31 Mar 2023 : The Hindu Editorial Analysis

Editorial 1: GPT-4 — a shift from ‘what it can do’ to ‘what it augurs’

Introduction:

• U.S. company, OpenAI, recently released GPT-4, its latest AI model. This large language model can understand and produce language that is creative and meaningful, and will power an advanced version of the company’s chatbot, ChatGPT.

GPT-4 and what it can do

• GPT-4 is a remarkable improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3.5, which first powered ChatGPT.

1. GPT-4 is more conversational and creative.
2. Its biggest innovation is that it can accept text and image input simultaneously, and consider both while drafting a reply. The model can purportedly understand human emotions, such as humorous pictures. Its ability to describe images is already benefiting the visually impaired.
3. GPT-4 was tested in several tests that were designed for humans and performed much better than average. For instance, in a simulated bar examination, it had the 90th percentile, whereas its predecessor scored in the bottom 10%. GPT-4 also sailed through advanced courses in environmental science, statistics, art history, biology, and economics.
4. However, GPT-4 failed to do well in advanced English language and literature, scoring 40% in both. Nevertheless, its performance in language comprehension surpasses other high-performing language models, in English and 25 other languages, including many Indian languages.
5. ChatGPT-generated text infiltrated school essays and college assignments almost instantly after its release; its prowess now threatens examination systems as well.
6. OpenAI has released preliminary data to show that GPT-4 can do a lot of white-collar work, especially programming and writing jobs, while leaving manufacturing or scientific jobs relatively untouched. Wider use of language models will have effects on economies and public policy.

• If we define intelligence as “a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience”, GPT-4 already succeeds at 4 out of these 7 criteria. It is yet to master planning and learning.

Ethical questions

1. GPT-4 is still prone to a lot of its flaws its predecessor have. Its output may not always be factually correct — a trait OpenAI has called “hallucination”.
2. GPT-4 has been trained on data scraped from the Internet that contains several harmful biases and stereotypes. There is also an assumption that a large dataset is also a diverse dataset and faithfully representative of the world at large. This is not the case for the Internet, where people from economically developed countries, of young ages and with male voices are overrepresented.
3. The moderator model is trained to detect only the biases we are aware of, and mostly in the English language. This model may be ignorant of stereotypes prevalent in non-western cultures, such as those rooted in caste.
4. There is vast potential for GPT-4 to be misused as a propaganda and disinformation engine.
5. The larger question here is about where the decision to not do the wrong thing should be born: in the machine’s rules or in the human’s mind.

A ‘stochastic parrot’

• In essence, GPT-4 is a machine that predicts the next word in an unfinished sentence, based on probabilities it learned as it trained on large corpuses of text. This is why it’s being called a “stochastic parrot”, speaking in comprehensible phrases without understanding the meaning. But Microsoft Research has maintained that GPT-4 does understand what it is saying, and that not all intelligence is a type of next-word prediction.
• Apart from OpenAI’s models, AI company Anthropic has introduced a ChatGPT competitor named Claude. Google recently announced PaLM, a model trained to work with more degrees of freedom than GPT-3.

Conclusion:

• More broadly, efforts are underway worldwide to build a model with a trillion degrees of freedom. These will be truly colossal language-models that elicit questions about what they cannot do, but these concerns would be red herrings that distract us from whether we should be building models that simply test the limits of what is possible to the exclusion of society’s concerns.

Editorial 2: Vaikom, a satyagraha, and the fight for social justice

Context:

• The Kerala government in 2023 decided to commemorate the Vaikom satyagraha/ movement by organising various cultural events. Tamil Nadu CM also recently declared intentions of a year-long celebration.

What is Vaikom Satyagraha:

• Vaikom Satyagraha was a nonviolent protest that took place from 1924 to 1925 in the Kingdom of Travancore (part of modern day Kerala). The protest was against the rigid and oppressive caste system prevalent in the region, which forbade lower castes, or untouchables, from entering not just the Vaikom Temple but also from walking on the surrounding roads.
• Led by Congress leaders T. K. Madhavan, K. Kelappan, George Joseph and K. P. Kesava Menon, the protest was notable for the active support and participation offered by different communities and a variety of activists. The movement, started on the advice of Mahatma Gandhi, was successfully conducted by Periyar (E.V. Ramasamy Naicker), the then president of Tamil Nadu Congress.

Significance of Vaikom Satyagraha:

• There is more to it in terms of a social movement of consequence. It also marks the commencement of the centenary year of the Vaikom temple street entry movement that was launched in 1924, and a milestone in temple entry movements in India.
• This non-violent movement was to end the prohibition imposed on backward communities in using the roads around the Vaikom Mahadeva temple. It was the prelude to the temple entry proclamation of Kerala in 1936.

Periyar’s entry and conditions

• Supported by the Kerala Congress, the committee against untouchability launched the protest. The protest sustained itself for more than one and a half years, leading to many arrests of satyagrahis. The government then targeted the leaders of the protest. Their arrests created a vacuum as there was no leader left immediately.
• This led to leaders such as Neelakandan Nampoothiri and George Joseph to request Periyar to lead the protest. He got the title Vaikom Veerar (Hero of Vaikom) after this movement.
• The Vaikom movement was of many hues — as day-to-day protests, arrests, of inquiries, jail terms and and agitations and attacks by orthodox Hindu traditionalists Even the Akalis from Punjab travelled to Vaikom to supply food to the protesters.
• There was also the support of the higher castes for a 13-day march to the capital, a resolution in the Assembly in support of the sanchara (free entry to the streets around the temple), its defeat, and also the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi to negotiate between the government, protesters and orthodox Hindus.
• Since Mahatma Gandhi insisted that it should be a local protest, requests to make it a pan-India movement failed. Backed by the government and the administration, the traditionalists caused many troubles for the satyagrahis, which included counter rallies marked by violence.
• The resolution for the right to sanchara was defeated in the Assembly by the open support of the traditionalists and the indirect pressure of the government. But the satyagrahis overcame the hurdles.

Over 603 days

• The movement went on from March 30, 1924 to November 23, 1925. In these 603 days, there were many important events.
• The sanchara resolution that was taken up for voting in the Assembly in 1925, was defeated by a single vote. Mahatma Gandhi talked with the Queen of Travancore, social reformer Sri Narayana Guru, traditionalists and police.
• Finally in November, the government of the Travancore princely state declared that people could enter three of the four streets around Vaikom temple, thus bringing the protest to an end.

Conclusion:

• Vaikom is more than just a name of a town. It is a symbol of social justice and symbolises the eradication of caste barriers. It is one that still burns bright in history and the social justice movement.