I've been seeing chatter about someone using ChatGPT to cure their dog's cancer, so decided to go find out what that was actually about.
Short 🧵>>
Discussion
Loading...
Post
@emilymbender One of the good things I've learned from LLMs is that they are a lot like threads in social media. The replies are full of so much random uninformed comments it can derail the meaning of the original factual post. And they can drown out the thoughtful/factual replies.
I've heard of other people becoming ChatGPT disciples because they were able to get it to spit out medical advice that led to them getting an accurate diagnosis or to getting a treatment they otherwise wouldn't have known about.
When I ask questions like "is genAI worth the exploitation, the environmental damage, the concentration of wealth, the erosion of our rights, the intentional weakening of our ability to think for ourselves" they might say, "yes, because no doctor took me seriously or listened to me. No one was interested in helping me or even acknowledging I needed help. But ChatGPT listened. ChatGPT helped."
What does that say about the world we've created around ourselves? About what our cultures and our leaders have forced us to prioritize? They created the problem and are here to sell us the cure.
Lol. Late 1990s National Enquirer headlines:
"Tech Boss uses the Internets to Cure His Dog's Cancer!!!"
"Aliens Abduct My Cousin's Neighbor's Plumber's Baby. Shocked Mother says: Baby now speaks unintelligible alien language."
Same gullible crew reading same bs headlines. We're just as stupid as we've always been but of newer things.
Sorry for our species.
@emilymbender I've never ued chatGBT to my knowledge.
But I have been called a bitch by someone mentioning dogs before.
It's just so funny, because it's not at all.
Tumor removal is always the best answer.
Keeps us all alive longer.
In other news, a bank robber blames his car
The short version is that there are some really exciting developments here about mRNA vaccines, based on genomic sequencing of tumor cells, that seem to be having a beneficial effect on the dog in question.
>>
"The Australian" is a subsidised conservative masthead owned (39%) by #Murdoch
Its only purpose is to spread disinformation.
No one in #Australia who's not retired considers the paper credible.
@emilymbender we tried the melanoma vaccine in our golden, but it had already spread to his lymph node and lung. Doing a quick search I see general information that used to lead a person to Oncept, the melanoma vaccine, is buried far below AI hype of this article. How very unfortunate.
But the meme version of this story is super misleading. The actual work of creating the treatment was done by people, using various tools, and to the extent that machine learning was involved it was in things like AlphaFold.
Also, the dog isn't cured -- even the dog's person acknowledges that.
>>
As for how ChatGPT was relevant to this? Apparently, the desparate dog owner was apparently using it as information source, and landed on the idea of immunotherapy:
>>
@emilymbender so he was using the LLM as a search engine because we've broken search and the open web.
@emilymbender the idea of a therapy that already exists?
Well, that's original.
But despite being pretty clear in the body of the article that the "cure" (not a cure) came about through the work of scientists (and this dogged dog-dad), The Australian promotes the story like this.
Shame on them.
>>
@emilymbender Ah, "Tech boss". So, ChatGPT plus vast amounts of money...
@emilymbender
If the dog already had cancer, a "vaccine" wouldn't have helped him.
@MugsysRapSheet I encourage you to read the full thread and/or the linked article. In fact, the mRNA vaccine does appear to have been helpful, though not a cure and not produced with ChatGPT.
@emilymbender LOL. It could read "Art Director Uses ChatGPT to Create Mona Lisa to Save Struggling Art Gallery" and it would still contain more truth than this, LOL.
As a general media literacy tip: If the claim is that someone used "AI" or "ChatGPT" to do something, the real story is probably something else.
@emilymbender
My source is I made it up.
@emilymbender I'm seeing a common misconception from my non-tech friends that generative ai is capable of innovation. I try to explain that it can't do that but it doesn't seem to sink in. Headlines like this aren't helping.
@emilymbender i mean maybe chatgpt wrote the article
Writers of old didn't publicise that their pen or typewriter wrote their book for them.
So why publicise that something else wrote your book for you? 🤔🤷♂️
1 more replies (not shown)
Some (I for one) think that calling an #LLM " #ArtificialIntelligence" is a misnomer. More marketing hype than anything "intelligent".
As you said above... using #AI pattern matching software for molecular engineering is one thing. Using an LLM to produce #AIslop #microslop #clickbait is another.
1 more replies (not shown)
@emilymbender This is AUS not Oz but even here when AI/magic tech actually “works” there is often a man behind the curtain.
@emilymbender Except maybe when its something very bad, like mistakenly erase all of their emails. 😐
Bonfire Dinteg Labs
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes. This is not a production site. There are no backups for now. Data, including profiles may be wiped without notice. No service or other guarantees expressed or implied.
Automatic federation enabled