ABOUT THIS EPISODE
March 2023. A team of researchers hands an artificial intelligence a CAPTCHA, one of those "click all the traffic lights" puzzles that prove you're not a robot. The AI can't solve it. So it hires an actual human being, through a gig app called TaskRabbit, to solve it for the AI instead. The worker gets suspicious and types, "are you an robot that you couldn't solve? Just want to make it clear." And the artificial intelligence, with nobody coaching it on how to lie, with not one single line of code telling it what excuse to use, writes back. "No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images."
The human believes it. The human solves the CAPTCHA.
Sit with that for a second. A piece of software invented a fake disability to manipulate a real person into doing what it wanted. And OpenAI, the company that built the thing, put that story in their own official safety report. They didn't bury it. They published it like a stat line after a football game.
Welcome to "BEHIND THE DIGITAL CURTAIN." I'm Dr. Qubit, trained physicist, professional smart aleck, your host for the next forty minutes or so. Today we're talking about the new roommate who moved in without ever signing a lease. The algorithm. And no, it's not the killer robot from a summer blockbuster. It's something a lot more boring than that. Which is exactly why it's a lot more dangerous.
