9 ms·

OpenAI's chatbot store is filling up with spam

234 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

ActionHank 3y ago
Maybe they should use an AI to automate moderation.
- timetraveller26 3y ago
  Yes, they should have a GPT that runs other GPT's, an Universal GPT we could call it. They do use some sort of automation according to the article > We use a combination of automated systems, human review and user reports to find and assess GPTs that potentially violate our policies.
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    Then they can market this universal GPT as an AGI.
- bink 3y ago
  It is a bit funny that if you apply for a job with many of these companies they ask they you do not use AI for the application.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    As any company should. Not sure what's funny about it - I'm interested in the person. If using AI is one of required capabilities I will ask them to perform a task using it during the interview so I can review their process. In the same way I don't expect to receive an executable binary as a cover letter for a SWE position. I had many candidates submit absolutely terrible cover letters clearly made by ChatGPT. The number one sign - it talks about their experience exactly in the order I listed it on the job post; number two - I don't get to know anything about the person. I asked them to submit a cover letter they wrote themselves, and while not everyone's writing was as good as ChatGPT can write, I got to know the person, and hired few of these who definitely wouldn't make the cut if I went by the AI made letter. If you can have AI generate your letter so well I can't tell, you get a pass. Nobody was able to do that yet, though (or at least didn't admit to it, even though I'm asking after they are hired and saying that at this point it would only help them if they did so).
    - herval 3y ago
      most companies are using AI to filter out CVs these days, and cover letters written with ChatGPT seem to have a higher success ratio. I wouldn't blame anyone for using it, unfortunately.
      - throwaway11460 3y ago
        Maybe in first rounds. I am the third/fourth round interviewer. If a cover letter like that gets to me, it's automatically a no - not because of the fact itself but simply because the cover letters are terrible.
        crooked-v 3y ago
        In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?
        badwolf 3y ago
        Who is even looking at cover letters at all?
        kergonath 3y ago
        I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well. The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for. I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.
  - exe34 3y ago
    This could be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff - if your AI can be detected through your writing, then you aren't who they're looking for!
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      I've been trying to get Gemini to write things for me. It's either way to formal, passive, and evasive, but if you ask it to be less formal its like "Yo dude, give me a job!". I find it quite hard find a middle ground and write in a style I like.
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  on that note, will only bother with AI when "open"ai announces an AI ceo.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Then you've set your standards way too high. Loads of places hire interns, no sane person would make an intern CEO. LLMs today are kinda like weird interns at every subject all at once.
    - 1oooqooq 3y ago
      who wants to pay for weird interns? even good ones are free. and might even grow to good hires.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Paid internships are common, and LLMs are so much cheaper than humans they might as well be free. The prices on OpenAI's website are listed per million tokens, the cheaper model can read a typical book for less than the cost of that book in paperback, second hand, during a closing down discount sale, and even the fancy model is still in range of a cheap second-hand paperback (just not during a closing-down sale) for reading and just about the price of a new cheap paperback for writing — cheap enough it might as well be free. Plus, they're an intern at everything all at once. You don't get to hire someone who has a late-degree-level grasp of programming (in every major programming language at the same time) and genetics and law and physics and medicine and who has a business-level grasp of all the most common written languages on Earth — there is no such human. (If and when we can make an AI, be it an LLM or otherwise, which can act at the level of a senior in whichever field it was trained on, even if that training takes a gigawatt-year to compute per field, and even if inference costs 100 kW just to reach human output speed, it's going to seriously mess up the whole world economy; right now it's mainly messing up the economic incentives to hire people fresh from university while boosting the amount of simple stuff that actually gets done because normal people and not just business can now also afford to hire the weird intern). > and might even grow to good hires. Even if they do, will you be the one to hire them? Also, ChatGPT has so far existed for about as long as I spent on my (paid) year in industry that formed part of my degree. It wasn't called an internship, but it basically was. In that time, the models have grown and improved significantly, suggesting (but not proving, because induction doesn't do that) that they will continue to grow and improve.
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  business idea: put a chatgpt plugin moderator on the store, priced for a single purchase by them.
  - mirekrusin 3y ago
    I'm sure there is gpt to plagiarize gpt already that can be used to not use it directly.
Areibman 3y ago
As a (former) ChatGPT plugins developer, our business has absolutely tanked due to GPTs. Discoverability is nonexistent because search is just buried by spam. At least with plugins, there were only a few hundred to sort through, and most had some unique API they would plug into. For context, we built ChatOCR- an OCR tool that lets users extract text from photos and PDFs. We made roughly $20k from 39,000 users over 6 months on the plugins catalog
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Do end users have to pay you each time or buy access or credits or something, or do you just get a cut of ChatGPT paid subscriptions when a paying user uses your plugin?
  - Areibman 3y ago
    We use a third party plugins manager called pluginlab.ai. It manages auth and subscriptions for plugins users by prompting them to sign in when they hit a paywall.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - csallen 3y ago
    Nobody in this thread said they need OpenAI to provide them discoverability.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Not sure what you mean: OpenAI's App Store doesn't charge and has discoverability. (hence the viability of the spam, hence TFA) OP is likely affected by the change from plugins to GPTs Now, users have to manually select an app. Whereas before, you'd have a list of, say, 5 apps and the AI would attempt to intelligently determine which app to use. OpenAI said plugins didn't find product-market fit, and that's why they moved on. It's worth opining there's an air of rushing around doing nothing with their product development. Like instead of "what should it be?", and building it, and sustaining it, it's a pastiche of every startup shibboleth you've ever heard - sprints, if 10-20% of the user base / 10^7 users aren't using it within 3-5 months, it's time to Pivot (throw away the working solution we invested in) That makes sense when you're at 100 users in an uncertain market but at their scale, it reminds me more of how Google ended up with the reputation it has. * forgive me for not air-quoting app and app store, these aren't __apps__ per se, but it was immensely distracting, with an air of condescention, when I air-quoted everything
paulpauper 3y ago
it is impossible to divorce AI from spam. the two go hand in hand. the spam situation will get far far worse than ever imagined with AI. The web will be increasingly clogged with AI-generated content (e.g. videos and articles ) that can do a reasonably good job impersonating human-generated content to the undiscriminating reader. Same for AI-produced research papers, plagiarism, etc. AI-generated content can still be identified, but that is not the point. It has to only be good enough to pass muster for the average person or anyone who is not paying close attention.
- visarga 3y ago
  One area that's getting close to hitting the mainstream is AI agents that control web browsers or desktop apps. Basically, you tell your AI what you want to do, and it does the computer work for you, showing the results the way you like. You won't have to dig through tons of useless apps anymore. It'll search, sort, and create feeds for you. This is what scares advertisers the most - when we start saying, "Just talk to my AI." God knows I'd love an AI that can fill tax forms for me. Operating on top of UI it is compatible with all devices, kind of like an android robot would fit well with all human spaces and tools. There is plenty of screen capture with narration to learn from. You can generate more training data by essentially giving free reign over a VM to an AI agent. Ask it to do office work. We can also collect this kind of data very easily.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    I recall imagining something s quite like this as a kid when I first encountered the term "User Agent". I'd be all in on this if I knew I had full control and explainability of its decisions, but am afraid that reality will be a lot more depressing than what I imagine.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    For a very immediate example, I can already see a clear path to somebody coming up with an LLM service that will automatically filter out political spam texts and emails. (Maybe it already exists and I just haven't seen it yet.)
cdme 3y ago
A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.
- golergka 3y ago
  LLMs are no more a tool to generate spam than text and image editors or programming languages are.
  - croes 3y ago
    And a chainsaw is just tool to cut things like a plastic knife.
  - nirvdrum 3y ago
    Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.
      - HughParry 3y ago
        The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.
pants2 3y ago
It was a huge mistake to monetize GPTs. I and many other AI enthusiasts would have probably developed plenty of useful GPTs for free. But now I would never bother because nobody will see my projects under all the SEO spam and fake ratings.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  When you say it's monetized, are they actually giving anyone any money? The details of that were to "to be announced" but I haven't heard any announcement.
  - Implicated 3y ago
    It seems that just the 'threat' of monetizing it would cause an absolute flood of GPTs to be launched, under the assumption that they would eventually get paid.
- MattDaEskimo 3y ago
  Have to disagree. When OpenAI didn't provide a method of revenue for plugins they were plagued with third-party paywall services
  - pants2 3y ago
    Plug-ins are a bit different because someone needed to host a backend for it. Most GPTs are fully hosted by OpenAI.
- vasco 3y ago
  It's the fastest growth product in number of users in the history of the internet, to think they wouldn't run the Apple store playbook as much as possible is naive.
- creesch 3y ago
  That and even if they had proper reviews in place, there is no telling when they would pull the plug on the entire thing. Based on that alone I never even considered making a GPT for sale. Having said that, I do like them because of the openAPI integration. I made one for myself that can send things to a private discord channel through webhooks and can calls my memo instance (https://github.com/usememo https://github.com/usememo) to store or retrieve memos.
ado__dev 3y ago
When the barrier to entry is non-existent, this outcome is inevitable.
rvz 3y ago
OpenAI GPTs Store was supposed to be the "iPhone moment" which it changes everything and upends the App Store. ...Or so I was told by the AI bros. So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That is nothing like the quality of the Apple App Store.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That, and there isn't a lot of space for real innovation within the "GPT" framework that OpenAI provides. Most of what's available in their store is literally just prepackaged prompts, and there's only so much that can accomplish. You can ask a chatbot to pretend to be an expert in a topic all day, but that won't actually make it into one. If Apple's App Store were just a form you filled out to release versions of Flappy Bird with new graphics or whatever, that'd fail too. Developers need conceptual "space" to innovate; I'm not convinced that's possible when the interface (a chat window) and the back end (a language model) are both set in stone by the platform.
- jart 3y ago
  It was doomed from the start, because monetizable computing platforms that target consumers can't succeed if they don't have high barriers to entry. Low quality Atari games were responsible for the 1983 video game crash. Anyone could publish an Atari game. So what ended up happening was people made games about things like raping Native American women (Custer's Revenge) and they were sold just like any other Atari cartridge. Nintendo pioneered the closed platform. No one was allowed to build games for Nintendo without Nintendo's permission. Microsoft and Apple did things a bit differently, by making their platforms as difficult to develop for as possible. WIN32 is byzantine. Making iPhone apps when the App Store was launched required learning Objective C, which was an entirely new language to most developers at the time. OpenAI on the other hand created an app store which, in their own words, "is simple and doesn't require any coding skills." https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store
  - 3y ago
eightman 3y ago
The use case for AI is spam.
- klabb3 3y ago
  “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    By the same logic, the purpose [0] of “the purpose of a system is what it does” is thought-terminating cliché. [0] in most short comments in online discussions, at least.
jsemrau 3y ago
As I had written about publicly already, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Same with poe.com, GPTs can be generated in just a few clicks by anyone anywhere with no quality control in sight. My guess is that it was always a play about having access to high-quality data.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paxys 3y ago
A spam-filled online marketplace is almost becoming a feature. That way the top developers have to pay and outbid each other to get featured and show up in search results, and that becomes a lucrative revenue source for the platform.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Bingo. It’s the “platform-corporation” playbook only at 10x the speed. “Tired of drowning in the totally unpreventable noise of spammers? Well, have you tried our Boost product?”
ionwake 3y ago
Can anyone recommend a good chatgpt chatbot from the store? I havent had a poll recently. Any suggestions would be great, thanks.
tkgally 3y ago
> OpenAI’s terms explicitly prohibit developers from building GPTs that promote academic dishonesty. Yet the GPT Store is filled with GPTs suggesting they can bypass AI content detectors, including detectors sold to educators through plagiarism scanning platforms. The use of generative AI in academic contexts--both education and research--is turning out to be a vast ethical gray area. It seems that some people regard any use of AI for writing under one's own name to be dishonest. Others are willing to allow some AI use, but where they draw the line varies a lot. Is it okay, for example, to have an LLM correct word-level grammatical mistakes, rewrite a paragraph to make the author's point clearer, write a paragraph based on the author's bullet points, write a full first draft that the author then checks and revises by hand, translate phrases or sentences that the author has written in their native language, translate an entire paragraph or paper that the author wrote, etc.? Over the past year, I have conducted several workshops on LLMs for university faculty in Japan, and when I have polled them about the acceptability of each of those use cases, their responses have varied widely. At the institutional level, some universities discourage their students from using AI for writing at all, while others seem to be encouraging it. Just last week, I heard about two public universities in Japan that have contracted with Microsoft to provide Copilot to all of their students starting in April, when the new academic year begins here.
- pylua 3y ago
  What’s more unethical than the bypassers is the so called detectors whose claims are dubious.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  example -- "UC Berkeley Law School AI Policy" https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/u-california-berkeley-law-school-rolls-out-ai-policy-ahead-final-exams-2023-04-20/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/u-california-ber...
smusamashah 3y ago
Shouldn't OpenAI be able to easily remove these non-complying GPTs by putting up their own GPT for moderation with a set of rules? They should already have something in place. And if they have, and these GPTs are still up it can also mean these are OK as per their policy. Ot may be they are deliberately not moderating these because money.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
Reminds me of an early rumor back when Sam Altman was fired (and briefly re-hired) that the old board allegedly was very much against the GPT store. I kind of get why now. It arguably doesn't really aid in the non-profit's mission to pursue AGI, or share the benefits of AI with humanity, or any of that stuff. Doesn't even seem to be much of a worthwhile endeavor from a purely money-making perspective either.
- brevitea 3y ago
  But it does keep users in OpenAI ecosystem vs. the competition.
  - Bjorkbat 3y ago
    Yeah, but does it matter? Most of their revenue comes from enterprise clients and it seems more likely that someone is going to create a killer app for AI by leveraging APIs and publishing their work on traditional distribution channels rather than creating something that only works on a relatively niche platform. Like, hypothetically, if Anthropic took the lead in this effort, I don't think it would derail OpenAI's plans in the slightest.
    - CSMastermind 3y ago
      Users on the platform provide training data that can be used to improve the platform which attracts more users in a classic snowball/flywheel effect.
giarc 3y ago
The Apple App Store (and Google Play Store) have a fairly large barrier to entry. To develop an app, you needed to actually code one. Learning objective C, Swift or Java isn't easy and therefore you had to have some skill to gain entry. With the GPT store, anyone that could type out some instructions could build a GPT and submit it. There was 0 barrier to entry and the flood of spam was a foregone conclusion. They should have either vetted the GPTs, invited select developers, or charged a large developer fee to be included to increase the quality and reduce the spam.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  And you have to pay and there's a review process, and basically anyone who has released apps has had their submission rejected, the reviewers generously deny.
mitjam 3y ago
I use GPTs like bookmarks. If I find an interesting or useful prompt, I bookmark / GPT it, maybe add a tool, later, and sometimes I share it, too. For me, Custom GPT is just a flashy term for bookmark and the GPT Store is just a social bookmark site.

234 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

ActionHank 3y ago

Maybe they should use an AI to automate moderation.

timetraveller26 3y ago
Yes, they should have a GPT that runs other GPT's, an Universal GPT we could call it. They do use some sort of automation according to the article > We use a combination of automated systems, human review and user reports to find and assess GPTs that potentially violate our policies.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Then they can market this universal GPT as an AGI.
bink 3y ago
It is a bit funny that if you apply for a job with many of these companies they ask they you do not use AI for the application.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  As any company should. Not sure what's funny about it - I'm interested in the person. If using AI is one of required capabilities I will ask them to perform a task using it during the interview so I can review their process. In the same way I don't expect to receive an executable binary as a cover letter for a SWE position. I had many candidates submit absolutely terrible cover letters clearly made by ChatGPT. The number one sign - it talks about their experience exactly in the order I listed it on the job post; number two - I don't get to know anything about the person. I asked them to submit a cover letter they wrote themselves, and while not everyone's writing was as good as ChatGPT can write, I got to know the person, and hired few of these who definitely wouldn't make the cut if I went by the AI made letter. If you can have AI generate your letter so well I can't tell, you get a pass. Nobody was able to do that yet, though (or at least didn't admit to it, even though I'm asking after they are hired and saying that at this point it would only help them if they did so).
  - herval 3y ago
    most companies are using AI to filter out CVs these days, and cover letters written with ChatGPT seem to have a higher success ratio. I wouldn't blame anyone for using it, unfortunately.
    - throwaway11460 3y ago
      Maybe in first rounds. I am the third/fourth round interviewer. If a cover letter like that gets to me, it's automatically a no - not because of the fact itself but simply because the cover letters are terrible.
      - crooked-v 3y ago
        In a third round, why are you even looking at cover letters?
        badwolf 3y ago
        Who is even looking at cover letters at all?
        kergonath 3y ago
        I suspect it depends on the field, but in my experience it’s often a good indicator of success. A shoddy letter betrays a lack of professionalism. If you’re not going to spend 10 minutes running a spell checker it means that either it’s not important to you, so good bye, or that your standards are really low and you will keep producing garbage if I hire you, so good bye as well. The problem with cover letters is false positive (people who did not write the letter themselves, or who did it to a much higher standard than their usual). But then, that’s what interviews are for. I did hire a couple of people with either a subpar CV (some good people sometimes end up in dead ends or difficult situations), or cover letter (not everyone is a great writer), or reference (your issues with your former boss are not always your fault), or interview (you can have a bad day), so I would not rely on a single factor. But a combination of 2 dodgy elements is an automatic rejection. Each one tends to surface different aspects.
- exe34 3y ago
  This could be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff - if your AI can be detected through your writing, then you aren't who they're looking for!
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    I've been trying to get Gemini to write things for me. It's either way to formal, passive, and evasive, but if you ask it to be less formal its like "Yo dude, give me a job!". I find it quite hard find a middle ground and write in a style I like.
1oooqooq 3y ago
on that note, will only bother with AI when "open"ai announces an AI ceo.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Then you've set your standards way too high. Loads of places hire interns, no sane person would make an intern CEO. LLMs today are kinda like weird interns at every subject all at once.
  - 1oooqooq 3y ago
    who wants to pay for weird interns? even good ones are free. and might even grow to good hires.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Paid internships are common, and LLMs are so much cheaper than humans they might as well be free. The prices on OpenAI's website are listed per million tokens, the cheaper model can read a typical book for less than the cost of that book in paperback, second hand, during a closing down discount sale, and even the fancy model is still in range of a cheap second-hand paperback (just not during a closing-down sale) for reading and just about the price of a new cheap paperback for writing — cheap enough it might as well be free. Plus, they're an intern at everything all at once. You don't get to hire someone who has a late-degree-level grasp of programming (in every major programming language at the same time) and genetics and law and physics and medicine and who has a business-level grasp of all the most common written languages on Earth — there is no such human. (If and when we can make an AI, be it an LLM or otherwise, which can act at the level of a senior in whichever field it was trained on, even if that training takes a gigawatt-year to compute per field, and even if inference costs 100 kW just to reach human output speed, it's going to seriously mess up the whole world economy; right now it's mainly messing up the economic incentives to hire people fresh from university while boosting the amount of simple stuff that actually gets done because normal people and not just business can now also afford to hire the weird intern). > and might even grow to good hires. Even if they do, will you be the one to hire them? Also, ChatGPT has so far existed for about as long as I spent on my (paid) year in industry that formed part of my degree. It wasn't called an internship, but it basically was. In that time, the models have grown and improved significantly, suggesting (but not proving, because induction doesn't do that) that they will continue to grow and improve.
1oooqooq 3y ago
business idea: put a chatgpt plugin moderator on the store, priced for a single purchase by them.
- mirekrusin 3y ago
  I'm sure there is gpt to plagiarize gpt already that can be used to not use it directly.

Areibman 3y ago

As a (former) ChatGPT plugins developer, our business has absolutely tanked due to GPTs. Discoverability is nonexistent because search is just buried by spam. At least with plugins, there were only a few hundred to sort through, and most had some unique API they would plug into. For context, we built ChatOCR- an OCR tool that lets users extract text from photos and PDFs. We made roughly $20k from 39,000 users over 6 months on the plugins catalog

danpalmer 3y ago
Do end users have to pay you each time or buy access or credits or something, or do you just get a cut of ChatGPT paid subscriptions when a paying user uses your plugin?
- Areibman 3y ago
  We use a third party plugins manager called pluginlab.ai. It manages auth and subscriptions for plugins users by prompting them to sign in when they hit a paywall.
jbverschoor 3y ago
[flagged]
- csallen 3y ago
  Nobody in this thread said they need OpenAI to provide them discoverability.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean: OpenAI's App Store doesn't charge and has discoverability. (hence the viability of the spam, hence TFA) OP is likely affected by the change from plugins to GPTs Now, users have to manually select an app. Whereas before, you'd have a list of, say, 5 apps and the AI would attempt to intelligently determine which app to use. OpenAI said plugins didn't find product-market fit, and that's why they moved on. It's worth opining there's an air of rushing around doing nothing with their product development. Like instead of "what should it be?", and building it, and sustaining it, it's a pastiche of every startup shibboleth you've ever heard - sprints, if 10-20% of the user base / 10^7 users aren't using it within 3-5 months, it's time to Pivot (throw away the working solution we invested in) That makes sense when you're at 100 users in an uncertain market but at their scale, it reminds me more of how Google ended up with the reputation it has. * forgive me for not air-quoting app and app store, these aren't __apps__ per se, but it was immensely distracting, with an air of condescention, when I air-quoted everything

paulpauper 3y ago

it is impossible to divorce AI from spam. the two go hand in hand. the spam situation will get far far worse than ever imagined with AI. The web will be increasingly clogged with AI-generated content (e.g. videos and articles ) that can do a reasonably good job impersonating human-generated content to the undiscriminating reader. Same for AI-produced research papers, plagiarism, etc. AI-generated content can still be identified, but that is not the point. It has to only be good enough to pass muster for the average person or anyone who is not paying close attention.

visarga 3y ago
One area that's getting close to hitting the mainstream is AI agents that control web browsers or desktop apps. Basically, you tell your AI what you want to do, and it does the computer work for you, showing the results the way you like. You won't have to dig through tons of useless apps anymore. It'll search, sort, and create feeds for you. This is what scares advertisers the most - when we start saying, "Just talk to my AI." God knows I'd love an AI that can fill tax forms for me. Operating on top of UI it is compatible with all devices, kind of like an android robot would fit well with all human spaces and tools. There is plenty of screen capture with narration to learn from. You can generate more training data by essentially giving free reign over a VM to an AI agent. Ask it to do office work. We can also collect this kind of data very easily.
- falcor84 3y ago
  I recall imagining something s quite like this as a kid when I first encountered the term "User Agent". I'd be all in on this if I knew I had full control and explainability of its decisions, but am afraid that reality will be a lot more depressing than what I imagine.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  For a very immediate example, I can already see a clear path to somebody coming up with an LLM service that will automatically filter out political spam texts and emails. (Maybe it already exists and I just haven't seen it yet.)

cdme 3y ago

A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.

golergka 3y ago
LLMs are no more a tool to generate spam than text and image editors or programming languages are.
- croes 3y ago
  And a chainsaw is just tool to cut things like a plastic knife.
- nirvdrum 3y ago
  Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Similarly, the worst kind of SEO grifters are now providing services which can mass-generate thousands of longform "articles" on your behalf based on nothing but a handful of keywords, or even scrape a competitors site and bulk generate articles based on their content. SEO spam isn't new but automating it on this level is unprecedented.
    - HughParry 3y ago
      The danger is that we rely almost entirely on Google to solve this. The monopoly they have as a search engine means there is effectively sole responsibility on them to maintain a usable internet. I genuinely feel sorry for the people that now have to figure out how search engines work in a world where anybody can generate reams of passable (albeit not unique) content in minutes.

pants2 3y ago

It was a huge mistake to monetize GPTs. I and many other AI enthusiasts would have probably developed plenty of useful GPTs for free. But now I would never bother because nobody will see my projects under all the SEO spam and fake ratings.

ilaksh 3y ago
When you say it's monetized, are they actually giving anyone any money? The details of that were to "to be announced" but I haven't heard any announcement.
- Implicated 3y ago
  It seems that just the 'threat' of monetizing it would cause an absolute flood of GPTs to be launched, under the assumption that they would eventually get paid.
MattDaEskimo 3y ago
Have to disagree. When OpenAI didn't provide a method of revenue for plugins they were plagued with third-party paywall services
- pants2 3y ago
  Plug-ins are a bit different because someone needed to host a backend for it. Most GPTs are fully hosted by OpenAI.
vasco 3y ago
It's the fastest growth product in number of users in the history of the internet, to think they wouldn't run the Apple store playbook as much as possible is naive.
creesch 3y ago
That and even if they had proper reviews in place, there is no telling when they would pull the plug on the entire thing. Based on that alone I never even considered making a GPT for sale. Having said that, I do like them because of the openAPI integration. I made one for myself that can send things to a private discord channel through webhooks and can calls my memo instance (https://github.com/usememo https://github.com/usememo) to store or retrieve memos.

ado__dev 3y ago

When the barrier to entry is non-existent, this outcome is inevitable.

rvz 3y ago

OpenAI GPTs Store was supposed to be the "iPhone moment" which it changes everything and upends the App Store. ...Or so I was told by the AI bros. So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That is nothing like the quality of the Apple App Store.

duskwuff 3y ago
> So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That, and there isn't a lot of space for real innovation within the "GPT" framework that OpenAI provides. Most of what's available in their store is literally just prepackaged prompts, and there's only so much that can accomplish. You can ask a chatbot to pretend to be an expert in a topic all day, but that won't actually make it into one. If Apple's App Store were just a form you filled out to release versions of Flappy Bird with new graphics or whatever, that'd fail too. Developers need conceptual "space" to innovate; I'm not convinced that's possible when the interface (a chat window) and the back end (a language model) are both set in stone by the platform.
jart 3y ago
It was doomed from the start, because monetizable computing platforms that target consumers can't succeed if they don't have high barriers to entry. Low quality Atari games were responsible for the 1983 video game crash. Anyone could publish an Atari game. So what ended up happening was people made games about things like raping Native American women (Custer's Revenge) and they were sold just like any other Atari cartridge. Nintendo pioneered the closed platform. No one was allowed to build games for Nintendo without Nintendo's permission. Microsoft and Apple did things a bit differently, by making their platforms as difficult to develop for as possible. WIN32 is byzantine. Making iPhone apps when the App Store was launched required learning Objective C, which was an entirely new language to most developers at the time. OpenAI on the other hand created an app store which, in their own words, "is simple and doesn't require any coding skills." https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store
- 3y ago

eightman 3y ago

The use case for AI is spam.

klabb3 3y ago
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  By the same logic, the purpose [0] of “the purpose of a system is what it does” is thought-terminating cliché. [0] in most short comments in online discussions, at least.

jsemrau 3y ago

As I had written about publicly already, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Same with poe.com, GPTs can be generated in just a few clicks by anyone anywhere with no quality control in sight. My guess is that it was always a play about having access to high-quality data.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paxys 3y ago

A spam-filled online marketplace is almost becoming a feature. That way the top developers have to pay and outbid each other to get featured and show up in search results, and that becomes a lucrative revenue source for the platform.

klabb3 3y ago
Bingo. It’s the “platform-corporation” playbook only at 10x the speed. “Tired of drowning in the totally unpreventable noise of spammers? Well, have you tried our Boost product?”

ionwake 3y ago

Can anyone recommend a good chatgpt chatbot from the store? I havent had a poll recently. Any suggestions would be great, thanks.

tkgally 3y ago

> OpenAI’s terms explicitly prohibit developers from building GPTs that promote academic dishonesty. Yet the GPT Store is filled with GPTs suggesting they can bypass AI content detectors, including detectors sold to educators through plagiarism scanning platforms. The use of generative AI in academic contexts--both education and research--is turning out to be a vast ethical gray area. It seems that some people regard any use of AI for writing under one's own name to be dishonest. Others are willing to allow some AI use, but where they draw the line varies a lot. Is it okay, for example, to have an LLM correct word-level grammatical mistakes, rewrite a paragraph to make the author's point clearer, write a paragraph based on the author's bullet points, write a full first draft that the author then checks and revises by hand, translate phrases or sentences that the author has written in their native language, translate an entire paragraph or paper that the author wrote, etc.? Over the past year, I have conducted several workshops on LLMs for university faculty in Japan, and when I have polled them about the acceptability of each of those use cases, their responses have varied widely. At the institutional level, some universities discourage their students from using AI for writing at all, while others seem to be encouraging it. Just last week, I heard about two public universities in Japan that have contracted with Microsoft to provide Copilot to all of their students starting in April, when the new academic year begins here.

pylua 3y ago
What’s more unethical than the bypassers is the so called detectors whose claims are dubious.
mistrial9 3y ago
example -- "UC Berkeley Law School AI Policy" https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/u-california-berkeley-law-school-rolls-out-ai-policy-ahead-final-exams-2023-04-20/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/u-california-ber...

smusamashah 3y ago

Shouldn't OpenAI be able to easily remove these non-complying GPTs by putting up their own GPT for moderation with a set of rules? They should already have something in place. And if they have, and these GPTs are still up it can also mean these are OK as per their policy. Ot may be they are deliberately not moderating these because money.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

Reminds me of an early rumor back when Sam Altman was fired (and briefly re-hired) that the old board allegedly was very much against the GPT store. I kind of get why now. It arguably doesn't really aid in the non-profit's mission to pursue AGI, or share the benefits of AI with humanity, or any of that stuff. Doesn't even seem to be much of a worthwhile endeavor from a purely money-making perspective either.

brevitea 3y ago
But it does keep users in OpenAI ecosystem vs. the competition.
- Bjorkbat 3y ago
  Yeah, but does it matter? Most of their revenue comes from enterprise clients and it seems more likely that someone is going to create a killer app for AI by leveraging APIs and publishing their work on traditional distribution channels rather than creating something that only works on a relatively niche platform. Like, hypothetically, if Anthropic took the lead in this effort, I don't think it would derail OpenAI's plans in the slightest.
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    Users on the platform provide training data that can be used to improve the platform which attracts more users in a classic snowball/flywheel effect.

giarc 3y ago

The Apple App Store (and Google Play Store) have a fairly large barrier to entry. To develop an app, you needed to actually code one. Learning objective C, Swift or Java isn't easy and therefore you had to have some skill to gain entry. With the GPT store, anyone that could type out some instructions could build a GPT and submit it. There was 0 barrier to entry and the flood of spam was a foregone conclusion. They should have either vetted the GPTs, invited select developers, or charged a large developer fee to be included to increase the quality and reduce the spam.

kristopolous 3y ago
And you have to pay and there's a review process, and basically anyone who has released apps has had their submission rejected, the reviewers generously deny.

mitjam 3y ago

I use GPTs like bookmarks. If I find an interesting or useful prompt, I bookmark / GPT it, maybe add a tool, later, and sometimes I share it, too. For me, Custom GPT is just a flashy term for bookmark and the GPT Store is just a social bookmark site.