Why am I not terrified of AI?
scottaaronson.blog
Why am I not terrified of AI?
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#2That was certainly far more interesting than my answer for why I am not terrified of AI, namely that I am not a panicky idiot who doesn't know fact from fiction. That and I react to being told what to feel with contempt.
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#3To be honest, I am a bit terrified. I'm not panicking yet, but it's not going to be all milk and honey.
One thing is certain: thousands or millions of people and companies will start creating GPT bots. Some will just download existing weights (like the recently leaked Meta LLAMA weights) and add a wrapper around them. Some will train new GPT bots from scratch. Some will hybridize them. Some will use a corpus of Library of Congress books to understand the world during the American Revolution. Some will use GPT bots to build worlds in Minecraft.
And then some will use GPT bots to scam people out of their life savings (actually they already started). Phishing and social engineering attacks will graduate to a whole new level.
As for propaganda and internet trolling and psy ops, what we've seen so far is absolutely nothing. Dictators around the world are salivating now.
And once bots get into learning how to manipulate humans... Well, if this does not terrify you, ... don't be surprised if you are a target.
Brave new world we're heading to.
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#4I'm terrified of AI.
Both the imperfect good enough AI, and the post-human skynet AI.
In my personal life, I have friends addicted to ChatGPT. While we are talking, they are talking to chatgpt for advice, for jokes, for planning David Bowie themed parties. They literally run everything thru this AI first.
My firm's marketing department is using ChatGPT heavily to write copy, tweets, etc.It's amazingly great. Our ROI's have been fantastic.
I've read the stories of thousands of people treating Replika AI like some kind of lover.
Stable Diffusion with ControlNet, is amazing fun and cool, but what an existential threat to 80% of artists.
As a mother, AI instagram models are something that keep me up at night. Will my daughter compare herself to these things without knowing they aren't real and go insane, will my son view real women as inferior. I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.
AI has we have it today is already changing paradigms. It so easily exacerbates some evolutionary weaknesses in us. People are treating as alive today, Business managers want to replace as many people as they can with it, today!
We can't really define what makes us unique and conscious. We can't even agree on how to define consciousness for living creatures, how can we define it for a digital existence.
I'm worried that the current form of AI is already surpassed most people. Stable Diffusion can generate art way better than I can. ChatGPT can write better than I can. ElevenLabs AI can speak and imitate voices better than I can.
I think it's really a brave new world with this radical technology that has so many immediate practical uses, and more just keep coming out so easily. I never would have guessed neural networks were so flexible, and that's what scares me the most.
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#5I'm terrified of AI, but not for the reasons you think. I'm not worried about a Skynet AI, and at the same time, I am.
We aren't going to see an AGI in a while, so it's too premature to worry about that. I'm not even sure a true AGI is possible, yet... kind of like how flying cars are possible. We do have flying cars, sort of? Not the way we all envisioned though. So it is for AI.
My worry is that AI will become too trusted. We know the failure rates of humans can be higher than what is deemed acceptable, and AI could fail in unpredictable ways. I'm concerned that now it can be all-too easy to manipulate people en masse.
- Say we entrusted an AI to be our early-warning detection system and trust the output of said AI to mount a counter-response. Turns out it was a false positive, and we started WW3.
- It is used to manipulate people's identity online.
- It can be used to replace people's livelihoods (i.e. book-writing, art, maybe programmers to an extent).
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#6[dead]
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#7That was certainly far more interesting than my answer for why I am not terrified of AI, namely that I am not a panicky idiot who doesn't know fact from fiction. That and I react to being told what to feel with contempt.
Why is it that in the gutter of every HN post there's some schlorby shlub desperately trying to seem cool?
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#8I don't think it's the X-risk AI threat that should primarily concern everyone. I'm not suggesting it should be ignored; some like Scott and Eliezer are working on trying to reduce that risk (or more accurately, trying to figure out ways to understand the alignment problem well enough to develop ideas to reduce the risk), but it's out of the hands of most of us. Either AGI instantiates and kills (most) all of us, or it doesn't. And, as Scott points out, humans—due to various technologies and psychosocial problems—may be running headlong into a great filter in the near future without AGI, so an AGI might be an improvement in that case.
But what happens to society when all non-face-to-face communication becomes saturated with unlabelled AI-created and AI-assisted content, which may or may not be trustworthy or correct, but which we can't separate from human-created content? What happens to economies, governments, countries, and geopolitical stability? You don't have to believe in a large-scale AI replacement of human work and massively increased unemployment to see the problems AI is already creating, and LLMs will only get better.
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#9I don't think it's the X-risk AI threat that should primarily concern everyone. I'm not suggesting it should be ignored; some like Scott and Eliezer are working on trying to reduce that risk (or more accurately, trying to figure out ways to understand the alignment problem well enough to develop ideas to reduce the risk), but it's out of the hands of most of us. Either AGI instantiates and kills (most) all of us, or…
I agree with the saturation, It's potentially the end of information, makes me wonder, how do we stop Wikipedia entries being rewritten little by little, what sounds like valid context changes, referencing unaware AI fake content, that is then read by the next AI model, so the "pattern" is kindof preserved and on and on it goes... To me it sounds like a future where archive.org would be the only valid source of information, the rest is saturated by garbage. It's a problem of processing power. The needle in the haystack has a new added factor, fake needles. Where is our red stop button that turns the Internet in read only mode because these garbage generators are running wild? Or what was the name of that project where you would have CDs with information on how to rebuild civilization?
Re: Why am I not terrified of AI?
#10That was certainly far more interesting than my answer for why I am not terrified of AI, namely that I am not a panicky idiot who doesn't know fact from fiction. That and I react to being told what to feel with contempt.
Why is it that in the gutter of every HN post there's some schlorby shlub desperately trying to seem cool?
I'm trying to be cool? That is certainly a new one to me as I wasn't even trying to be witty. I was legitimately impressed at a far more interesting answer encompassing the anti-intellectualism mass reaction and philosophical framework. I am more curmudgeonly yelling at clouds.
What kind of quietly desperate insecurity drives reading not opting into a trend as desperately trying to be cool instead of dismissing them as out of touch?