There are many reasons to be panicked about AI text generators like ChatGPT. The AI might allow students to cheat their way through AP exams. It might give you bad information about how compound interest works, like when CNET used AI to write SEO-friendly explainers on personal finance. It might try to seduce you and convince you to leave your wife, as Bing’s chatbot did with a New York Times tech columnist.
AI is smarter than us. It doesn’t rest. It doesn’t demand union-mandated break times. It doesn’t ask for a raise. It is relentless, unstoppable. Inevitable.
Or, you know, not. Such is the case with 2dumb2destroy, an AI chatbot trained on the most inane stuff in the world: Pauly Shore movie quotes, dialogue from all seven Police Academy movies, the sayings of Homer Simpson, and more.
Craig Shervin, 34, and Steve Nass, 33, two friends who met while working at a New York advertising agency, wondered what would happen if they created an AI so unintelligent there would be no way anyone would be scared of it.