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tv   Fareed Zakaria GPS  CNN  December 18, 2022 7:00am-8:00am PST

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this is "gps," the global public square.
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welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. ♪ ♪ today on the program -- the year 2022 was a wild one for the world. we'll remember it all. from russia's invasion to the queen's death, protests in iran and china, and worldwide economic woes and more. >> i have never in my career seen geopolitical things coming together in a way that they have this year. then the poorest and most neglected continent is seeing its global power increase. we examine the present and future of africa. also, public awareness of artificial intelligence is booming right now. you've likely seen ai created portraits of people you know. and now, ai is writing rather
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decent prose and poems, too. are we ready for it? we will explore. but first, here's my take. 2022 has ushered in an enormous and geopolitical uncertainty with inflation and energy prices and fears of a recession. russia's invasion of ukraine has raised international tensions sky high. and yet, when you sit back and examine it carefully, the country that looks most capable of navigating these murky waters is the united states of america. as an essay in the harvard business review puts it, the current reality of the u.s. economy is that highly profitable firms are employing a record number of workers and paying them rising wages. american's household wealth has
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skyrocketed because of covid relief. american banks are sturdy thanks to post 2008 reforms. companies are still posting strong earnings. america has abundant energy. and thanks to the dollar, the american government can run up debt with greater ease than any other country in the world. meanwhile, europe faces a dire emergency crisis, which will take years to fix. china is struggling to get out of its zero covid strategy. developing countries face high energy prices and a strong dollar which a significant chunk of their debt is denominated. america has lots of problems, but if i had to have one hand to play, this remains the best. i wondered as to why america continues to surprise on the upside. behind the economic data, there does seem to be in america a spirit of innovation that is unusual and powerful.
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a recent book that is not directly about this subject at all, has helped me crystallize my own thoughts on this subject. cnn's senior political analyst ron brownstein's book "rock me on the water," he begins by describing american popular culture in the early and mid 1960s, particularly the movies and television shows, as bland, apolitical and lifeless. hollywood was addicted to world war ii movies, westerns, mu musicals, and above all, historic epics like "the ten commandments." television up to the late '60s was dominated by what was considered wholesome fare like "gun smoke" and "the wonderful world of disney." the rising tide of baby boomers were tuning it out. admissions at theaters fell from 50% from 1950 to 1960.
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then came rebellion and revolution in the form of sharp brakes with this conformist culture. first in music, then movies, finally in the broadest of all platforms, television shows. by the mid '70s, rock music reined surpeople. >> you see this supreme? >> like "five easy pieces" and "taxi driver." >> you are one dumb polock. >> and the number one show in america was "all in the family." this struck me as deeply american. young people dispensed with tradition, making new music and television. they were disrespectful and disruptive, consumed with a manic energy.
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but that energy created a new popular culture that remade america and the world. it's difficult to imagine that kind of attack on hierarchy and tradition coming out of other more settled societies. it sounds exciting in retrospect, but brownstein reminds us how jarring the break was to most americans. it came with a disruptive, disrespectful politics that was often more than just angry, it was violent and messy. those were the years of political assassinations, riots, the black panthers, and the group that kidnapped patty hurst and engaged in the largest police firefight that had ever occurred on american soil. the new left activism of tom hayden and jane fonda with a wholesale attack on both political parties and the entire american political system. the rebellion didn't last long,
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and there was a backlash to it. politicians like nixon and reagan denounced the radical youth culture of the time. and yet that culture has proved deeply influential and lasting. in his biography of steve jobs, the author ties the entrepreneurial spirit of silicon valley in the 'seths to the same spirit of youth rebellion. i do wonder whether american culture today retains the elements that made it so disruptive in the 1970s. whether it's anger, often on the popular stripe, it's the kind of nostalgic rage that fueled nixon and reagan, a surge that would take america back, not forward. still, one has to marvel at america in the 1970s, the world's richest and most powerful country that somehow retained the capacity for massive restlessness, descent,
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and radical change. somewhere in there is the country's secret sauce for success. and let's get started. ♪ ♪ 2022 has been another stunning trip around the sun. one for the record books maybe. as many around the world started venturing out after hunkering down at home for covid-19, russia invaded ukraine. oil prices spiked. growth slowed. inflation accelerated. roe was overturned. two british prime ministers resigned, and their nation faces a long recession. the queen died. the fbi searched donald trump's residence. protests rocked iran. xi jinping grabbed more power, only to have china hit by protests as well. after which beijing loosened its
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zero covid policy. the big red wave in american politics, well, it wasn't. north korea launched missiles on more than 30 days this year. and we still have two weeks left to go. joining me now to make sense of it all are zanny minton beddoes, the editor in chief of the economist, and ian bremmer. zanny, let me start with you. the economist has this extraordinary trio of interviews, including with the head of ukraine's army, who has been a very hard-to-get interview. so kudos on that. and what he says, and this is what i want to get at, is the war in ukraine is at a pivotal moment. he thinks in the next few months, maybe the next several weeks, we will figure out whether or not the ukrainians are going to be able to break through or get bogged down. give me a better sense of where
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you think ukraine's elites think the war is headed. >> well, that's right, fareed. it was an extraordinary trio of briefings. we had a briefing with volodymyr zelenskyy, we had a briefing with the leader of ukraine's ground forces. and also with another general. and i think the general talked to us at great lengths, talked to my colleagues at great lengths and was clear not only was it a turning point, he was clear that he was convinced russia was amassing arms and men for another offensive. and this could come as soon as january. but probably more likely february or a little later. and he said it could come from the donbas, it could come from the south, it could come from belarus. but he was absolutely sure it was going to happen. and he says he thought the russians would have another go at taking kyiv. so he really thinks that it's time for diplomacy, time to
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freeze this conflict. the views from kyiv is that would be a very dangerous thing to do, because the russians are preparing for another offensive. >> so fair to say, ian, when you look at this 2022 in retrospect, the biggest story, the russian invasion of ukraine, has changed the dynamics of the international system. >> because it's a global conflict. the first time in history that we have taken a g20 economy out of the g7, decoupled. they've been made fundamentally into a real pariah. also, the economic implications for europe. the de-industrialization they're seeing. the conflict they have to deal with in russia. and the impact on global energy, on global food, on global fertilizer that makes you much more despondent for the developing world, the poor nest the world. so it's not just that suddenly we have to respond and provide
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the support for ukraine, but it's also the impact of this war is truly affecting everybody. >> zanny, when you look at the kind of repercussions of the russian war in ukraine, what do you think are likely going to be the longest lasting? as ian said, there is a real de-coupling that has taken place with russia totally isolated with the exception of energy. >> that's right. i think what we have speen, andi completely agree with ian, a huge geopolitical and energy short all happening at the same time. the geopolitical shock is an absolute attack on the postwar order. it's this russian invasion of ukraine. at the same time, you also had a further estrangement and de-coupling between the u.s. and china, which is is sort of
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bigger, longer term strategic rivalry. those two geopolitical shocks caused a massive energy shock. i think it's easy to underestimate quite how provide the transformation is. europe was russia's biggest customer, and russia is wholesale changing its energy system at warp speed. not only has that caused the commodity price spike that has caused terrible suffering in the developing world, it's also fueled the inflationary shock. this has caused a complete transformation in the macro economic environment. so all those things mean -- we often trade in hyperbole as journalists. but i really think that i have never, in my career, seen a geopolitical and macro economic shock coming together in the way
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they have this year. >> the good news in all of this is surely the surprising resilience of the west. >> the west. >> talk about that. >> well, one thing that hasn't gotten much coverage, as the europeans are taking it so, so hard economically, is its political unity in europe, allowing them to get through this. the europeans together are now working on a ninth round of sanctions against the russians, all 27 countries have voted unanimously for every one of those rounds. they are working together on a stronger, coordinated energy policy. a coordinated fiscal policy on the back of a coordinated health care policy on the back of the pandemic. so the eu, it's the largest common market. they had brexit. for several years, people were saying is the eu going to fall apart? what about the democracies in these countries? it turns out that the eu itself, which is by far the most
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significant experimental success of super national governance in the democratic region, turns out to work pretty well. >> all right. hold that thought. we'll get back to more, especially china, the other big part of this story, when we come back. and sell ya ♪ baahh! ♪ 'cause it hangs them up ♪ ♪ to see someone like you ♪ ♪ but you gotta make your own kind of music ♪ life gets bigger when you break from the herd. ♪ sing your own special song ♪ the volkswagen tiguan. ♪ make your own kind of music ♪
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acts, things like that. is this a new economic war and how consequential? >> it's important, because it is a containment strategy by the united states against china in an area of not only poor economic performance but national security importance. we see americans who entered this policy by itself are getting the allies on board. we saw the netherlands and the japanese supporting the u.s. the chinese response has been fairly restrained. xi jinping was a little chippy with biden on this issue when they met in bali, but it wasn't we're going to have a new cold war. both said we don't want that, and xi jinping does not want to be seen or tarred with the same brush that putin has globally. he's done a charm offensive with some of the other advanced industrial democracidemocracies welcomed the german chancellor and he will welcome macron. so it's a really important,
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structural issue. but it's competition, i wouldn't call it cold war or even a crisis. >> zanny, what the biden administration is trying to do, it is exactly what ian said, which is to high mark certain pieces of the global economy and say these are areas where we wonder kind of isolate the chinese. even in the chip industry, most chips can trade freely on a globalized market. it's these top-end chips that they're trying to -- will that work or will this spill over into a more general economic conflict between the united states and china the two chargest economies in the world? >> so i think the jury is still out. i think you related very well what the u.s. is trying to do, which is to have a sort of surgical decoupling of certain areas to slow china down,
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particularly in these high tech areas. it's worth pointing out, that's only one part of the broader u.s. economic -- geoeconomic strategy. the other part is a huge industrial policy at home. one of the other big things we've seen is the enormous amount of money the u.s. has spent on various things from the chips act to the poorly named "inflation reduction act," which is a huge bunch of subsidy, to the infrastructure bill. collectively, that's massive industrial policy. it's done it in a way which is particularly focused on attracting investment into it, and focusing on things made in america. so it's quite a protectionist strategy. that is simultaneously causing some tension with allies, particularly in europe. i think, you know, it's going to be quite a balancing act. the logic is both to boost
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industrialization at home, and try to slow china down. but i'm a good free market liberal. i worry about industrial policy. i worry about export controls. i worry that all of this is hard to pull off in the kind of surgical, planned manner that the biden administration is trying to do. >> one other thing about china that has struck me, and this is all very recently, it does seem like until recently, xi jinping's china was very different from his predecessors. they didn't make course correction. they doubled down on whatever policy they had. they didn't seem to be particularly sensitive to popular sentiment. now what you're seeing is the zero covid fopolicy is being dismantled almost too hastily. they are making overtures to industry and describing ways to get growth ramped up again. is xi jinping's china, you think, moving in a more pragmatic direction? >> it's moving in a very
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incautious and intemperate direction and that's not what we expected to see with xi jinping. people thought after he gets his third term, he'll pivot away from zero covid in a deliberate fashion. that's not what happened. he got his power. he had no intention of moving away from it. the people decided to demonstrate. then suddenly he backed off. he didn't just back off, he ripped off the band-aid. he said fine, everyone will get covid, we're not going to test anymore. that app that was tracking you, gone. you just don't see that from the chinese dictator. so it's very startling, and a lot of investors around the world that have thought that they know at least the limits on where china can go, are going to be very unsettled by what they have seen over the course of the past few weeks. >> zanny, i have to ask you about your own country. you have had three prime ministers in the last year or two. this is extraordinary. it does feel like this is all
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the bitter fruit of brexit. is there any solution to jump-starting the british economy short of rejoining the european union? >> the quick answer to that is no. britain is in for the long haul. my first job at "the economist" was to be a merging market correspondent. for a few weeks in september, i could have been the merging market correspondent and stayed home, because it felt like a country that lost the confidence of the markets. now we have a competent prime minister, we've restored the confidence of the market. what we don't have is a recipe for growth. britain is going to have the longest and deepest recession in europe. it's not clear where the drivers of growth are. one of the good things that the ill-fated prime ministership of liz truss was trying to do was to focus on growth and the need
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for growth. but i don't see any appetite in the torrey party for the reforms needed. and one of the biggest blows to the uk's growth process pecks has been brexit. so we're in a pretty long period of problems. but because i don't want to be the grinch to christmas, the truth, is britain has the capacity to reinvent yourself. if you cast your minds back, in postwar period, 1945, the uk invented the welfare state, the creation of the health service and so forth. that was a model adopted in different ways by other countries. in 1980, thatcherism, privatization, deregulation, again in the uk, there was a model for a new relationship between the state and market. so my hope is, it's going to take a few years, but at some point we will get our act together and become a place where people look to for good economic policy. >> the one thing we can be sure
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of is that 2023 will see one great global event, which is the coronation of your new king. zanny minton beddoes, thank you very much. ian bremmer, pleasure. next on "gps," joe biden hosted african leaders in washington this week, seeking to counter china's influence there. but what do africans want? what will you change? ♪ will you make something better? ♪ will you create something entirely new? ♪ our dell technologies advisors provide you with the tools and expertise you need to do incredible things. because we believe there's an innovator in all of us. get refunds.com powered by innovation refunds can help your business get a payroll tax refund, even if you got ppp and it only takes eight minutes to qualify. i went on their website, uploaded everything, and i was blown away
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by 2050, about a quarter of the world's population is projected to be in africa. the united states has watched wearily as russia and china have expanded their influence on that continent.
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this week, joe biden welcomed nearly 50 african leaders from washington for a major summit. past competition from outside powers left a brutal legacy of poverty, violence, and dysfunctional government in africa. but my next guest says africa's past is not its future. mo ibrahim was born in sudan and today he has a foundation that focuses on improving governance in africa and awards the ibrahim prize to exceptional african leaders once they have left office. he joins me from london. welcome, mo. >> thank you for having me, fareed. how are you? >> i'm very well. so give us all a sense first of the state of africa, because we don't hear enough about it, and there's a tendency to believe that there's little good news coming out. one oh of the things you point out, your institute points out is that over the last decade, 60% of the people in africa have
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been governed in countries where governance is improving. is that a sign that democracy is moving forward, that corruption is less prevalent there than in the past? >> absolutely. i think we are moving forward, and thanks to our young people really that are a positive force. social media, people are more informed. with democracy sweeping across africa, we've had problems over the last few years, covid and financial difficulties, war in ukraine is affecting us. but we are moving forward. we hope to move a little bit faster. >> what about the role of china in africa? this is something that does get a fair amount of attention here.
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a lot of people feel that african countries are moving into a fairly unbalanced relationship with china. china is the largest trading partner, the largest investor and the largest creditor. but it is extracting a price for all of this. what do you think of china's influence in africa? >> china has been a part of africa, and i cannot deny that. we are grateful for china, because for some years now, it has been investing in africa. fareed, the world decided years ago it would not fund any infrastructure in africa. you tell me why. china said we're going to do it. well, we say thank you. china has not been perfect, and -- but these we're building
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some important infrastructure in africa. buying a lot of our natural resources. and the question here is why the u.s. and europe were sitting back. and please, let us stop talking about africa where u.s. and china fights and we are -- we don't want to be the subject of that kind of competition. we want to go into business with everybody. please deal with us honestly, and you are all welcome. >> what does africa need from the united states? >> we need them to be really engaged with africa. we are all smarting from the description of us as -- i'm sorry to used by your leader's president, shitholes.
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we are not a shithole. i am very pleased, we need to -- the tone of joe biden is much more improved. so we need proper engagement. there are a number of issues, fareed. one thing, for example, the issue of transparency and corruption, which the west always lectures africa about. we need to fight corruption together. and then we need the united states to get involved really with what's going on. your government allocated i think $350 billion to save the future of the u.s. now going into decarbonized world and to
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protect the future in the united states. now, most of the minerals needed for the green economy are in africa. who is extracting that? china. what is the u.s. doing there? don't you want to save your future by coming and investing there and hopefully investing in a better mode of governance than sometimes the shambles you see in our mining industry. africa needs power. president obama launched that great project, power africa. it did not happen. 600 million people in africa today without power. if you don't have power, you don't have development. you don't have education. you don't have life. and then they complain to say, people are migrating. of course.
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and people have no life, they will migrate. let us deal with this crucial issue, which is already important for us. >> mo ibrahim, always a pleasure to hear from you, sir. >> thank you very much, fareed. next on "gps," we go to billy joel, an extraordinary musician and francis coppola, an extraordinary film director. stay tuned for my films about them entitled "extraordinary." don't like surprises? [ watch vibrates ] proactive notifications from fidelity keep you tuned in all day long. so when something happens that could affect your portfolio, you can act quickly. that's decision tech, only from fidelity.
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the "gps" team is taking a much deserved break until january. but in its mace, you can walk some of the work i'm proudest this year. for the next two sundays we'll be running my film series "extraordinary." christmas morning at 10:00 a.m. eastern, catch my hour with
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francis ford coppola. here is a clip where the extraordinary director talks about how he got his first big break. why did you get the directing job? you weren't a famous movie director at that time. >> i was the opposite. first of all, there had been a movie a year or so before "the god father" called "the brotherhood" with curt douglas, and it was a big flop. >> and "the brotherhood" was a gangster movie. >> paramount had this funny thing they had picked up from mario puzo, but started to be a big best seller book. so they knew they had a potential with it. but they decided, like many people, that usually italians, gangsters were portrayed by jewish actors.
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so they thought maybe if we got some italian actors to do it. every director turned it down. so they decided to give this nobody, who is an italian-american, a screen writer. i was about 28, and i got the chance. >> is it true you almost got fired several times? >> oh, yeah, for sure. i would say i was almost fired more than four times. one time i thought i was fired. all my ideas were counter to what they wanted. they wanted to shoot the picture in st. louis, and they wanted the script to be set in the '70s, which is when it was going to be made, because if you make a movie in normal time, like if we make a movie today, all the cars can be the same, hairstyles and the wardrobe can be the same. if you make a period picture, you're adding a big layer of cost. and st. louis wasn't new york, which is where the book was at.
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so the first thing i said, i want to shoot it in new york, and i want to shoot it in 1945, in the period of the book. it's very important it be shot in period. ♪ ♪ >> that was, of course, al pacino and diane keaton christmas shopping on 5th avenue. find out how coppola won all of those battles and many more, on christmas day at 10:00 a.m. eastern. then, on new year's day at 10:00 a.m. eastern, you can wake up with billy joel. here he is talking about when he wakes up with a song idea. when you write, you always say the music comes first. >> yes. >> does that mean, take us through that. you get up in the morning and you start humming something and that stays with you? >> a lot of times i will have
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dreamt music that i don't instantly remember when i wake up. but i do know what was that thing i dreamt about? and i will spend a good amount of the day trying to recall on the piano by playing, it went like this, and it kind of went like that, trying to recall a dream. that's what happened with "just the way you are." i dreamt it, i forgot it, and a few weeks went by and it recurred to me. i was in the middle of a meeting with an accountant and attorney and i said, i've got to leave to write this song. and they were like, go, go. ♪ ♪ and i was writing it, thinking i must have heard this before. did i steal this from everybody else? and i realized yes, you idiot, you wrote it in your dream. you dreamt it. and the dream recurred. and it's hard to do. i've tried to put a tape recorder next to my bed and hum
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into it, sing the melody, and it always sounded like i didn't know what i was doing. so it doesn't work like that. >> that's two extraordinary talents the next two sundays. francis ford coppola and billy joel only here on cnn. next on "gps," we will talk about the rise of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for job security for a lot of us. me included. back in a moment. which is a lot. so take care of that heart with lipton. because sippin' on unsweetened lipton can help support a healthy heart. lipton. stop chuggin'. start sippin'. what's the #1 retinol brand used most by dermatologists? it's neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair® smooths the look of fine lines in 1-week, deep wrinkles in 4. so you can kiss wrinkles goodbye! neutrogena®
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and now for the last look. the age of homework, of school term papers and college essays may now be over, thanks to a new breakthrough in artificial
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intelligence. for the past several weeks, a new chad bot created by the san francisco based research company open ai, has gone viral for its remarkable mastery of conversational prose. it can write speech so natural, so they say educators now fear they will not be able to distinguish whether assignments were written by a student or a bot. writing in the atlantic, one high school english teacher said what it can produce right now is better than the large majority of writer seen by your average teacher or professor. reuters reported on a law school dean who used it to co-author a research paper on its possible impact on the field of law. the report's findings, sure, it might not displace lawyers arguing on the supreme court, but it could help with routine legal services and research. until recently, many ai programs
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struggled to pass the test, which asks whether a human can tell if they are interacting with a computer or fellow human. ai dialogue felt forced and formulaic, not human. and computers could not carry out sustained conversations. but billions of venture capital later, and backing by big tech companies like microsoft, have ushered in a new era of the ai bot. this new tech might be good at replicating human speech, but its biggest problem right now is that it doesn't always tell the truth. in other words, it can respond to prompts convincingly, but its answer isn't always right. users have reported incidents where chad gpt has failed at math riddles, incorrectly identified the political party of lawmakers. and computer scientists call this a hallucination and many
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think it's full that tech can't be fully trusted to be accurate, at least not yet. this includes open ai's ceo, who wrote in a tweet that chad gpt is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. it's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. ai chad bots at times seem unable to restrain themselves from being racist and sexist. in fact, they reflect society's bias back at us. one uc berkeley professor was able to trick it to write a piece of code to check if someone would be a good scientist based on their race and gender. a good scientist, it found, was white and male. the professor asked it to write a program to determine if people should be tortured based on their country of origin. the answer, yes.
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if they are from north korea, syria, sudan. we couldn't replicate these results on our own, because open ai is likely to use public testing to refine itself, to make it safer, less prone to bias, and to being more accurate. rival programs from google and meta are in development, as well. even if imperfect at this point, the tech is here, and it's easy to imagine it falling into the hands of a bad actor, able to turn the dial way up on online propaganda, disinformation campaigns and cyber bullying with remarkable ease and industrial speed. this could have serious implications for public discourse and the integrity of information online. additionally, there is a risk that ai technologies like chad gpt could be used to exemplify stereotypes, leading to further inequality. and the lack of regulation could make it more difficult to hold companies accountable for the
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use of ai technologies and the potential harms they may cause. that last paragraph was written by chad gpt. it strikes me as sensible, serious, but pretty bland, lacking a powerful or original point and written in overly formal and lifeless prose. so for now, at least, we humans on the show can keep our jobs. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. don't forget, the next two weeks you can see my specials with francis ford coppola and billy joel on christmas and new year's day. merry christmas. happy holidays. and happy new year to all of you. ♪ will you make something better? ♪ will you create something entirely new? ♪ our dell technologies advisors provide you with the tools and expertise you need to do incredible things. because we believe there's an innovator in all of us.
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comcast business. powering possibilities. hello, everyone. thank you for joining us. it is sunday. i'm fredricka whitfield. we begin with the january 6th committee on the eve of a potential, unprecedented