5 ms·

To be honest, these result really feel like we are playing with fire here and inventing things that are too powerful for us. Automation has proven to be benefic

To be honest, these result really feel like we are playing with fire here and inventing things that are too powerful for us. Automation has proven to be beneficial on a small local scale (like food processor instead of cutting things up by hand) but on a large scale, I feel like this is too society-disrupting. For example, imagine if ChatGPT gets so good that it can replace humans in nearly every type of writing -- we'll be drowned in AI writing and most writers will be out of a job. It is too quick at concentrating all the best abilities into the hands of a very few, and takes away from human connection (instead of reading what a human wrote , we are just interacting more and more with computers and less with humans). I think if you add up the costs and benefits, the costs very much outweigh the benefits. I also think any programmer creating this technology and even people who show it off are incredibly irresponsible. It is on a similar level of publishing a new recipe on how to make a very powerful, undetectable explosive device, just because you can have some fun with it in your backyard. Analogous reasoning to show that innovation is good does not apply here because it is on a scale we have never seen. The creation of these AI technologies sickens me, and the people who are making it sicken me even more. I truly hope we will actually be a bit more responsible here and delete this trash, but like all times that have come before, I doubt we have the wisdom to do so.

mandmandam 4y ago
There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. No way no how, don't even try. Concentration of power is the real issue here. This tech can either work for all of us, or just the above-the-law class. Making such tech illegal, as you seem to be sort-of advocating for, would just lead to more concentration of power. So from my perspective, the people working on this openly are doing an incredible service by making it more equally available and equitable. Finally, think of the real potential of this tech - it isn't just a bomb. It can be a teacher's aide on a global scale; a great leveler; an explosion in creative capability something like the Cambrian Explosion.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I do wonder what human existence looks like in a world where all meaningful intellectual tasks are handled better by AI. I don’t think we’re at that world yet, but it sure seems like a depressing place to be. I worry about this even in a future where we pursue the post-scarcity path and don’t turn it into an excuse for a new form of serfdom, which we surely will attempt to do.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    Wire the "generative art" parts of everybody's brains to AI output whose input is the rest of the brain's experiential, uh, experience. Get the very best of your own potential, and it's still limited by your own skills.
  - Beaver117 4y ago
    Brain-linked VR. The ultimate goal of humanity is to built a self sustaining society of people in VR for life, like in the matrix except by choice. AI will probably be needed to get there.
mrits 4y ago
Maybe you should be sickened by actual real problems that AI might be able to fix. Starvation, disease, dangerous manual labor. These are just some of the things AI will help us get past. We are already drowning in writing because we have billions of people on this planet. I don't share your concerns at all.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I seriously doubt AI will be able to fix any of these problems. In fact, it seems like it will just cause more problems. Starvation can already be fixed by today's technology. People who are starving are not starving because of a lack of technology for example, but rather because of the socio-economic situation of their country. AI might help fix disease but if it really can make progress towards disease, it certainly won't stop there and it will help us extend lifespans too, and everyone being super-healthy for hundreds of years can't be a good thing for overpopulation. I think you can easily just say "here's problem XYZ, let's use AI". Well, that's a rather lazy argument because it's hard to envision how AI will help and moreover, I think the onus should be on the inventors of AI to really demonstrate that it does anything useful at all, because it's not at all clear how it can help anyone.
  - mrits 4y ago
    "I seriously doubt AI will be able to fix any of these problems." Remind me 100 years
    - survirtual 4y ago
      I am flabbergasted that an opinion like the post you’re responding to is held by anyone. AI has the potential to eliminate all menial tasks of humanity. If use benevolently, it can free everyone from poverty, and enable an unprecedented era of human experience. True human experience. Discovery of self and our true place in the universe, without worry of material concern. No worry of disease, hunger, shelter — an age of boundless abundance. It can be endowed to embody our best traits. All the thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, distilled into an intelligence working with the whole of humanity for good. Change like this can be scary for people who are already comfortable; I get it. But most people in my generation and younger do not have a future without radical innovation. Most of us don’t have homes, don’t have families, don’t have any prospect but slaving away in servitude until we die. I prefer freedom.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
amelius 4y ago
I guess humans should learn to not derive their identities from how well they play music, write texts, or paint pictures.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  Perhaps we should learn to derive our identity based on likes from social media instead? The problem is that a healthy society is one in which humans have the capability to create value and feel appreciated, not be 100% healthy meatbags having everything provided for them while they consume endless content. The only reason why this technology is being created is for short-term profit: if we were making decisions purely on what is good for us (presuming we had the wisdom to do so), we would be much more careful. Honestly, does anyone believe that the good for society is being considered at all when a researcher writes a paper? No, of course not, they are only concerned with increasing the size of their CV and satisfying their own amusement.
  - amelius 4y ago
    I agree, but the problem is that if we don't push technology forward, then certainly China or Russia or Iran will. The responsibility is thus not with researchers, but instead with politicians.
helsontaveras18 4y ago
Every technology has changed how humans interact with the world and society at large. For me, I use ChatGPT as an AI pair programmer. In certain cases, it returns better results than Google. Because you can continue to ask it questions and ponder pros and cons of one approach over another, it really does feel like you have a competent engineer next to you. There are good use cases to GPT. Not everything it doom and gloom.
thunky 4y ago
> For example, imagine if ChatGPT gets so good that it can replace humans in nearly every type of writing -- we'll be drowned in AI writing and most writers will be out of a job. The real problem here isn't the tech. It's our inability to figure out how to sucessfully let tech do our job for us so we don't have to "work" anymore. There is no law of nature that demands every human "work" 40 hours a week or die hungry. If AI replaced every job on earth, and humans still had more than enough resources to live comfortably, what exactly would the problem be?
flashgordon 4y ago
So here is my wishful thinking. Let us say we do get drowned in AI generated ... stuff. Yes it will be indistinguishable from 99.99% of content. My hope is this would force us into local co-ops where we would value the human interaction and human art over the mass produced? Art for art's sake could be more valuable? Il still pay to listen to my Kid's choppy twinkle twinkle on the violin over any AI generated Paganini! Sure leave the hard boring problems to AI. My only worry is all this AI would be in the hands of a very few rich and powerful who would go revert to their desires of enslaving others. But that is no different today or when industrialization hit us :(
srcreigh 4y ago
My science fiction philosophy is that much of human thought is more like interacting with an objective, shared thought universe with other humans (living and dead) as well as gods and angels and stuff. As opposed to brains firing based on physical perception. Most of the scare of recent AI is about how it’s a big brain model therefore it will overtake us. This falls apart in my model, which is that we have little brains which see the thought universe, and that’s where most of the interesting stuff goes on. For AI to be even on par with humans, it’s not enough to simulate a brain. The computers would need a transmitter for talking to angels and dead humans, which they clearly don’t have. Even if a ChatGPT co-opts human input in real-time as a proxy to the thought universe, it’s not clear to me what the boundaries in this thought universe are for automation. Even in the physical universe we are severely lagging behind natural technology in many ways-can’t make cell sized machines, or new world level environments to live in. Stuff that we have that we can’t make artificial replacements of. The thought universe should have similar practical difficulties. Anyways, technology such as writing, radio, internet aren’t much different than ChatGPT in this sense. A new lens into the thought universe, but not itself capable of interacting with it apart from humans.
Terretta 4y ago
These ChatGPT sessions are something like an ink-blot test. You see the end of human society. Others see something that can't count backwards from 10. For now, this thing is a probabilities trick, similar to a Magic Eight Ball toy in function and impressiveness. These conversations are no more indicative of intelligence than "Signs point to yes" is indicative of paranormal activity. Both are clever. How impressed one should be with either, is an exercise entirely left to the reader.
- 0-_-0 4y ago
  Isn't the human brain a probabilistic trick as well?
  - mecsred 4y ago
    If you know the answer, you should write a paper. I think a few people are still working on that question.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    FWIW, I pattern match that that's a reasonably likely explanation for my stimulus responses.
- scarface74 4y ago
  This definitely isn’t true. Like the other poster said, I’ve used this to generate complex regular expressions and it gave me sample Python code. I’ve also used it to create simple Python scripts to automate AWS stuff. I would definitely pay a monthly subscription for it.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    I do pay a monthly subscription for it. It's a useful tool. So, surprisingly, is a Magic Eight Ball.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I don’t see a way to pay for it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zitterbewegung 4y ago
You can't really undo this the cat is already out of the bag and most likely we will have open source reimplementations of ChatGPT soon. I also see if we were to keep it secret doesn't really work. Once you even publish a paper describing the system immediately it is going to be reproduced. This happened with Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT is next. A good analogy would be the knowledge required to make a nuclear weapon. The scientific knowledge to understand how to do it would be in a high school physics class but the hard part is refining the nuclear material. Reproducing ChatGPT requires a large amount of expensive server time but once you have the model working it can be distributed very easily.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  What you can do is refuse to participate in it though. I used to be a researcher in a related field and I have decided to stop publishing anything that could remotely be used to further advancements in computer science and AI technology. I will never work in that field again because it is too detrimental to humanity. You can also refuse to support any such project financially -- if you can make decisions in a company, don't use it. Unfortunately, the situation of companies using new technology is like a prisoner's dilemma situation, so most people will use it if it maximizes their profit. That is why I think we need government regulation on a global scale .
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    > I will never work in that field again because it is too detrimental to humanity. And that is a personal opinion. I'm of a different opinion, so this past year I started focusing more and more on AI technology. YMMV. Maybe it's detrimental, maybe it's the most powerful thing we've ever built. I'm old enough to have heard these arguments about the internet itself, and while the internet absolutely has downsides, hearing some people say that we'd be better off without just saddens me. We've made life better for many; made education more reachable than ever; littered the world with free high quality knowledge; solved incredible science-fiction like problems; made long distance real time face-to-face communication possible; etc. It'll be the same for AI. And it too will have downsides.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Being a luddite about it isn‘t the answer. And it‘s better this is happening in public than behind closed doors. At a bigger scale humanity never ever asked itself: "We can, but should we?", it just did and that won‘t change.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  I actually believe being a luddite IS the answer. If enough people actually really cared about this and had the means, it could be destroyed. I think at some point it will become so bad that more and more people will realize how dangerous this is and fight back, at which point there will be luddite-like occurrences of mass deleting.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    I have a mindset where I prefer everyone to have a gun, instead of select few. If AIs get limited and only governments/researchers etc. have access, as usual the rich and powerful will control it. I don‘t want that. That might become a realistic scenario. Massive scale high performance compute & memory becoming a tightly controlled resource to avoid private creation of AI.
  - Beaver117 4y ago
    Butlerian Jihad
    - hxugufjfjf 4y ago
      I'm having a terrible case of The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon with people saying this the last couple of weeks, and I have never seen it explained.
      - Beaver117 4y ago
        Well Dune is pretty popular, many people have probably mentioned it. In the series humanity ends up going to a long war against sentient machines, which they win. All machines and computers are destroyed and laws are created so anyone who builds a computer, even as simple as a calculator, is sentenced to death.

mandmandam 4y ago

There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. No way no how, don't even try. Concentration of power is the real issue here. This tech can either work for all of us, or just the above-the-law class. Making such tech illegal, as you seem to be sort-of advocating for, would just lead to more concentration of power. So from my perspective, the people working on this openly are doing an incredible service by making it more equally available and equitable. Finally, think of the real potential of this tech - it isn't just a bomb. It can be a teacher's aide on a global scale; a great leveler; an explosion in creative capability something like the Cambrian Explosion.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I do wonder what human existence looks like in a world where all meaningful intellectual tasks are handled better by AI. I don’t think we’re at that world yet, but it sure seems like a depressing place to be. I worry about this even in a future where we pursue the post-scarcity path and don’t turn it into an excuse for a new form of serfdom, which we surely will attempt to do.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Wire the "generative art" parts of everybody's brains to AI output whose input is the rest of the brain's experiential, uh, experience. Get the very best of your own potential, and it's still limited by your own skills.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Brain-linked VR. The ultimate goal of humanity is to built a self sustaining society of people in VR for life, like in the matrix except by choice. AI will probably be needed to get there.

mrits 4y ago

Maybe you should be sickened by actual real problems that AI might be able to fix. Starvation, disease, dangerous manual labor. These are just some of the things AI will help us get past. We are already drowning in writing because we have billions of people on this planet. I don't share your concerns at all.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
I seriously doubt AI will be able to fix any of these problems. In fact, it seems like it will just cause more problems. Starvation can already be fixed by today's technology. People who are starving are not starving because of a lack of technology for example, but rather because of the socio-economic situation of their country. AI might help fix disease but if it really can make progress towards disease, it certainly won't stop there and it will help us extend lifespans too, and everyone being super-healthy for hundreds of years can't be a good thing for overpopulation. I think you can easily just say "here's problem XYZ, let's use AI". Well, that's a rather lazy argument because it's hard to envision how AI will help and moreover, I think the onus should be on the inventors of AI to really demonstrate that it does anything useful at all, because it's not at all clear how it can help anyone.
- mrits 4y ago
  "I seriously doubt AI will be able to fix any of these problems." Remind me 100 years
  - survirtual 4y ago
    I am flabbergasted that an opinion like the post you’re responding to is held by anyone. AI has the potential to eliminate all menial tasks of humanity. If use benevolently, it can free everyone from poverty, and enable an unprecedented era of human experience. True human experience. Discovery of self and our true place in the universe, without worry of material concern. No worry of disease, hunger, shelter — an age of boundless abundance. It can be endowed to embody our best traits. All the thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, distilled into an intelligence working with the whole of humanity for good. Change like this can be scary for people who are already comfortable; I get it. But most people in my generation and younger do not have a future without radical innovation. Most of us don’t have homes, don’t have families, don’t have any prospect but slaving away in servitude until we die. I prefer freedom.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

amelius 4y ago

I guess humans should learn to not derive their identities from how well they play music, write texts, or paint pictures.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
Perhaps we should learn to derive our identity based on likes from social media instead? The problem is that a healthy society is one in which humans have the capability to create value and feel appreciated, not be 100% healthy meatbags having everything provided for them while they consume endless content. The only reason why this technology is being created is for short-term profit: if we were making decisions purely on what is good for us (presuming we had the wisdom to do so), we would be much more careful. Honestly, does anyone believe that the good for society is being considered at all when a researcher writes a paper? No, of course not, they are only concerned with increasing the size of their CV and satisfying their own amusement.
- amelius 4y ago
  I agree, but the problem is that if we don't push technology forward, then certainly China or Russia or Iran will. The responsibility is thus not with researchers, but instead with politicians.

helsontaveras18 4y ago

Every technology has changed how humans interact with the world and society at large. For me, I use ChatGPT as an AI pair programmer. In certain cases, it returns better results than Google. Because you can continue to ask it questions and ponder pros and cons of one approach over another, it really does feel like you have a competent engineer next to you. There are good use cases to GPT. Not everything it doom and gloom.

thunky 4y ago

> For example, imagine if ChatGPT gets so good that it can replace humans in nearly every type of writing -- we'll be drowned in AI writing and most writers will be out of a job. The real problem here isn't the tech. It's our inability to figure out how to sucessfully let tech do our job for us so we don't have to "work" anymore. There is no law of nature that demands every human "work" 40 hours a week or die hungry. If AI replaced every job on earth, and humans still had more than enough resources to live comfortably, what exactly would the problem be?

flashgordon 4y ago

So here is my wishful thinking. Let us say we do get drowned in AI generated ... stuff. Yes it will be indistinguishable from 99.99% of content. My hope is this would force us into local co-ops where we would value the human interaction and human art over the mass produced? Art for art's sake could be more valuable? Il still pay to listen to my Kid's choppy twinkle twinkle on the violin over any AI generated Paganini! Sure leave the hard boring problems to AI. My only worry is all this AI would be in the hands of a very few rich and powerful who would go revert to their desires of enslaving others. But that is no different today or when industrialization hit us :(

srcreigh 4y ago

My science fiction philosophy is that much of human thought is more like interacting with an objective, shared thought universe with other humans (living and dead) as well as gods and angels and stuff. As opposed to brains firing based on physical perception. Most of the scare of recent AI is about how it’s a big brain model therefore it will overtake us. This falls apart in my model, which is that we have little brains which see the thought universe, and that’s where most of the interesting stuff goes on. For AI to be even on par with humans, it’s not enough to simulate a brain. The computers would need a transmitter for talking to angels and dead humans, which they clearly don’t have. Even if a ChatGPT co-opts human input in real-time as a proxy to the thought universe, it’s not clear to me what the boundaries in this thought universe are for automation. Even in the physical universe we are severely lagging behind natural technology in many ways-can’t make cell sized machines, or new world level environments to live in. Stuff that we have that we can’t make artificial replacements of. The thought universe should have similar practical difficulties. Anyways, technology such as writing, radio, internet aren’t much different than ChatGPT in this sense. A new lens into the thought universe, but not itself capable of interacting with it apart from humans.

Terretta 4y ago

These ChatGPT sessions are something like an ink-blot test. You see the end of human society. Others see something that can't count backwards from 10. For now, this thing is a probabilities trick, similar to a Magic Eight Ball toy in function and impressiveness. These conversations are no more indicative of intelligence than "Signs point to yes" is indicative of paranormal activity. Both are clever. How impressed one should be with either, is an exercise entirely left to the reader.

0-_-0 4y ago
Isn't the human brain a probabilistic trick as well?
- mecsred 4y ago
  If you know the answer, you should write a paper. I think a few people are still working on that question.
- Terretta 4y ago
  FWIW, I pattern match that that's a reasonably likely explanation for my stimulus responses.
scarface74 4y ago
This definitely isn’t true. Like the other poster said, I’ve used this to generate complex regular expressions and it gave me sample Python code. I’ve also used it to create simple Python scripts to automate AWS stuff. I would definitely pay a monthly subscription for it.
- Terretta 4y ago
  I do pay a monthly subscription for it. It's a useful tool. So, surprisingly, is a Magic Eight Ball.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I don’t see a way to pay for it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zitterbewegung 4y ago

You can't really undo this the cat is already out of the bag and most likely we will have open source reimplementations of ChatGPT soon. I also see if we were to keep it secret doesn't really work. Once you even publish a paper describing the system immediately it is going to be reproduced. This happened with Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT is next. A good analogy would be the knowledge required to make a nuclear weapon. The scientific knowledge to understand how to do it would be in a high school physics class but the hard part is refining the nuclear material. Reproducing ChatGPT requires a large amount of expensive server time but once you have the model working it can be distributed very easily.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
What you can do is refuse to participate in it though. I used to be a researcher in a related field and I have decided to stop publishing anything that could remotely be used to further advancements in computer science and AI technology. I will never work in that field again because it is too detrimental to humanity. You can also refuse to support any such project financially -- if you can make decisions in a company, don't use it. Unfortunately, the situation of companies using new technology is like a prisoner's dilemma situation, so most people will use it if it maximizes their profit. That is why I think we need government regulation on a global scale .
- scrollaway 4y ago
  > I will never work in that field again because it is too detrimental to humanity. And that is a personal opinion. I'm of a different opinion, so this past year I started focusing more and more on AI technology. YMMV. Maybe it's detrimental, maybe it's the most powerful thing we've ever built. I'm old enough to have heard these arguments about the internet itself, and while the internet absolutely has downsides, hearing some people say that we'd be better off without just saddens me. We've made life better for many; made education more reachable than ever; littered the world with free high quality knowledge; solved incredible science-fiction like problems; made long distance real time face-to-face communication possible; etc. It'll be the same for AI. And it too will have downsides.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

Being a luddite about it isn‘t the answer. And it‘s better this is happening in public than behind closed doors. At a bigger scale humanity never ever asked itself: "We can, but should we?", it just did and that won‘t change.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
I actually believe being a luddite IS the answer. If enough people actually really cared about this and had the means, it could be destroyed. I think at some point it will become so bad that more and more people will realize how dangerous this is and fight back, at which point there will be luddite-like occurrences of mass deleting.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  I have a mindset where I prefer everyone to have a gun, instead of select few. If AIs get limited and only governments/researchers etc. have access, as usual the rich and powerful will control it. I don‘t want that. That might become a realistic scenario. Massive scale high performance compute & memory becoming a tightly controlled resource to avoid private creation of AI.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Butlerian Jihad
  - hxugufjfjf 4y ago
    I'm having a terrible case of The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon with people saying this the last couple of weeks, and I have never seen it explained.
    - Beaver117 4y ago
      Well Dune is pretty popular, many people have probably mentioned it. In the series humanity ends up going to a long war against sentient machines, which they win. All machines and computers are destroyed and laws are created so anyone who builds a computer, even as simple as a calculator, is sentenced to death.