Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

There is a state of emergency presidential address. In Video A, the politician says X Y Z. In Video B, the politician says A B C. Both videos have equal credibility. The videos show no artifacts from tampering. The alteration is undetectable by experts. The broadcast has dire consequences in a divided country.

50% of channels are pushing Video A, 50% of channels are pushing Video B.

We are now in a position where the public actually cannot determine which video is authentic. The politician could broadcast a new statement, to clarify the validity of the first video. But, you could just as easily fake that too, to publish a statement that declares the opposite.

So, then you load up Hacker News or wherever, to determine for yourself what the hell is going on. But someone spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video A, and someone else spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video B. These comments are all in natural language, all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. It's impossible to determine if the comment is a bot. And because the cost is essentially free, these bots can be primed for years, making mundane comments on trivial topics to build social credibility. Actual humans only account for maybe 1% of this discourse.

Now imagine: our entire world operates like this, on a daily basis, ranging from the mundane to the dramatic. How about broadcasting a deepfake press statement from a CEO to make a shorted meme stock crash. If there are financial/political incentives to do so, and the technological hurdle is insignificant, these tools will be weaponized.

So how do we "not believe the media", do we all have to be standing in the same room together where something notable happens?

I understand that there could be upsides, the world isn't all doom and gloom. But, I think engineers get myopic, and do not heed the warnings.

IMO AI has reached this stage of its lifecycle. There have always been, and still are, valid use cases for AI, but I think the GPT-3 inspired applications we've been seeing as of late are no more than impressive tech demos. It's the first time the general public has seen a glimmer of where AI can go, but it really is just a glimmer at this point.

My advice is to keep your head down and try to be selective with the content you engage with on AI. It seems like every feed refresh I have some unknown Twitter Verified account telling me why swaths of the population will be out of a job soon. The best heuristic I have so far is to ignore AI-related posts/reshares from names I haven't heard of before, but of course that has obvious drawbacks.

On your claim that the mind is metaphysical OR it is a NN, you have to understand that this extremely false dichotomy is quite the stretch itself, as if there are no other possibilities, that it isn't even a range or it could be something else entirely. One of the critiques people have of NN from the "old guard" is the lack of symbolic intelligence. Claiming you don't need it and fitting is merely enough is suspect because even with OpenAI tier training, just the grammar is there, some of the semantic understanding is lacking. Appealing to the god of the gaps is a fallacy for a reason, although it may in fact turn out to be true, potentially that just more training might be all that is needed. EDIT: Anyway, the point is assuming symbolic reasoning is a part of intelligence (hell, it's how we discuss things) doesn't require mysticism, it just is an aspect that NNs currently don't have, or very charitably do not appear to have quite yet.

Regardless, there isn't really evidence that "what brains do is what NNs do" or vice versa. The argument as many times as it has been pushed has been primarily driven by analogy. But just because a painting looks like an apple doesn't mean you can eat the canvas. Similarities might betray some underlying relationship (an artist who made the painting took reference from an actual apple you can eat), but assuming an equivalence without evidence just strange behavior, and I'm not sure for what purpose.