A movement to cancel ChatGPT has exploded since the Pentagon selected OpenAI\u2019s technology for military use last week, but judging by the turnout for a protest in San Francisco, it hasn\u2019t exactly spilled into the streets.<\/p>\n
Around 50 \u201cQuitGPT\u201d protesters carrying signs and writing chalk messages gathered Tuesday outside OpenAI\u2019s headquarters, denouncing CEO Sam Altman\u2019s cozy relationship with the Department of War. Journalists, eager for a story, showed up more punctually than the demonstrators for the scheduled start of the protest.<\/p>\n
The protesters had a range of views. There was a contingent that embraces the benefits of the technology but believes OpenAI has gone too far by being in cahoots with the military as the U.S. wages war against Iran.<\/p>\n
Among them was a 26-year-old Oakland tech worker whose head was covered by a cardboard robot mask with red LED eyes. He declined to share his name.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never go to protests. This is new for me,\u201d he said, adding that he uses AI for everything from programming to generating recipes. \u201cWe\u2019re not normally political people. We\u2019re techies, you know \u2013 we want to build stuff. What Open AI is doing in terms of building legal mass surveillance technology for the government \u2026 is frankly, insane.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then there were those who fundamentally oppose the rise of AI in all its forms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI hate AI, and I hate war,\u201d said Jennifer Keith, a graphic designer. \u201cAI steals my data, repurposes it, and makes it so I can\u2019t make a living from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She lamented that San Francisco, where she\u2019s lived since 1988, has lost its soul, pointing to the AI advertising around the city.<\/p>\n
OpenAI employees using the company\u2019s second-floor gym looked down at the demonstration. \u201cOpenAI there is blood on your hands\u201d and \u201cQuit your job\u201d were scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk. The crowd chanted, \u201cOne, two, three, four, we don\u2019t want a robot war. Five, six, seven, eight, no AI surveillance state.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s rival for supremacy, Anthropic, has been riding a wave of popularity since CEO Dario Amodei refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its technology, which he fears could be used to surveil Americans or allow offensive weapons to fire without human oversight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Until then, OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT was the popular choice over Anthropic\u2019s Claude, but that has changed amid the political debate. Anthropic\u2019s Claude surpassed OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT in daily U.S. downloads for the first time Saturday, according to data from analytics firm Appfigures.<\/p>\n
River Bellamy, a software engineer who lives in Berkeley, said the Pentagon contract dispute has made him more committed to using Claude. Before, he preferred it because he thought it performed better; now he also values Anthropic\u2019s political stance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe red lines that Anthropic had seemed very reasonable to me,\u201d Bellamy said. \u201cI think it is good for warfighters to have access to LLMs \u2014 I think they do have legitimate uses. I just want there to be safeguards in place to ensure that the technology is not used for illegitimate purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A movement to cancel ChatGPT has exploded since the Pentagon selected OpenAI\u2019s technology for military use last week,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,19534,1703,3408,7361,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-204438","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-military","11":"tag-openai","12":"tag-protests","13":"tag-san-francisco","14":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","15":"tag-san-francisco-news","16":"tag-sf","17":"tag-sf-headlines","18":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}