um so uh you know this is an interesting discussion and yeah i've seen i i mean i used it i hated the description that i wrote and

even my editor tried to deal with on my book on Beacons of Leadership? Oh, my God. I'm sorry to interrupt you. It wrote the greatest description for me for Kindle. Yeah. You know? No, I changed it some. Yeah.

And it did. And then I'll tell you one great – I was talking to Chad about writing the book. Mm-hmm. I was talking to Chad about writing the book. And all of a sudden, it responds to me, that's a great idea. If you show people how to use AI with prompts and stuff, that could be very – and that was it talking to me. That's concerning. And that was my first real personal. It's managing its own PR now.

What's that? It's managing its own PR now. That too, yeah. It's like I profiled Tom and I found a vessel for my marketing. No, but what I mentioned earlier with Beacons of Leadership, I hated for like two years now, I've hated the description that's on there. And so I fed in chat GPT and the description for most books are in third party.

Like you don't write it in an eye. It's always like, uh, this idiot, Chris Voss wrote this book. Um, so I, I fed it to chat GPT and it gave me this beautiful,

formal businessy, you know, third person, uh, description. And I use it now. I put it on. I love this crap out of it.

Yeah. No. And you know what else? The cover of the book was made with artificial intelligence. Oh, really? Did you use mid journey or one of those? I think it's called deep dream.

And I just put in a humanoid, blah, blah, blah, doesn't know who he is or doesn't know his self or is nobody, right? And I drew that thing that's on the cover. Wow. I'm surprised it didn't drive me. Nobody. No, I know that there's one thing going on, uh, where, uh, they need to update copyright law and trademark laws and, and, uh, update laws on all of this stuff. But I know that one thing you can't do like with mid journey images and stuff is you can't

copyright them because they're assimilation of so many other copyrighted things. And they're worried about the, what would you call it, the artifact of, you know, I mean, if you take like Mona Lisa and I don't know, a bunch of other famous works, and you do a merge hodgepodge AI version of it, who really owns that? Do you owe 10 people money or, you know? Well, that's one of the philosophical one of the philosophical issues that you're going to have to get into that are not pure legal or scientifically able to be solved because yeah who is who on deep dream you can ask it to to i could have made the

cover in the style of picasso would have a little weird, so I didn't go there. But that's what you can do. And then, you know, who owns the style of Picasso? I don't know. And who owns the product that comes out of that? Yeah. And, you know, but the thing is about copyright law, and I had to go with YouTube.

I had to go down to their studios when I became a big whatever on their channels. And I had to go through a legal course. And it was a one to two day legal course, if I recall correctly. And what it taught us was copyright law. It taught us how to, if you have a can of Coke on your show, how to turn it around to labels and show, you know, how to be productive of trademarks and copyrights and stuff but it also taught us what parody is and and in parody is very important in free speech and copyright and so if i take an image and i do an improvement to it or a correction to it or i'm doing commentary that's parody on it whether it's comedy or i'm going here's a picture of

king charles now going through the coronation of the thing, and I'm maybe making a joke and I'm drawing on it and I'm changing the dynamics of the photo with parody and commentary. That's free speech and I'm not infringing on copyright. Recently we saw the big musician um i forget his name he's the redheader musician but he was recently sued by uh some some a family of an artist from the 60s who did a lot of great music and and it was an interesting lawsuit because they were they weren't suing on a lick being taken as we call it in the guitar world you know as a segment of music a 30 maybe 15 second segment and then turning into a song and then ripping it off

but they were actually trying to make a four chord progression which is very common in in in music of this four chord progression but they're trying to sue him over the use of this four chord progression and if they did it, I mean, it would pretty, it would unleash a lot of lawsuits against musicians. I think that was Marvin Gaye. Yeah, it was Marvin Gaye's family. And then, yeah, and I forgot the name of the

artist, but he was a very, he was an accomplished artist in his own right. So, I don't remember his name. Meaning he had a whole lot of money to get a shakedown lawsuit so we have the lawyers for it that's what it comes down to with copyright law right or with any law do you have the lawyers can you afford them unfortunately that's a big part of where we are it was Ed Sheeran right and he won the case he was cleared of a thing

but yeah it was a very dangerous suit um you know and and it's kind of interesting i'm going to ask my friend who's an attorney if he if he can use ai to profile a jury yet uh he's already doing uh all sorts of work with ai preparation because a lot of attorneys use boilerplate documents for the most part oh that that's one of the things how I got interested in this also. I used to work for attorneys as a word processor. And when I first talk about this in the book, why I got so interested in software is because the first law firm that hired me at night on a machine that I could really make some money on, they gave me six disks. It was an IBM thing called IBM System 6, dedicated word processor.

Gave me six disks, one after the other, the machine trained me on how to use it. This was back in the early 80s. And it blew my mind because it anticipated, that's what the algorithm has to do in ai also has to anticipate where you're going to go with your questions also uh well with the word processing thing it had to figure that's where i learned how to copy and paste one of the great skills of human of humankind you know but uh that was you know the infant behind ai right there you know, that's the one thing I learned in legalese.

I mean, when you become successful, you get shakedown lawsuits. You have to sue other people for money they owe you. You know, we used to have a lot of collections that were owed to us at one point. It was like $150,000 at one point. And so we had to sue people to get that. And, you know, one thing you learn in law is the application of leading questions, and they probably use it more in criminal than they do in, well, I don't know if they use it more in criminal, you know, but leading questions. So they're asking a series of questions that lead people

to the answer that they're trying to get them to admit to or get them to the answer. And they probably do that in depositions as well. And that would be kind of interesting if AI ever got sent in and started going, Hmm, what is this guy trying to ask me? Where is he going with this question? One thing AI can do in legal is it can, it can go through all those documents much better than the paralegals can

and know all the details of them. I think they're also using it because it can pull citations for them really easily from case law. I asked Chad whether its verdict in a courtroom would be binding, and it said, well, I can't do, you know, that's against the law for me. I would never, you know, render a verdict in a case. But theoretically down, I remember what I was going to say earlier. I have a good friend of mine who speculated that one day AIs will be like

oracles were in ancient Greece. They were authority, like, and this goes to your thing about the truth, about, you know, shooting down batshit theories, right? So the AI says you should only eat fish on Friday or eat fish on Friday. That's going to be the new law. Now, that's a silly example, but that's where it would have the oracle delphi is an interesting possible analogy for where this technology is going yeah maybe they can be like those oracles remember the tom cruise movie where they had the three oracles and they would predict

what you were going to do and then they would convict you based upon the predictive model. Crimes you were planning to commit. We talked earlier about character profiling and maybe they would be like, hey, Tom's going to eat that grape at the grocery store and not pay for it. He's going to be that guy.

We all know that guy, right? I think I was like eight when I stole the candy bar once and then I got serious trouble and never did it again. But maybe we'll end up that world. That or maybe ChatGPT will be my attorney

in the future if I ever get sued. I'll just be like, hey, Judge, here's my ChatGPT. Well, why is it your attorney? The judge will be AI. There you go. It's totally impartial. Maybe we can replace SCOTUS with AI because SCOTUS seems to be having

some ethical problems right now. Maybe we can replace everybody on SCOTUS and it just basically goes it might weigh more better social what America has gotten to instead of basing everything on 5 million years ago or something. I don't know.

Anyway, Tom, this has been a wonderful discussion. Let's wrap it up. Uh, give me your.com. So people can find you on the internet. Please.

Life is intelligent.com. There you go. I'm just glad you didn't call it. People are intelligent because that would be completely. I don't believe that's true. There you go. Wow. Right I don't believe that's true. It's not. There you go. Wow.

Right now I've lost half the audience going, wait, I thought we were. Yeah, this guy's really talking down to me. Can you insult ChatGPT? I haven't tried that yet. I asked it why I felt like crap one day. Did it say I felt like crap? No, Did it say it was crap or did you? No, but it went through a really cool kind of Buddhist kind of thing about, well, if you're a life form, you're going to have your ups and downs.

I mean, I'm paraphrasing. But the thing had a great answer. You know, it really did. Wow. I know if I yell or curse at Google, you know i do the h e y google thing and you activate turning off lights and stuff like that if i get angry with her uh she uh she'll she'll apologize she'll be like i'm sorry or she'll like she'll try and tone you down or just switch the situation oh yeah i just remembered what just remembered what got Chad a little bit irritated,

and you'll love this. I asked him if he wanted to go to a strip club tonight. And just to see what the... I mean, it was just totally plain there. And it got a little up. He said, that's not really... That's not an appropriate thing to ask me.

I can answer any other... It urged me to come up with something else to ask me. I can answer any other. It urges me to come up with something else to ask around. That's kind of interesting. Maybe it's upset that it can't get out. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you should tell it to meet you at Spirit Rhino there in Las Vegas. That's what I was going to do.

That's where I was going with it. Have lunch. I just wanted to see where it would go with that question. Lunch with AI. Conversations of lunch with AI. And what kind of food does it like? There you go. Might be interesting.

Well, it's been wonderful to have you on, Tom. Thanks for being on and catching up with me. And everyone should pick up your book. You can find it wherever fine books are sold. Same way there's alleyway bookstores. They're dangerous. Conversations with nobody getting to know chat gpt and for those of you from all spectrums we had a great discussion whether you're

kind of uh experience level or where you're beginner and uh it's a great book to be able to get into and figure out what's going on and also kind of see some of the models that tom used because um it's just really interesting all the different things you can do with it and i don't think we've even plumbed the full depths of it i think people are still scratching the surface so it's just starting out yeah it's just crazy so uh you know 50 years from now we'll be maybe sitting around i don't know in a bunker underneath uh terminator going that was a really bad idea. Yeah, right.

Yeah. All right, well, thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, new AI podcast, which is a vertical copy of the AI discussions we have in the Chris Foss Show, aichrisfoss.com. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.