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AI is just someone else's intelligence

zdziarski.com

61–70 of 170 posts

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#61
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people because the idea that sapience/sentience is just a side effect of our brains being pattern matching machines with a giant knowledge graph of neurons means that we're not that special

Because there's no reason for anyone to take seriously this notion. It's not scientific and is just a different kind of religious nonsense.

there's nothing religious about entertaining the idea that sentience could just be an emergent property

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#62
It will take jobs because the computer is using the thinking of a million other workers – how can any one worker compete with that? Training material is, at a deconstructed level, the critical patterns of other people’s thoughts, ideas, writings, music, theology, facts, opinions, poetry, and so on

AI has completely changed technological competition.

Most still don't perceive that AI is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. This changes everything. It is not comparable to any technological innovation prior.

"Anything you create can be replicated without investment cost while also being unique in design as well as delivering the same function or experience. Intellectual property laws essentially have no function in this new environment and there isn't an obvious remedy"

https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#63
post #5

Everything is a remix (watch the movie) We are all using the intelligent of previous people, generations of humans. The same is true for AI. It’s not different from humans. What will we do once it’s conscient? Will AI have rights? Should we be able to shut it down?

This is what's so puzzling about arguments around LLMs and copyright. If virtually anything GPT-4 generates is a copyright violation because it was trained on copyrighted material, then that would imply that virtually all art produced by humans is a copyright violation given that humans wouldn't produce art unless they were inspired (i.e. trained) by previous art. How people don't understand that practically every pi…

The difference seems to be in the level of fidelity of the copy. For example, we still attribute works to Socrates even though they were written down by Plato.

Some of these LLMs can produce code that is nearly identical to some file in the training set with the right prompt, similar to a human with a photographic memory. If a human for example copies a story or song, copyright law can and does consider it a copy even if produced purely from memory.

The line of originality was always somewhat arbitrary, it likely will continue to be.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#64
post #34
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of our intelligence is someone else's. That is what education does.

This brings up an interesting question: are we intelligent when we merely employ models, or only when we extrapolate from them? In other words, does a maximally-parsimonious theory contain all the knowledge you need, or is there something extra (typically called "reasoning") that is needed to perform analysis on and draw conclusions from such a model?

Godel would say you can always break the system.

Game theory would say there are dominant strategies, and sometimes they require guessing or bluffing.

Economics would say, once too many people are using a dominant strategy, it's time to switch it up.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#65
> "In the end, generative AI takes from the world’s best artists, musicians, philosophers, and other thinkers – erasing their identities, and reassigns credit to its output. Without the proper restraints, it will produce the master forgeries of our generation, and blur the lines between what we view as human ideas and synthesized ones."

as a free software contributor, always has been

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#66

I predict it'll all come crashing down once people start having skin in the game. (Right now, it's a toy, the source for a million overheated news articles and opinions.) ChatGPT can pass the Bar. Okay, have it draw up a contract and have the parties sign it—skin in the game. When an omitted comma can cost millions[1], what will an LLM's hallucinations wrought? [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=missing+comma+millions&r=u…

Agreed. I don't think it will necessarily crash, but there will be a serious reckoning for any business owner who thinks they can replace critical roles with AI. We're a long way off from that, if ever. In the short term, I think AI will be most useful in areas where (a) indeterminate results are acceptable, and (b) the consequences of a "mistake" are either non-existent or negligible. As humans are imperfect, there…

Sorry, "crash" is probably hyperbolic. "Deflate" is maybe better. If you can't trust the work output, then paying 10¢ instead of an hour of a FTE's time for it is no consolation.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what's so puzzling about arguments around LLMs and copyright. If virtually anything GPT-4 generates is a copyright violation because it was trained on copyrighted material, then that would imply that virtually all art produced by humans is a copyright violation given that humans wouldn't produce art unless they were inspired (i.e. trained) by previous art. How people don't understand that practically every pi…

The problem is the missing reference. As an artist, you don't just copy or use a style, you make the reference obvious. As an author, you include a citation, or, if it's fiction, you openly allude to the reference. This is actually why we can form a proposition like the one on Plato and Aristotle (which probably should include Socrates). The problem with the kind of "remix" and transfer of generative AI is that the r…

Humans are also pretty notoriously bad at doing this. It's also very easy to be inspired by something then forget the source. Humans often perform reverse-attribution, where they later realize or someone else points out a similarity, and only then do they add the citation.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#68
post #47

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't.

I'm not entirely sure what that means since it suggests we currently have the "wrong" definition of the word, but if there is a class of intelligence that gets created that it so far on a different tier from human intelligence that we think a separate word is needed, I would expect two things:

1) We aren't going to be the ones seeing that distinction or labeling it, the greater intelligence is

2) So the word "sentient" won't need to be changed; a new term will need to be created, but we won't really understand what it means

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the missing reference. As an artist, you don't just copy or use a style, you make the reference obvious. As an author, you include a citation, or, if it's fiction, you openly allude to the reference. This is actually why we can form a proposition like the one on Plato and Aristotle (which probably should include Socrates). The problem with the kind of "remix" and transfer of generative AI is that the r…

Humans are also pretty notoriously bad at doing this. It's also very easy to be inspired by something then forget the source. Humans often perform reverse-attribution, where they later realize or someone else points out a similarity, and only then do they add the citation.

Granted. This is why we built a rather complex set of rules and enforced habits around this and, if there's any doubt, rather dismiss a given production not adhering to these rules.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#70
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't.

>not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't. Anything presenting such a ridiculous conclusion is so wrong as to not be taken seriously. The only thing that is for certain in this life is that we are sentient, everything else is derived from that. Same with things proposing we don't have freewill, we do.

You make decisions subconsciously before your conscious mind is aware of it. It's been experimentally demonstrated and at least calls into question the perception of free will.

Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corpus callosum (the information highway between the two hemisphere) creating "split-brain patients". Interesting content on YouTube if you look up split-brain experiments. What was most chilling to me was that when instructions were presented to the non-vocal hemisphere (by showing only one eye) and the patient followed the instructions they couldn't tell you the real reason why. They would come up with plausible-sounding nonsense the way ChatGPT hallucinates.

So if we've established that the subconscious mind makes decisions, and that our mind is really two intelligences with the mute one subject to the one that understands language. People can logically understand these statements and still act in experiments as if neither are true.

I didn't get into the question of sentience because what most people mean is sapience. Of course we can feel things and perceive them. Plants do that too. Intelligence derived from knowledge and wisdom is a higher bar and still we have plenty of examples in the animal kingdom. If you want to argue that we're sapient, you also have to make the point that we have two entities in our skull responsible for that sapience that disagree with one another, and the only thing giving us the illusion of unity is that we tend to think in linguistic terms and only half our hardware can translate what that actually means.

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