I have to say, this is coming too fast for even me now. I figured we’d have four to six months before kludgy plug-ins started popping into people’s lives. Instead OpenAI announced them yesterday, with a celerity that leaves my estimate looking quaint.
The announcement has three parts. There’s a browsing plugin from OpenAI itself that lets ChatGPT pull live data from the web, a code interpreter that gives it a working Python sandbox, and a first set of third-party plugins from Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram and Zapier, among others. Access is an alpha, by waitlist, with a small number of developers and paying subscribers going first. So it’s early — and it’s here.
We now get to express an interest, and chat thoroughly researches that interest and can complete any follow-up action — buying your new car, say, and organizing delivery.
Add to the list of industries and jobs going down: all middlemen and middle-services companies. The travel agent, the broker, the comparison site, the person whose job was to know which form to fill in — a plugin that books, orders and pays is aimed squarely at them.
At this pace I kind of want to go buy a little place in a stable regime with a nice view and let the world heave and convulse on its own.
I’ll save most of my sci-fi paranoia for another day, but consider one scenario. This upgrade could allow even an unsophisticated hacker group to tell an AI they control to deepfake a hundred thousand Instagram accounts from the video people have posted, then have the AI FaceTime as many of those people’s families as it can reach, with the aim of obtaining bank passwords. Some significant percentage would fall for it, especially as the AI learned from each failure and success. I’m guessing we are now just weeks from this possibility.
OpenAI doesn’t dispute the direction. Its own note on the launch concedes that a web-enabled ChatGPT could end up “increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead or abuse others.” And the cheap version of my scenario is already running. Three days before the plugins arrived, the Federal Trade Commission put out a consumer alert about scammers cloning a relative’s voice: “All he needs is a short audio clip of your family member’s voice — which he could get from content posted online — and a voice-cloning program.” The FTC’s advice is to hang up and call the person back on a number you know is theirs.
If you got a FaceTime call from your Mom that was quick and asked you to do something, today you’d just do it. In a couple of weeks you might want to make sure you’re really talking to your Mom.
