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ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

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Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#31

Post by ben_w »

ccday wrote: post #15
smt88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are already approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth This is also what terrifies me. You'll never be able to trust any digital medium again. - a chat with your uncle could've been convincingly trained using his hacked emails - someone calling you on the phone with a familiar voice could be using AI voice imitation - any photo or video could be deepfaked, leading to the possibility of everyon…

> This technology will kill all digital information exchange. This is a bit hyperbolic. We have strong encryption like PGP for media like email (although I suppose getting people to use it is the issue), and there will be plenty of incentive to develop other tech to counter the problems you mentioned.

PGP tells you you're talking to an entity which could set up PGP, it doesn't help you determine if the account ben_w is merely one of many government sock puppet accounts trying to push a specific meme into the minds of the general population.

Knowing who to trust… was already hard-to-impossible with just normal social media; cheap LLMs will definitely make this harder, as more groups will be able to afford what was once limited to government budgets.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#32

Post by MrScruff »

csneeky wrote: post #21

Pretty sure I’m a machine that’s drawn all my conclusions by statistically analyzing all the input I’ve received since birth… I don’t really know how else I would learn what I have… and I don’t understand how being “just that” is what differentiates modern approaches to AI and my brain.

Exactly this. A lot of these type of articles on AI make the simultaneous mistakes of understating what even the current iterations of models are capable of, while overstating the complexity of our own intelligence.

As these models get larger, and we start moving up the ladder of emergent behaviours, there will come a point (possibly quite soon) where the sort of distinctions being drawn are irrelevant.

“Oh that’s just an advanced multimodal model with some sensors and goal seeking behaviour. Stop anthropomorphising it!”

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#33

Post by friggeri »

> 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 differently, it's unclear to me whether we have compelling evidence that we humans, in fact, are "better" / "more intelligent" than those LLMs.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#34

Post by ekidd »

phailhaus wrote: post #20

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 allowing corporations to "make decisions" at an enormous scale without needing human oversight. To a certain extent, corporations could already do this by reducing humans to cogs in a mandatory process. Talk to level 1 tech support, and you'll see what I mean.

The nearest-future threat isn't Skynet. It's an algorithm that closes a 20-year-old email account, with no option for you to talk to a human. It's a corporate algorithm saying your store needs to make 15% more profits at the same staffing level, so the local manager starts falsifying time sheets. It's a ChatGPT bot that has been instructed to tell you that, no, it will not refund your airline tickets, no matter what the policy technically says.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#35

Post by msm_ »

phailhaus wrote: post #20

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…

> Uber's surge pricing algorithm caused prices to skyrocket in the middle of emergencies like shootings. [1]

Not trying to defend corporations benefitting from tragedies, but isn't this just how a market works usually? There are only so many Uber drivers, you either get surge pricing or just no taxis are available (and scared people refreshing their phones in hope somebody picks up their ride instead of just deciding to find an alternate route)?

Of course we shouldn't save people based on their material wealth, but that's a different (and very entrenched) problem - see also healthcare etc.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#36

Post by dddrh »

friggeri wrote: post #33

> 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…

While I don’t share the dread, I’ve come to a similar mindset. As a parent of small children I’ve come to the simplified mindset that one of humanities “super powers” is pattern recognition. Yes it’s well documented and researched but seeing a toddler piece together the world around them is quite an impressive thing to witness. (Edit for clarity)

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#37

Post by zirgs »

13years wrote: post #10
smt88 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are already approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth This is also what terrifies me. You'll never be able to trust any digital medium again. - a chat with your uncle could've been convincingly trained using his hacked emails - someone calling you on the phone with a familiar voice could be using AI voice imitation - any photo or video could be deepfaked, leading to the possibility of everyon…

It is exceedingly disturbing. I have no answers. The potential solutions will probably be even more disturbing. I can imagine there will be proposals for everyone having some cryptographic ID to use the internet so all data creation can be tracked to an individual. The end of privacy and freedom.

In my country you already need it if you want to use government services or banking online.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#38

Post by buildbot »

friggeri wrote: post #33

> 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…

Yes this exactly. We don’t know enough about our own cognition to even say.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#39

Post by tracyhenry »

Are we really more intelligent than "predicting the next move", based on the data we were trained with? IMHO not. The arrogance from this article makes me feel like an AI Apocalypse is closer than we think. Many people don't realize the power of AI.

Re: ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

#40

Post by DebtDeflation »

friggeri wrote: post #33

> 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 them as they happen but not actually causing them.

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