A few years ago, I got a tip that seemed too outrageous to be true: A mysterious company called Clearview AI claimed it had scraped billions of photos from the public web to identify just about anyone based only on a snapshot of their face.
It led me on a fascinating reporting journey and to my book, YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US, coming out in 3 weeks! One big question is whether the average person is ready for a world in which anonymity ceases to exist.
This week, I got pitched by a PR guy who expressed admiration for a book I wrote. Except I didn't write the book and when I Googled the title, no one else had either. I emailed the guy back: "What did you think of the book? 😉" That led him to admit that "someone used ChatGPT" and it gave a bio for me with this invented piece of information. The guy was embarrassed but I found it fascinating. ChatGPT hasn't learned how to tell the truth but it has learned plausibility. Beware, early adopters!