«Black Swan» Author Nassim Taleb Issues Crucial ChatGPT Warning

The author of popular books “Black Swan”, “Antifragile”, etc, scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is also a vocal Bitcoin critic, has published a major warning about OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT.

On Friday, a similar warning was published by Edward Snowden, although his message was a lot stronger than Taleb’s.

Nassim Taleb bashes ChatGPT

The expert at managing risk and finance, Taleb continues dipping his toes in modern technologies and finding faults with them. A Bitcoin critic who used to be a vocal BTC supporter, he has now shared his take on the recent controversial invention – artificial intelligence and in particular on the ChatGPT bot created by OpenAI.

Just a reminder that ChatGpt has for modus: «when you don’t know, bullshit». pic.twitter.com/k3Kfc3TJBq

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 16, 2024

Taleb shared a screenshot of his dialogue with the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, pointing out a weak point of this software: it does not admit that it may not know replies to users’ certain questions.

In Taleb’s particular case, this was when the writer asked the program to give him the Latin name of Saint Sassine, one of the early Christian martyrs who consequently became one of the church fathers after Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The screenshot shows that Taleb kept saying “no” to all the replies offered by ChatGPT, however, the software continued to produce new variants in an attempt to answer Taleb’s question.

The author of “Black Swan” tweeted that ChatGPT has a modus of saying nonsense if it does not know an answer to a user’s question.

Edward Snowden’s warning to avoid using ChatGPT

On Friday, whistleblower and a former analyst of the NSA Edward Snowden published a tweet to heavily criticize OpenAI-made ChatGPT.

He warned the community against ever using ChatGPT after the news came out that OpenAI had appointed a former chief of NSA Paul Nakasone to the company’s board of directors.

Almost fifteen years ago, when Snowden became a whistleblower, he revealed that the NSA had been secretly paying private American tech companies to share access to user communications.

This time, he stated that OpenAI had “gone full mask-off.” He called the appointment of Nakasone “a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.” He warned the X community against ever using OpenAI or any of its products, including ChatGPT.

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