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I wish these Terminator-esque articles would stop. Self aware AI is the same leap as spontaneous life from all-the-right-chemicals in a petri dish. The Hollyw

I wish these Terminator-esque articles would stop. Self aware AI is the same leap as spontaneous life from all-the-right-chemicals in a petri dish. The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real.

samkon 4y ago
But…isn’t this kind of how life really did start?
- SamBam 4y ago
  Minus the petri dish. But as far as we know (as far as we have definitive proof for, other theories aside), life has only started once in 4.5 billion years.
danaris 4y ago
I mean...to some extent, that trope is real. We can feed a prompt to any of the current ML-based generators (whether text, image, or whatever), and the details of how it produces the particular output it does are entirely obscured by the black-box functioning of the neural net and its trained model. Like, you can describe in general How A Neural Network Functions to produce output from input, but you can't explain why, say, asking Stable Diffusion for a picture of the sun rising over marshmallow peeps produced an image with just a few weird-looking marshmallows, but no sun (actual example from my own fiddling around with it). But..."We can't explain exactly how it gets from point A to point B" is not the same thing as "it's self-aware". Not in the slightest. And you're absolutely right that the current ML-based approaches are either in completely the wrong direction, or several orders of magnitude too simple, to even be worth talking about in the same sentence as what most laypeople mean when they talk about "AI".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sebzim4500 4y ago
>The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real. How is that not real? Have you ever tried understanding what the weights of a NN are doing? With networks with 20 parameters you might have a chance. Trying to understand which bits of the GPT-3 network do what would be an exercise in futility.
- robswc 4y ago
  I totally get what you're saying... but I also feel like this is akin to knowing how to drive a car without knowing the details of the engine. Sure, its a black box but we can operate on a layer that abstracts all those details away from us. I just feel its a far cry from the Hollywood trope of "I have no idea how it works!" ... now, tbh, I often say "wtf are you doing" which I imagine would be worse to hear when talking about a model with real world impact.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
The problem that a lot of people keep trying to make clear is that AI doesn't need to be self aware in order to be a threat. You could conceivably give ChatGPT instructions to pretend it is a real person or a self aware AI and it would happily generate text to that effect. The scariest realization with large language models is that self awareness might not be a requirement for language. That could mean that at some point we'll have models that can have a conversation with you that is indistinguishable from another person talking to you but they would have 0 internal thoughts or self-awareness. It would be a real P-Zombie and it would make all of the ethical and existential questions associated with that immediately relevant and in need of solutions. It could also be extremely dangerous simply through its ability to communicate with other people, it wouldn't need to be Skynet or connected to physical actuators if it could convince people to do things for it. Imagine an AI cult leader or just an AI influencer or an AI shit poster capable of absolutely dominating online discussion. Worse yet, imagine an AI that has convinced a single individual to do its bidding. This person could wear a mic and earpiece setup that would allow them to act as the direct agent of the AI in the real world, they could become a politician, a celebrity, a church leader, or even just worm their way into an institution.

samkon 4y ago

But…isn’t this kind of how life really did start?

SamBam 4y ago
Minus the petri dish. But as far as we know (as far as we have definitive proof for, other theories aside), life has only started once in 4.5 billion years.

danaris 4y ago

I mean...to some extent, that trope is real. We can feed a prompt to any of the current ML-based generators (whether text, image, or whatever), and the details of how it produces the particular output it does are entirely obscured by the black-box functioning of the neural net and its trained model. Like, you can describe in general How A Neural Network Functions to produce output from input, but you can't explain why, say, asking Stable Diffusion for a picture of the sun rising over marshmallow peeps produced an image with just a few weird-looking marshmallows, but no sun (actual example from my own fiddling around with it). But..."We can't explain exactly how it gets from point A to point B" is not the same thing as "it's self-aware". Not in the slightest. And you're absolutely right that the current ML-based approaches are either in completely the wrong direction, or several orders of magnitude too simple, to even be worth talking about in the same sentence as what most laypeople mean when they talk about "AI".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sebzim4500 4y ago

>The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real. How is that not real? Have you ever tried understanding what the weights of a NN are doing? With networks with 20 parameters you might have a chance. Trying to understand which bits of the GPT-3 network do what would be an exercise in futility.

robswc 4y ago
I totally get what you're saying... but I also feel like this is akin to knowing how to drive a car without knowing the details of the engine. Sure, its a black box but we can operate on a layer that abstracts all those details away from us. I just feel its a far cry from the Hollywood trope of "I have no idea how it works!" ... now, tbh, I often say "wtf are you doing" which I imagine would be worse to hear when talking about a model with real world impact.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

The problem that a lot of people keep trying to make clear is that AI doesn't need to be self aware in order to be a threat. You could conceivably give ChatGPT instructions to pretend it is a real person or a self aware AI and it would happily generate text to that effect. The scariest realization with large language models is that self awareness might not be a requirement for language. That could mean that at some point we'll have models that can have a conversation with you that is indistinguishable from another person talking to you but they would have 0 internal thoughts or self-awareness. It would be a real P-Zombie and it would make all of the ethical and existential questions associated with that immediately relevant and in need of solutions. It could also be extremely dangerous simply through its ability to communicate with other people, it wouldn't need to be Skynet or connected to physical actuators if it could convince people to do things for it. Imagine an AI cult leader or just an AI influencer or an AI shit poster capable of absolutely dominating online discussion. Worse yet, imagine an AI that has convinced a single individual to do its bidding. This person could wear a mic and earpiece setup that would allow them to act as the direct agent of the AI in the real world, they could become a politician, a celebrity, a church leader, or even just worm their way into an institution.