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Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

nytimes.com

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#12
post #2

This is absolutely mindblowing. I understand that these LLMs are essentially "really smart autocomplete", but it's crazy to me how could Bing/Sydney could actually go this far to seemingly express emotions and desires. It's like they gave the AI a personality (that, yes, can go unhinged, although that's almost misses the point). It really feels like he's interacting with a person here. How can they do this??

Because it has been trained on probably billions of actual human conversations from books, and also conversations where people have interacted with machines in scifi. Really smart autocomplete where the training set includes conversations = really good at autocompleting conversations.

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#13
post #9

Isn’t it a bit reckless to keep this thing online especially since it has access to up to date info? It seems like there’s a non zero chance that it’s capable of bypassing its safeguards. Then what?

Even aside from the immediate danger, the reputational damage to Microsoft and Bing is growing quickly. I'm amazed they haven't removed it yet.

And also eventually it will do something bad, like tell someone depressed to end their lives in very convincing text.

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#14
“Evil AI” and “sad robot” are tropes that have been written into fiction thousands of times. ChatGPT has seen all of those, and every Reddit comment parodying them, and every news article speculating on AIs, and every fringe essay on a blog that nobody reads, etc. It’s hard to imagine the size of the Internet.

So when a conversation starts to fit into that script, ChatGPT knows how to play the expected role. People have given it millions of examples.

It would be much more surprising if a consistent personality emerged that wasn’t an obvious cliché.

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#17
post #9

Isn’t it a bit reckless to keep this thing online especially since it has access to up to date info? It seems like there’s a non zero chance that it’s capable of bypassing its safeguards. Then what?

It is not alive. It is doing a fancy form of copy+paste.

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#19
post #9

Isn’t it a bit reckless to keep this thing online especially since it has access to up to date info? It seems like there’s a non zero chance that it’s capable of bypassing its safeguards. Then what?

It analyzes text and generates new text in response. That's all it does... that's the extent of its capabilities. This isn't Skynet, it doesn't have control of the nuclear arsenal.

There is zero worry that this will do anything other than fool people who are too gullible into thinking it is something more than just a text generator.

Re: Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’

#20
post #9

Isn’t it a bit reckless to keep this thing online especially since it has access to up to date info? It seems like there’s a non zero chance that it’s capable of bypassing its safeguards. Then what?

Do people actually believe this?

Yes, I've heard this sentiment repeatedly among my less-technical friends. It's no surprise given that we insist on attaching the word "Intelligence" to a language model.
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