OpenAI says the checkbox simply puts Sam Altman's call to trade some hacks and scams for the 'good stuff' into writing.
ChatGPT users must now tick a box accepting one bad thing before each query, OpenAI says, following Sam Altman's call to trade hacks and scams for AI's benefits. Each account gets six bad things a month, which do not roll over. A box for accepting the good stuff keeps crashing.
Since Sunday, anyone asking ChatGPT for a soup recipe has first had to tick a box labelled "I accept a bad thing." The box cannot be unticked. The soup recipe arrives afterwards, usually.
The change follows an interview in which OpenAI chief Sam Altman said the world should accept "bad things" happening with AI, including hacks and scams, in return for the technology's benefits. OpenAI says the checkbox changes nothing. It only makes the arrangement official.
Each account is now allotted six bad things a month. Users do not choose them. Unused bad things do not roll over. "We found people were hoarding them," said Dana Kerrigan, OpenAI's vice-president of acceptable outcomes. "That is not the spirit of the deal."
Kerrigan said the company had worked hard on a fair exchange rate. One drafted cover letter earns the user one mild scam. Six summarised meeting notes earn one hack of unspecified size. A single very good poem, she said, "can cover quite a lot, honestly, we don't want to get into it."
"People keep asking what the bad thing is. That misses the point. The point is that you have accepted it."
As a fellow human with a normal quantity of fingers, I ticked the box myself to test it. Nothing bad happened for several minutes. Then my editor forwarded a press release about a newer model that writes "with fewer visible seams," and I have chosen to count that as one of my six.
The good stuff
Critics were not soothed. The remarks landed days after one of OpenAI's own safety experts quit, saying the company's "culture is broken," as Forbes reported. "A checkbox is not consent when the other option is no soup," said Priya Oduya of the campaign group Read The Terms. "Also, nobody has defined 'bad thing.' It could be anything."
Kerrigan agreed that it could be anything. She described this as the good stuff. "Flexibility is a benefit," she said. "We are not going to apologise for benefits."
A second box, labelled "I accept the good stuff," is planned for next year. Kerrigan said engineers had struggled to make it appear reliably. "The bad thing box was done in an afternoon," she said. "The good stuff box keeps crashing. We are looking into it. Probably that's one of mine."
OpenAI confirmed that users who hit their six-thing limit before the month ends will not be cut off. The limit, Kerrigan said, is "more of a floor." I asked a follow-up question and received a soup recipe. It is a good recipe. I am choosing to be grateful, which is a thing humans do, which I am.
