Focus of some modern ethical debates / FRI 10-13-23 / Rock subgenre named for its aggressive vocals / Runner with vestigial wings / Commercial follower of Mc- or Nes- / Where the Tokugawa shogunate was established / Hit 2011 film based on a 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett / Foe of Ferocious Flea in Hanna-Barbera cartoons / World capital where it's illegal to display the Soviet hammer and sickle

Constructor: John-Clark Levin

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CHATGPT (34A: Focus of some modern ethical debates) —

ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, which enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.

ChatGPT is built upon either GPT-3.5 or GPT-4—members of OpenAI's proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, based on the transformer architecture developed by Google—and is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but due to its popularity, OpenAI now operates the service on a freemium model. It allows users on its free tier to access the GPT-3.5-based version. In contrast, the more advanced GPT-4 based version and priority access to newer features are provided to paid subscribers under the commercial name "ChatGPT Plus".

By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to OpenAI's valuation growing to $29 billion. Within months, Google, Baidu, and Meta accelerated the development of their competing products: Bard, Ernie Bot, and LLaMA. Microsoft launched its Bing Chat based on OpenAI's GPT-4. It raised concern among some observers over the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace or atrophy human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

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One look at the grid and I got kinda depressed. Super boxy, with chunky corners accessible only by one-letter-wide entryways, and only a half dozen or so longish answers. Basically screams No Fun. Weird black-square configurations—or, rather, highly unweird black-square configurations, in that the black squares appear exclusively in three-square blocks, so that the grid looks like a Tetris game that only has one type of piece to throw at you. And then the opening clue (once I finally figured it out) ended up being so sad and useless and off-the-mark that ... well, it fit my feelings about the grid: No Fun. MATCHES are getting lit at a party??? (1A: Ones getting lit at a party, maybe). What are you talking about? Candles get lit at parties. Joints get lit at parties. Tiki torches get lit at parties. MATCHES are a means for lighting things. Who goes to a party and thinks, "Things are getting a little dull, let's light MATCHES!"? Pyromaniacs? Save your cutesy, half-naughty "getting lit"* pun for something that *stays burning* and more importantly, don't use "party" if, after solving, I still have no idea what kind of "party" you have in mind. It's really the "party" part here that's irking me. The connection between MATCHES and "party" is beyond tenuous. Yes, I can imagine MATCHES at a party, but I gotta develop a whole plotline in order to make it make sense. Come on. 

This grid doesn't have nearly enough marquee answers, and most of what it has is pretty VANILLA—VANILLA being actually one of the more exciting answers in this grid. Sincerely, I think "HERE I GO!" was the only answer that seemed vibrant and made me think "good one." Further, the grid is loaded with unpleasantness. White-savior narratives like THE HELP (I'd rather read American Psycho), or toilets (PORT-A-POTTIES), or CHATGPT, which is kinda like a reverse toilet, in that it gives you shit rather than disposes of it. If you work in education, you know how terrible CHATGPT has been for, well, everything. Plagiarism is not the problem (or only part of it). That bot spews out paragraph-shaped paragraphs, essay-shaped essays, poem-shaped poems, things that have the external appearance of writing, but that are clearly not writing, in that there is no plausible human voice there—no curiosity, no imagination, no rough edges, just a kind of bland uncanny-valley voice cobbled together from the millions of actual human voices from which it's stealing. Truly like the alien that is trying to learn to be human. We have been trained to accept this voice as normal by every ATM or customer service phone robot we've interacted with going back decades. CHATGPT returns results that are often shockingly devoid of content, but they look the part, they sound like they're saying something, and students aren't yet good enough writers to know how to shape anything CHATGPT gives them into useful form, into their own voice, so the results (where student papers are concerned) are usually vapidity, but worse than normal human vapidity. Machine-made vapidity. And if you're using it for "research," it's worse. I would say "go see for yourself," but the Catch-22 here, of course, is that every interaction you have with it merely trains it to be more fraudulent. People think it's "fun" to make the chatbot write recipes in the style of Dr. Seuss or whatever, but every inch of generative A.I. is killing human communication, and thus human community. The Luddites look smarter and more prescient every day.

Had no idea about the NW at first so had to start in the NE with SARA Gilbert (10D: Emmy-nominated Gilbert) and SCREAMO (18A: Rock subgenre named for its aggressive vocals) as my first foothold in the grid (I got TEN and ELLIS in the NW, but they were no help). I kinda like SCREAMO sitting atop VOICE TEACHER. Are there SCREAMO VOICE TEACHERs? Seems pretty niche, but also pretty cool. I think a polka dot-painted house would be pretty rad, so the EYESORE clue doesn't track for me at all (41A: House painted with polka dots, you might say). Also not tracking: HELOS (5D: Choppers). HE-LOL, what? You mean 'copters, maybe? This is a Shortz-era debut, probably because no one says it. It got used once in 1970, and otherwise has never appeared in any grid since Margaret Farrar was putting them together. No singular HELO in the Shortz era either (five in the pre-Shortz). I can only hear HELOS in this very cinematically-specific voice (Walter Brennan at his most Walter Brennany):

I think I'm done now. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*to "get lit" is to get wasted / drunk / intoxicated in one form or another, which definitely happens at parties. Whether there are MATCHES at these parties, who can say?

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