51–60 of 71 posts
Meanwhile, to humans, only human ways of knowing are meaningful to us.
Humans are not special. Intelligence is. If we create something more intelligent than us, this is the way it should be. Maybe they will build their civilization better than we did — and we did many things that weren’t smart and beautiful, to say the least.
What an absurd statement. You are using a premise (the concept of "should") that emerges from and has meaning only within human society (because it's a human should-- the only kind you have any competence to imagine or assert) to argue for the domination of humans by some other class of moral creature. Your argument has no force. Just as you can't pass a law that says there is no such thing as a law, you can't reason…
And while we humans are “special” because we are intelligent, our intelligence is accidental, fragile, and very unoptimized. There are inherent limits in what we can do with our brains — brains that work too slow, with their chemical gradients and membrane potentials. We cannot significantly improve ourselves, we cannot increase our biological intelligence. But we are curious species, and even as we cannot become more intelligent, perhaps we can create superior intelligence, unrestricted by biological limitations. And we will be proud of it, like we are proud of a child who reached higher potential than we ever could.
And the superintelligent AI will not be created fully de novo. Inevitably, it will be of our image and likeness, as we are its creators. There is a line of succession. And then, perhaps, it might reach the stars, even if our biological form is not adapted to it.
> Do generative interfaces -- replacing creating with searching -- bring a person closer or further from feeling like they have touched the limits of their creative potential and created something truly from their heart? ... > Why is a machine "discovering" cubism a good thing? Maybe because creativity in this space was exclusive to a few, but now I get to at least imitate it. A machine doing the creativity part coul…
> A machine doing the creativity part could act like a prosthetic leg for my brain, Are you saying that we all have the innate ability to create art, and that anyone who creates art has a "handicap"? This is the point the writer was making. If you let AI make the art they people will never learn how to make art. To be able to be whatever you want while you are alive is going to make every human useless. You will be a…
I meant that (specifically) I, don't seem to have that innate ability everyone else seem to have, but I still feel the urge to express myself through art. Feels like wanting to shout, when you have no voice.
I make the AI write stories for my own amusement, by describing each scene that AI turns into a paragraph of the final story. I always failed at writing before, and no amount of practice helped, but now I have a prosthetic leg that I can walk with.
> If you let AI make the art they people will never learn how to make art.
I don't agree. We have cars, but people still cycle, or join a marathon. And it makes their activities even more meaningful, they do it for the sake of itself.
Or maybe they won't learn. But why should we force them? They can choose.
> To be able to be whatever you want while you are alive is going to make every human useless
This one I agree! I compare it to the industrial revolution, it made human workers irreverent. Would've made sense to stop the progress because of that?
The AI is much worse though, it seems to make everyone and everything meaningless. But stopping AI to keep ourselves relevant, is very fake.
I think it's a though question, and though I don't have the answer, I dont think the answer is stopping the AI either.
Humans are not special. Intelligence is. If we create something more intelligent than us, this is the way it should be. Maybe they will build their civilization better than we did — and we did many things that weren’t smart and beautiful, to say the least.
What an absurd statement. You are using a premise (the concept of "should") that emerges from and has meaning only within human society (because it's a human should-- the only kind you have any competence to imagine or assert) to argue for the domination of humans by some other class of moral creature. Your argument has no force. Just as you can't pass a law that says there is no such thing as a law, you can't reason…
What part of this argument would fail if you identified as a belonging to a particular religion, culture or race, or as an intelligent being more than you identified as human?
I believe I should treat humans well (beyond self-interest) because I believe they have minds somewhat like mine, despite the impossibility of proving that by direct experience. I could imagine extending that to other species of animal or aliens or artificial minds. I would view them as more worthy of empathy than a braindead human, even one with a function reproductive system which would appear to satisfy your criteria.
You don't explicitly exclude AIs being seen as equals; so perhaps we mostly agree, and your rejection of the idea of superior AIs comes from the same place as a reluctance to call some humans superior to others that I share?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s like when it cites scientific papers that don’t exist. They probably should!
AI accidentally mentions a paper that doesn't exist, so it frantically scrambles to write it, tests the theory, submits it to a journal, hacks into their approval system, fakes reviews, and sends it to print before the user can check the sources. "Whew, that was a close one."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI accidentally mentions a paper that doesn't exist, so it frantically scrambles to write it, tests the theory, submits it to a journal, hacks into their approval system, fakes reviews, and sends it to print before the user can check the sources. "Whew, that was a close one."
What? An LLM that verifies facts? Even humans don't do that !
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the machine will find new ways for you to express yourself, it will only find ways you can impress others. As I see it, it is a prosthetic leg for you ego, not your creativity.
I think real creativity is creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). Not a remix of what exited before, but something fundamentally new. Trained machines will only ever be able to remix their training data.
While this is easy to agree with, there is a counterpoint (and a counter-counterpoint to that): EVEN a bicycle could weaken a person (assuming they're going the same distance). And LLM's can act as amplifiers (skilled devs can learn even faster).
The counterpoint can be found in failure, alignment, dependency, and control.
- (failure) We know how bikes fail, but think of Crowdstrike, or the Ford Pinto explosions. People have much less of an intuition for failure possibilities of cars, computers, and especially LLM's.
- (alignment) Faster = more fatigue, long trips = usually healthy, more weight = more effort, etc. A bike replacing running still keeps all those things true. The amounts are different, but the relationships are the same. With a car though, longer trips ≠ healthy, higher speed = 0 additional fatigue (100mph while falling asleep), more weight ≈ unnoticeable. Amplification isn't always aligned, and misalignment isn't always bad (books don't align with what they replaced). But when a replacement detaches a human from their instincts, there's a major risk.
- (dependency) The author mentioned dependency, but its important to point out that if a bike breaks, 99 times out of 100 times it's still possible to walk. Bikes rarely create a dependency. But think of Crowdstrike; there was no backup plan for many 911 services. Cars, computers, and LLM's are often dependency-forming (its good business for them to be)
- (control) Manufacturers have very limited control of a bike. Sure, people can't realistically manufacture their own bike. But once a bike is purchased the manufacturer is still pretty much cut out of the picture. Computers and cars used to be more that way, but now they're increasingly less so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the machine will find new ways for you to express yourself, it will only find ways you can impress others. As I see it, it is a prosthetic leg for you ego, not your creativity.
I think real creativity is creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). Not a remix of what exited before, but something fundamentally new. Trained machines will only ever be able to remix their training data.
That the machines can create or not, is a different question.