I feel like Eddy Burback's ChatGPT video is a missed opportunity. It shows some of the scary stuff for the uninitiated, so it's a good documentary in that sense, but as commentary it falls short.
It's just a "I tried messing with ChatGPT for X weeks" video, with little actual commentary, and its idea of "doing it so less people use ChatGPT" seems truly ill-informed to me. If the video does well, other YouTubers will copy the idea. The video only showcased one extreme, specific way ChatGPT can be harmful, and does very little to convince a casual user that they're causing harm or at risk if they use it.
My mom uses it "because she needs it for synonyms" (an unpaid job that it stole from me) because my brother installed it on her phone, and she refuses to listen to my complaints, from me, her daughter, the writer, the artist, the person with the most knowledge on the topic, because she's uncomfortable siding against her favourite son. My hairdresser, my go-to reference if I want to know what the common idiot thinks about a topic [note: I am dissing him for free because of worse things he's said to me], uses it as a short-cut for a search engine even though he's not in love with it, because he's convinced it's going to be an active part of our future whether we want it or not, so you might as well learn to use it intelligently, as a safety measure in fact.
These people, should they watch Eddy's video, will think "damn that's fucked up" and continue to use ChatGPT, not any more convinced about the claims of pollution than they were the last time someone mentioned it, but certain that the way they use it is surface-level and normal.
Eddy also missed an opportunity to dig further into the differences between ChatGPT 4 and ChatGPT 5, as someone who happened to be using it right when the update occurred. There were some hints of it, but he would have been in the perfect position to comment on how differently they behaved (although his pandora's box analogy at the end is appreciated) - and perhaps say a word or two about the fact that the most vulnerable people who have publicly expressed disarray at the loss of the 4 model can pay to have it back?
I wish there had been more commentary and less musical transitions.
