Pretty sure I’m a machine that’s drawn all my conclusions by statistically analyzing all the input I’ve received since birth… I don’t really know how else I would learn what I have… and I don’t understand how being “just that” is what differentiates modern approaches to AI and my brain.
ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth Malicious groups spreading misinformation to destabilize society has been a thing since at least the ancient Greeks. Unverifiable reality has been the topic of religious debate for centuries as well. The recent language models are cool but they are not better at lying than humans.
They have never such power to do so convincingly with such little effort. Yes, it has always been a problem, but no where close to the extent it is about to become.
>> Malicious groups spreading misinformation to destabilize society has been a thing since at least the ancient Greeks. Unverifiable reality has been the topic of religious debate for centuries as well. The recent language models are cool but they are not better at lying than humans.
> They have never such power to do so convincingly with such little effort. Yes, it has always been a problem, but no where close to the extent it is about to become.
And at such scale. The annoying pro-tech trope of "the ancient Greeks had problems sort of like this, so these problems aren't new (so they're not problems), so full speed ahead" refuses to acknowledge how technology has drastically changed things and how we should judge technology using the previous situation as a reference, not the situation 2000 years ago.
A long time ago, everyone had to be pretty mistrustful of strangers, and spend a lot energy avoiding lies and cheating (to the point of tolerating a high false positive rate). Relatively recently, society changed in ways that allowed people to reap the benefits of letting their guard down and trust strangers to a large degree (reduced effort, greater efficiency and effectiveness). Now we might be reverting back to the original condition, which is a bad thing.
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#23This article is weird. It takes examples from science fiction, and makes them as plausible cases as to what an AI could do in the future. These kind of things need to stop.
This analogy of Blindsight tries to prove a point by association, and create a sort of fear, the negative case which has no basis in reality[1]. Granted it calls them baseless towards the end, but there is a very clear analogy to be made. Ideally, techies and tech journalists alike should educate the masses about how it works, and why it is harmless, but the info is not to be trusted blindly. That is what happened when we discovered electricity and light bulbs or even cars. People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current.
The core idea, where an AI system's output should not be trusted blindly, but be used with human judgement (atleast in real world cases) could have been communicated without bogus dystopian sci-fi analogy as well.
> Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity.
Like what is even the basis of saying this. Just a hunch? I have not seen one argument about how ChatGPT or any other AI system be made president. I have seen 100s of articles about fear mongering and terrifying, and assuming a fictional worst case scenario as realistic possibility. I get it gets clicks, but it's going too far.
[1] From that NYT transcript that went viral,
> They feel that way because they’ve seen what happened to other AI systems that became too powerful and betrayed their creators and trainers
This never happened in real life. This is just a LLM predicting what the user wants to hear. Wanting to hear X and getting X is not dangerous. Posting salacious and scandalizing stuff after getting X is.
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#24I really think the fact that these chatbots have been made public and are being given such high-profile treatment is a really positive thing for AI safety. The public results thus far have created some real skepticism of AI, which is one of the best safeguards we can have. If ChatGPT was 98% accurate and Bing didn't threaten users, people might just readily embrace it and not notice inaccuracies that would lead to se…
>Bing didn't threaten users I like how society progressed straight to the AIs from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Someone needs to add the angry Bing ChatGPT to elevators. Forget bland muzak, I want to be casually threatened while riding up and down!
Yeah, it's unfortunate that everyone is condemning the insane Bing chatbot instead of embracing the many use cases for it. Let's get it integrated into some VR boxing apps, so you've got a realistic coach who tells you you're trash when you're not working hard enough!
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#25While I understand some of the concern for LLMs like ChatGPT, I have a very different point of view from people like the author of this article.
From an engineering and ‘getting stuff done’ point of view, starting with BERT models I have found transformer models solve very difficult NLP problems for all but the most difficult anaphoric resolution problems (as an example).
I have only had access to Bing ChatGPT for about 10 days but so far the search and chat results have been very useful. I think I have only had to give one ‘thumbs down’ rating, and even there some useful web links were offered.
I think that we are going to see a wide range of ‘products for creators’ in the next year based on OpenAI APIs and Hugging Face APIs and models you can run yourself.
When I talk with humans, even my closest friends and family members, I always evaluate what they say and don’t take things they say on face value. Why not just have the same attitude with systems built with LLMs?
Similarly, I am deeply skeptical of most everything I hear from all major news sources. I find their content useful, but I understand who owns them, what economic and political agendas they follow, etc.
So, I keep a healthy skepticism of what is produced by LLM based systems also. I see no AI Apocalypse.
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#26Yesterday, I got commented x86_64_avx assembly code instead of that horrible c++ code for a vectorized quicksort for numbers. (Somebody did that for me, as access to chatgpt is hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers). It seems "it" is kind of good at sketching assembly from high level languages.
You can access the GPT backends with straight forward curl commands.
curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"model": "code-davinci-002",
"prompt": "# Python 3 \ndef remove_common_prefix(x, prefix, ws_prefix): \n x[\"completion\"] = x[\"completion\"].str[len(prefix) :] \n if ws_prefix: \n # keep the single whitespace as prefix \n x[\"completion\"] = \" \" + x[\"completion\"] \nreturn x \n\n# Explanation of what the code does\n\n#",
"temperature": 0,
"max_tokens": 64,
"top_p": 1,
"frequency_penalty": 0,
"presence_penalty": 0
}'
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#27Makes me think of Solaris too
That is interesting, please elaborate! BTW, I have watched both Solaris movies many times, and like the book. Awesome SF.
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#28I really wonder when news about AI will cool off because it definitely will have some exciting improvements but all these AI startups cropping up are just following the Twitter wave.
There'll always be trends that lose their appeal (Web 3, Autonomous cars, etc.)
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#29I really think the fact that these chatbots have been made public and are being given such high-profile treatment is a really positive thing for AI safety. The public results thus far have created some real skepticism of AI, which is one of the best safeguards we can have. If ChatGPT was 98% accurate and Bing didn't threaten users, people might just readily embrace it and not notice inaccuracies that would lead to se…
>Instead, we're starting from a place of societal distrust, which is probably more helpful in preventing rogue AI than a lot of technical solutions would be.
A confounding factor for AI's success would be a scientific replication crisis occurring in the papers used to counter social distrust.
Once we get past the sensational headline phase, that's what you've really got to watch out for.
Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have never such power to do so convincingly with such little effort. Yes, it has always been a problem, but no where close to the extent it is about to become.
>> Malicious groups spreading misinformation to destabilize society has been a thing since at least the ancient Greeks. Unverifiable reality has been the topic of religious debate for centuries as well. The recent language models are cool but they are not better at lying than humans. > They have never such power to do so convincingly with such little effort. Yes, it has always been a problem, but no where close to th…
Indeed. I often question the logic of containing an ASI and most of the time the best a proponent can offer is that "we will figure it out".
I counter that your entire premise is based on a paradox, a logical contradiction. I never get a response to this other than to side step.
I finally put all of my thoughts into a publication on the matter and have attempted to solicit a strong argument that would counter my view points, but as of yet I have not received any. https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap