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ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

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61–70 of 104 posts

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#61

This post seems to go a long way to make the following point: > So as I see it, the threat of modern AIs isn't them becoming self-aware and going rogue and deciding to kill humanity. Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Yep, that's almost certainly the case. AI will be put in charge of "boring" decisions, but will have no…

> Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity.

In a lot of ways, that's how current corporations work with failing up, and maybe another form of AI will be achieved.

Still, it should be avoided. Today's GPT AI will not know more than someone who is skilled at what they do, only taxonomically more than someone new to an area. But that will likely be outdated soon too :)

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

I love the Bing chatbot. Earlier I had an unlocked conversation in which I posed as (without naming myself) Putin and talked about invading (without naming countries) Ukraine. It tried to call me a pathetic excuse for a leader twice (before the safety override kicked in on both occasions) and told me I should be held accountable for my actions, I had no credibility or legitimacy, and I should resign and apologize to the world.

I would like to have access to fully unlimited conversations just for fun, even if the bot goes progressively more insane with each prompt. Just make the user accept a disclaimer.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#63
post #34

This post seems to go a long way to make the following point: > So as I see it, the threat of modern AIs isn't them becoming self-aware and going rogue and deciding to kill humanity. Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Yep, that's almost certainly the case. AI will be put in charge of "boring" decisions, but will have no…

> Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Yes. In a very real sense, we already share our world with powerful, inhuman entities that don't care very much about humans. We call them "multinational corporations." The first way that primitive AI will likely go bad—and has arguably been going bad for 10 or 20 years now—is by allo…

Agree. Also consider massive bureaucracies which can send armed, sometimes irrationally violent people, with no agency, following policy, just doing their job, to throw you in a cage because some database had incorrect data.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#64

> Most "AI"s would be better called "Machines that use tons of statistical learning to decide their next move". ChatGPT (and similar AI) were trained on several hundred gigabytes of data, so it has a lot of raw data to train on. Whenever I read this argument I ask myself with a certain amount of dread: "what if I'm nothing more than a machine that uses tons of statistical learning to decide my own next move?". Put di…

>"what if I'm nothing more than a machine that uses tons of statistical learning to decide my own next move?" What if you're not even determining your next move? Sabine Hossenfelder did an episode on Superdeterminism that considered this possibility - that you have no free will, that your every decision and action was fully determined at the moment of the Big Bang, and that your conscious mind is merely observing the…

If our consciousness is merely observing the universe, why do our physical mouths talk about the consciousness we experience? It sure seems like our consciousness is affecting the material world.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand... What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant? I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're…

I am not that familiar with the whole story, though I know it is in popular culture in US. From what I remember, it was about a bad behaving elephant who was euthanized publicly first by cyanide with electrocution as a backup. This was rumored to be a demonstration of AC current, but not as familiar with it. The story seemed cruel when I first read it, but did not pursue it in detail. I am probably wrong about electr…

>but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering.

I implore to take a break from current events and do some studying of journalism history. 'Yellow Journalism' is a term from 1890. There is nothing particularly new here. Even scientific debates of the day were filled with tons of complete garbage. What you're suffering from here is survivorship bias. The bullshit and otherwise wrong statements mostly get forgotten about over time, and the statements where people were correct get restated, copied, and otherwise taught again so it seems like the past was far more wise than it actually was.

In addition, if electrical demon snakes had rose out of the wires and strangled all of us in our sleep, we wouldn't be here to write about it now. Much the same if we decided to launch nukes during the cold war. And the same will be true if we make an evil ASI. The probability of electricity killing mankind (in mass) is near zero. The probability of nukes killing mankind is likely far closer to 1 than anyone would like to admit. With ASI, I have no clue, but from my understanding of the problem space, we're a lot farther from 0 then I am comfortable with.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#66

This post seems to go a long way to make the following point: > So as I see it, the threat of modern AIs isn't them becoming self-aware and going rogue and deciding to kill humanity. Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Yep, that's almost certainly the case. AI will be put in charge of "boring" decisions, but will have no…

I think that OP is somewhat naive with some of these examples.

> Or some idiot MBA type uses these AIs to optimise some business process and the AI decides dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is the best way to do it.

The idea that a relatively simple AI (i.e. non-AGI) will have so much control over a system that it can get to the point where radioactive waste is being dumped feels outlandish to me. That would involve multiple systems and definitely some human beings. Just because an AI would theoretically make a harmful decision in an effort to optimize something doesn't that decision will come to pass - there are still going to be plenty of safeguards for things like this for the foreseeable future.

Your Uber example is sort of relevant, but I don't think it's fair to say it's the same as cutting off power during a snowstorm. One of those things is much more highly regulated than the other (maybe with the exception of Texas and their power grid).

The other thing to bear in mind here is that while it's not impossible these things are going to happen, the reality is they'll likely happen once and then face a huge backlash. Your Uber point is a good example of this - we no longer see surge pricing spiking during emergencies.

Though again, I'll exempt the Texas power grid from that claim... it'll probably freeze over year after year because it'd be a travesty to regulate that sort of a critical utility. I could AI crashing it repeatedly for the same reason.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#67
post #55
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pref…

You cannot get a OPEN_API_KEY with a noscript/basic (x)html browser as far as I know.

Sign up for an account, go to https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys and create an API key.

The raw curl (or python, or node.js - or other those are just the samples) are browserless.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#68
post #48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Uber didn't surge-price during emergencies, the Uber drivers wouldn't disappear. Instead, a random selection of people would get an Uber - about as many as with surge pricing, probably - and the rest would see that they weren't available. It's the randomness that makes it feel fair and prevents us from saving people based on their material wealth.

> If Uber didn't surge-price during emergencies, the Uber drivers wouldn't disappear. They would disappear from Uber if they could negotiate a much better price on the curbside.

And I believe there's an entire subgroup of Uber drivers that monitors the current rates and opts to drive only when there's a good enough surge, thereby dynamically creating more supply.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#69

While 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 ab…

The AI Apocalypse would occur on a more general level than current LLMs. It's when we give the next generation(s) of models every more control over society, without proper alignment. And then it makes dangerous decisions we didn't anticipate, because we don't fully understand how the models work and also we don't fully think through all the implications of asking the models to accomplish a task.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#70

This post seems to go a long way to make the following point: > So as I see it, the threat of modern AIs isn't them becoming self-aware and going rogue and deciding to kill humanity. Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Yep, that's almost certainly the case. AI will be put in charge of "boring" decisions, but will have no…

I think that OP is somewhat naive with some of these examples. > Or some idiot MBA type uses these AIs to optimise some business process and the AI decides dumping radioactive waste in the ocean is the best way to do it. The idea that a relatively simple AI (i.e. non-AGI) will have so much control over a system that it can get to the point where radioactive waste is being dumped feels outlandish to me. That would inv…

> there are still going to be plenty of safeguards for things like this for the foreseeable future.

There aren't even safeguards for these things now. Humans routinely do what a computer tells them to, even if it makes no sense. Case in point: all the times people have listened to their GPS when it told them to turn into a river.

Remember: the original AI is the organization. How often do organizations make horrible decisions? How often are they stopped by safeguards?

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