Mene Michael Arndt
Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)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 🧵>>
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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
France Jor☝️
@emilymbender Except maybe when its something very bad, like mistakenly erase all of their emails. 😐
Master of Crevettes@jor @emilymbender nah. Still works: "this poster was not meant to be antisemitic. It was AI."
Narrotr's voice: it was not AI.
Narrotr's voice: it was not AI.
Ash-Miw-Re@jor @emilymbender That's a pretty mild example of the bad that can come from these things.
Stacey Cornelius 🇨🇦@emilymbender Right at the top of the story (italics mine): "Riddled with cancer, Rosie the rescue dog had only months to live, until her dogged owner collared a chatbot to collaborate with elite medical scientists in the quest for a cure."
Thanks for unpacking this. We know how many people don't read past headlines. sigh
Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷@StaceyCornelius To be truthful, I don't read Merde-dick rags. @emilymbender
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote@emilymbender This is AUS not Oz but even here when AI/magic tech actually “works” there is often a human behind the curtain.
@Pineywoozle I'd say there is 'always' a human behind the curtain. And there should always be a human to check the LLM's results. They are proven to be wrong, or to hallucinate whole sequences. @emilymbender
@Tooden Yep. They do a few things well on their own but not much and definately not the way it’s hyped.
Richard RatheSome (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.
@nickrauchen stay splainy Mastodon!
Joan of Contention 😷
guenther@emilymbender i mean maybe chatgpt wrote the article
Lambic@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.
Aknorals⚑Ⓐ 🏴@emilymbender
My source is I made it up.
My source is I made it up.
Cassandrich
Eric LawtonSomewhat like "the pedestrian was killed by a car" news reports.
P_______X@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.
Trump & Epstein: Biz partners.@emilymbender
If the dog already had cancer, a "vaccine" wouldn't have helped him.
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.
quixote@MugsysRapSheet Vaccine was often used to mean a preventive procedure. More recently it's come to mean administering molecules or particles by any route (injection, respriatory tract, etc) that stimulate the immune system to act against a medical issue.
By the old common usage, it's not a vaccine. By the new usage, it is.
(And don't feel bad about it. This stuff is not far from my day job, and when they started using 'vaccine' this way I did a double take too.)
LisPi
neoluddite@emilymbender Ah, "Tech boss". So, ChatGPT plus vast amounts of money...
Faraiwe@emilymbender the idea of a therapy that already exists?
Well, that's original.
Moses Izumi@emilymbender
>journos credited the vaccine to the dogowner's search engine
>journos credited the vaccine to the dogowner's search engine
Jon Renaut@emilymbender so he was using the LLM as a search engine because we've broken search and the open web.
B'ad Samurai 🐐🇺🇦@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.
Wulfy—Speaker to the machines"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.
PhilSalkie@emilymbender
"I used Chat GPT instead of a search engine and got the same results, but presented in a conversational tone! A modern miracle!"
(Or maybe I got utter palaver, I didn't bother to follow through and check...)
tuban_muzuruIn other news, a bank robber blames his car
I love you, I am proud of you!@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.
Duckbilled Plattypus.Lol. Late 1990s National Enquirer type 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.
Droid Boy 
@pattykimura @emilymbender Education, imagine that!
J. R. DePriest 
:EA DATA. SF: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.
@jrdepriest @emilymbender Your question should have included all the deaths, injuries and aggravated conditions caused by LLM medical "advice".
They rolled the Russian roulette and got a complimentary 20$ for hitting the dummy plastic round. They could've hit nothing or could've hit a live one instead.
They rolled the Russian roulette and got a complimentary 20$ for hitting the dummy plastic round. They could've hit nothing or could've hit a live one instead.
Ed@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.