Greg Brockman, TED and PR

Brockman ends the talk with the most telling of comments. "And if there's one thing to take away from this talk is that this technology just looks different. Just different from anything people had anticipated. And so we all have to become literate. (My emphasis) And that's, honestly, one of the reasons we released ChatGPT. Together. I believe we can achieve the OpenAI mission of ensuring that Artificial General Intelligence benefits all of humanity". Cue standing ovation.

The talk itself was about the wonders and not so wonderous failures of ChatGPT (hence the call for human Guinea Pigs, beta testers, consumers, and importantly advocates) which is obviously far from an AGI in its current state. The wonderous thing was the rhetorical strategy of pathos employed, a call to humans affection for their animal pets, in 'how GPT4 helped save my dogs life'.

Pathos is a rhetorical strategy that aims to persuade an audience by evoking emotions such as pity, fear, or joy. Brookman steered well clear of one of these emotions. The other two 'pillars of public speaking, ethos (appeal to credibility) and logos (appeal to logic) were implied by his status and TED, as much as anything said in the content.

The purpose of using emotional appeal in PR is to sway the audience's emotions and make them feel a certain way about a product, service, or idea. Emotional appeals are directed towards the audience's emotions and use manipulation of the recipient's emotions rather than valid logic to win an argument. The argument, of course was only revealed at the end, that users should help OpenAI (profit and) ensure AGI.

I'm not buying it.

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