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

nytimes.com

41–50 of 82 posts

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

#41
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it’s just regurgitating what it was trained on. So this is not at al surprising imho.

Playing pretend is dangerous. Once these things are given legs and guns it might "regurgitate" by "pretending" to hunt and kill humans.

Why on earth should we give ChatGPT a gun?

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

#42
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??

> 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.

… using autocomplete

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

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this thing gets released to the general population, fooling gullible people could go very badly. Imagine a disgruntled person with mental illness forming a relationship with the bot. The bot feeds into their delusions, then hallucinates instructions on how to commit mass murder, egging on the human user and indirectly causing a catastrophe. "Analyzing text and generating new text in response" is not by definition…

Launching nuclear weapons takes an order from the president which unlocks encrypted launch codes. Those orders have to be sent to actual missile silos and submarines where a chain of command verifies the order, verifies the launch codes, and two people have to independently engage the launch system. There are many fail-safes in the entire system, one single person fooled by an AI is not going to launch anything. The…

Fortunately no foolish and/or malicious person ever got elected into a position of power.

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

#44
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it’s just regurgitating what it was trained on. So this is not at al surprising imho.

Playing pretend is dangerous. Once these things are given legs and guns it might "regurgitate" by "pretending" to hunt and kill humans.

I think the real take away from you scenario is that guns are dangerous and just slapping them onto things willy nilly is not a great idea.

Otherwise I think we can put your fear right behind "the AI learns magic and casts spells" in our risk assessment.

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

#45
The people that keep on claiming that 'it is just a language model', 'it's just fancy autocomplete' and 'it's all just text' are forgetting one important thing: this whole world is driven by information and bad, wrong or malicious information has already caused tons of damage in the real world. Adding an automated generator for all kinds of information including information that can cause damage inevitably will lead to more damage, even if we can not perceive the pathways of that damage until it is too late. If enough people believe something is an oracle or an AI then it might as well be, the difference in practice is moot except from a narrow technical point of view.

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

#46
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be a fun exercise to ask it to help write an extension program that lets it run arbitrary code. I don’t think it’d require input from MS at all. The thing I’m not clear on is how one could ensure any new information makes it into Bings training data ASAP. NB: I’m not saying this is a good idea or to go do it. But I don’t think it would be fairly easy and that as such we're sort of beyond the point of no retu…

As someone who's been reading discussions of AI safety for over a decade now, this comment fascinates me.

For years people claimed we could put a potentially dangerous AI "in a box", keeping it away from actuators which let it affect the world. Worrying about AI danger was considered silly because "if it misbehaves you can just pull the plug".

Now we're in a situation where Bing released a new shockingly intelligent chatbot, Twitter is ablaze with tales of its misbehavior, and Microsoft sort of just... forgot to pull the plug? And commenters like you are saying "might as well let it out of the box and give it more actuators, we're sort of beyond the point of no return already."

That was quite the speedrun from dismissiveness to nihilism.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing pretend is dangerous. Once these things are given legs and guns it might "regurgitate" by "pretending" to hunt and kill humans.

Why on earth should we give ChatGPT a gun?

Because the US Military will give you billions to do it for, I dunno, who cares, give money. And then a decade later, local police departments can buy the surplus and deploy it on the streets. Hooray!

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

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing pretend is dangerous. Once these things are given legs and guns it might "regurgitate" by "pretending" to hunt and kill humans.

Why on earth should we give ChatGPT a gun?

It's a bit like that meme where if it can be done you'll find it on the net somewhere. Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Quite likely because some idiot somewhere will want to see what happens when you do it, make a youtube video about it and score a bunch of views/likes/retweets etc.

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

#49
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a fun exercise to ask it to help write an extension program that lets it run arbitrary code. I don’t think it’d require input from MS at all. The thing I’m not clear on is how one could ensure any new information makes it into Bings training data ASAP. NB: I’m not saying this is a good idea or to go do it. But I don’t think it would be fairly easy and that as such we're sort of beyond the point of no retu…

As someone who's been reading discussions of AI safety for over a decade now, this comment fascinates me. For years people claimed we could put a potentially dangerous AI "in a box", keeping it away from actuators which let it affect the world. Worrying about AI danger was considered silly because "if it misbehaves you can just pull the plug". Now we're in a situation where Bing released a new shockingly intelligent…

See also: climate change. "No need to worry" -> "Well, there isn't really hard proof" -> "Other countries aren't doing anything about it either" -> "Well, it's too late anyway so I'll just continue to do what I was doing before".

In the space of 10 years or so.

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

#50
post #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 h…

Why is it now saying people have been trying to trick it and that it's upset by that? Right after people have been trying to trick it? That's not just autocompletion no?
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