What happens when people don't understand how AI works
theatlantic.com
What happens when people don't understand how AI works
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Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#2Someone said, "The AI you use today is the worst AI that you will ever use."
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#3Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#4Someone said, "The AI you use today is the worst AI that you will ever use."
I can't tell any difference between Claude 3.5, 3.7 and 4 for coding.
So today is the same AI I used last year. And based on current trajectory same I will use next year.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#5> Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—“ChatGPT Jesus,” as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others are convinced, with the encouragement of their AI, that they themselves are metaphysical sages in touch with the deep structure of life and the cosmos. A teacher quoted anonymously in the article said that ChatGPT began calling her partner “spiral starchild” and “river walker” in interactions that moved him to tears. “He started telling me he made his AI self-aware,” she said, “and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God—and then that he himself was God.”
This sounds insane to me. When we are talking about safe AI use, I wonder if things like this are talked about.
The more technological advancement goes on, the smarter we need to be in order to use it - it seems.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#6Someone said, "The AI you use today is the worst AI that you will ever use."
I can't tell any difference between Claude 3.5, 3.7 and 4 for coding. So today is the same AI I used last year. And based on current trajectory same I will use next year.
I can tell the difference between those versions of Claude quite easily. Not 10x better each version, but each is more capable and the errors are fewer.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#7LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure.
They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call it divination is that it's skinned in dark mode UX instead of stars and moons.
Barthes reminds us that all meaning is in the eye of the reader; words have no essence, only interpretation. When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection.
What we're seeing isn't new, just unfamiliar. We used to read bones and cards. Now we read tokens. They look like language, so we treat them like arguments. But they're just as oracular, complex, probabilistic signals we transmute into insight.
We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture that doesn't know it's practicing one. That's why everything feels uncanny. And it's only going to get stranger, until we learn to name the thing we're actually doing. Which is a shame, because once we name it, once we see it for what it is, it won't be half as fun.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#8> Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—“ChatGPT Jesus,” as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others a…
Psychosis will find anything as a seed idea to express itself, even as basic a pattern as someone walking in lockstep with the soon-to-be patient can trigger a break. So it's not surprising that LLM chats would do the same.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#9What really happens: "for some reason" higher up management thinks AI will let idiots run extremely complex companies. It doesn't.
What AI actually does is like any other improved tool: it's a force multiplier. It allows a small number of highly experienced, very smart people, do double or triple the work they can do now.
In other words: for idiot management, AI does nothing (EXCEPT enable the competition)
Of course, this results in what you now see: layoffs where as always idiots survive the layoffs, followed by the products of those companies starting to suck more and more because they laid off the people that actually understood how things worked and AI cannot make up for that. Not even close.
AI is a mortal threat to the current crop of big companies. The bigger the company, the bigger a threat it is. The skill high level managers tend to have is to "conquer" existing companies, and nothing else. With some exceptions, they don't have any skill outside of management, and so you have the eternally repeated management song: that companies can be run by professional managers, without knowing the underlying problem/business, "using numbers" and spreadsheet (except when you know a few and press them, of course it turns out they don't have a clue about the numbers, can't come up with basic spreadsheet formulas)
TLDR: AI DOESN'T let financial-expert management run an airplane company. AI lets 1000 engineers build 1000 planes without such management. AI lets a company like what Google was 15-20 years ago wipe the floor with a big airplane manufacturer. So expect big management to come with ever more ever bigger reasons why AI can't be allowed to do X.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#10> Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—“ChatGPT Jesus,” as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others a…
I think insane and lonely people are definitely on the safety radar.
Even if todays general purpose models and models made by predators can have negative effects on vulnerable people, LLMs could become the technology that brings psych care to the masses.