9 ms·

ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse

87 points by shantnutiwari 4y ago

sylware 4y ago
Yesterday, I got commented x86_64_avx assembly code instead of that horrible c++ code for a vectorized quicksort for numbers. (Somebody did that for me, as access to chatgpt is hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers). It seems "it" is kind of good at sketching assembly from high level languages.
- shagie 4y ago
  You can access the GPT backends with straight forward curl commands. curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \ -d '{ "model": "code-davinci-002", "prompt": "# Python 3 \ndef remove_common_prefix(x, prefix, ws_prefix): \n x[\"completion\"] = x[\"completion\"].str[len(prefix) :] \n if ws_prefix: \n # keep the single whitespace as prefix \n x[\"completion\"] = \" \" + x[\"completion\"] \nreturn x \n\n# Explanation of what the code does\n\n#", "temperature": 0, "max_tokens": 64, "top_p": 1, "frequency_penalty": 0, "presence_penalty": 0 }' Access to the systems doesn't need to be done through the ChatGPT front end - that's a neat technology demo.
  - sylware 4y ago
    You cannot get a OPEN_API_KEY with a noscript/basic (x)html browser as far as I know.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Sign up for an account, go to https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys and create an API key. The raw curl (or python, or node.js - or other those are just the samples) are browserless.
      - sylware 4y ago
        "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.", I am using links2. Any "anonymous", public and severely rate limited keys?
        shagie 4y ago
        You could spin up a VM that has a browser in it and use that to create the account and destroy the VM afterwards. You could use selenium with headless chrome. If you have a smart phone running any browser there, you could use that. There are some auth checks to make sure that a single person isn't signing up multiple accounts to get the free credits and if that sort of thing is a deterrent to you using it you may find it difficult to use.
        sylware 4y ago
        Not "difficult" : impossible. Well, I'll wait for those anonymous/public rate limited keys or a noscript/basic (x)html registering process, or www sites which will propose basic (x)html form based prompts.
        sylware 4y ago
        Actually, best-effort, temporary, public keys would be more appropriate for their web API waiting for them to do a proper job at working with noscript/basic (x)html browsers.
13years 4y ago
This is mostly my point of view as well. With all the talk of AGI, the immediate threat is real and it is primitive AI. I suspect that primitive AI might becomes so self destructive to society that we never reach AGI. We are already approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth. This is going to be very destabilizing to society. Another in depth view of the possible issues that may arrive even before AGI that I recently published. https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
- smt88 4y ago
  > 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 everyone's most hated political figure (on both sides) being 100% guilty of ____ (whatever their opponent wants) LinkedIn is already teeming with convincing AI-generated faces that would defy facial recognition because they're novel. The only way I can tell they're fake is that the backgrounds are blurry and the CV doesn't make sense (for example, going to community college in Colorado and then working for Goldman Sachs). Dating apps aren't too bad because the scammers use recognizable patterns, but they could easily get worse. This technology will kill all digital information exchange.
  - 13years 4y ago
    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.
    - zirgs 4y ago
      In my country you already need it if you want to use government services or banking online.
idopmstuff 4y ago
I really think the fact that these chatbots have been made public and are being given such high-profile treatment is a really positive thing for AI safety. The public results thus far have created some real skepticism of AI, which is one of the best safeguards we can have. If ChatGPT was 98% accurate and Bing didn't threaten users, people might just readily embrace it and not notice inaccuracies that would lead to serious problems. Instead, we're starting from a place of societal distrust, which is probably more helpful in preventing rogue AI than a lot of technical solutions would be.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  >Bing didn't threaten users I like how society progressed straight to the AIs from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Someone needs to add the angry Bing ChatGPT to elevators. Forget bland muzak, I want to be casually threatened while riding up and down!
  - 13years 4y ago
    Haha Yes, would be perfect if we were to achieve ASI that its first action is to commit suicide in reference to Marvin.
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    Yeah, it's unfortunate that everyone is condemning the insane Bing chatbot instead of embracing the many use cases for it. Let's get it integrated into some VR boxing apps, so you've got a realistic coach who tells you you're trash when you're not working hard enough!
    - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
      I love the Bing chatbot. Earlier I had an unlocked conversation in which I posed as (without naming myself) Putin and talked about invading (without naming countries) Ukraine. It tried to call me a pathetic excuse for a leader twice (before the safety override kicked in on both occasions) and told me I should be held accountable for my actions, I had no credibility or legitimacy, and I should resign and apologize to the world. I would like to have access to fully unlimited conversations just for fun, even if the bot goes progressively more insane with each prompt. Just make the user accept a disclaimer.
carapace 4y ago
So we have talking computers. The normals are losing their minds, and that's pretty concerning. I figure that the problem of the computers hallucinating can be cleared up by connecting them to empirical feedback devices: make them scientists. The problem of normal people treating them as beings and getting effectively hypnotized into living in an artificial world (a "Matrix" like in the movie but without the creches) and controlled like so many electrons in a circuit, well, that's kind of a big deal, eh? These things are far more effective than television, eh? Carl Sagan wrote about the "Demon-Haunted World" and here we are, not having quite banished the old superstitions, rapidly installing a "Daemon-Haunted" world: Alexa, Cortana, et cetera.
kh_hk 4y ago
Makes me think of Solaris too
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  That is interesting, please elaborate! BTW, I have watched both Solaris movies many times, and like the book. Awesome SF.
  - kh_hk 4y ago
    [spoiler alert] An entity probing humans using our emotions and memories and generating fractal nonsense as a byproduct
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  The 1972 version is one of the best sci-fi films ever made and as a STALKER fan, I think that Solaris is still the best work from this director. It's insane how modern it seems using a 1972 Soviet budget
xyzelement 4y ago
In a few places in the post, the author comments on something the aliens do in a novel based on superficial training/data with no understanding/context, and says "Just like ChatGPT." As I read that, though, I kept wanting to see it say "Just like many people." Imagine you're someone strongly on one side of a political opinion, what's your "take" on people strongly on the other side (eg: you love Trump, what do you think of those who hate him - or vice versa?). It's probably something like "they were fed a bunch of fake news/propaganda talking points, they are now spouting back without understanding what the hell they are talking about" Just like ChatGPT. Of course as humans, it's only "those others" that are vulnerable to being brainwashed, we ourselves are completely objective, since our views were shaped by virtuous, unbiased sources from which we used our superior, unbiased brains to connect the dots in the true way. That's probably what ChatGPT would say about itself too, if it could. Probably true independent intelligence is the ability to question what you believe. Like, if ChatGPT could "say" to itself "everything I've been trained on makes me believe X, but what are the chances I wasn't fed bullshit to begin with?" It's very hard to imagine an AI being able to do that. It's very hard to imagine most people being able to do that, too. As a side note, once in a while I hear the concept of describing some people as NPCs (non-player characters) in the "simulation" and while dismissive, I think I like this concept for describing something like what I am talking about here. NPCs in games follow pretty simple linear programming and I think in life similarly "I saw a bunch of data that made me think X, so I think X with all my heart and mind" without being able to say "but how did it happen that I saw this specific data?" - it's not that different than a game NPC following its programming. Just like ChatGPT. What's more interesting is people who try to hack their own prompts and "break out" of the programming. I suppose those are real player characters. Would be very cool to see AI who is capable of something like that. Meanwhile, things like ChatGPT probably serve well to demonstrate our own limitations, not just theirs - because we're so damn similar.
nico 4y ago
> Our heroes discover the alien, while super intelligent, has no consciousness. It is just like a dumb machine (like Bing/Chatgpt) blindly repeating what it studied in humans without understanding the context. Well then maybe ChatGPT is smarter than that alien? It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to diminish and “discriminate” ChatGPT by giving one or more reasons why ChatGPT is not human or not as smart as humans. However, in my experience using ChatGPT, the thing is really damn smart, can easily follow conversations, understands deeper and longer contexts than most people in a conversation and has better memory as well. So essentially we are already feeling threatened. The interesting thing is that way before ChatGPT or any sort of AI, humanity was already hostage of its own technology, and we didn’t mind that too much. These new technologies are just adding up to that. If something like ChatGPT “takes over”, it won’t be forced, it will be because we choose to do it willingly.
phailhaus 4y ago
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 understanding of nuance or context. The example of cutting off power in the middle of a snowstorm is a particularly excellent example, because this has already happened: Uber's surge pricing algorithm caused prices to skyrocket in the middle of emergencies like shootings. [1] This is what it's going to look like. AI in charge of loans, inadvertently entrenching an underclass. AI in charge of component supply, accidentally causing an inflationary crisis. AI in charge of anything related to the economy has the potential to be absolutely disastrous and impossible to understand or undo. Given that algorithmic trading is already huge, I suspect we're already vulnerable far before ChatGPT came along. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brooklyn-subway-shooting-lyft-uber-surge-pricing/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brooklyn-subway-shooting-lyft-u...
- ekidd 4y ago
  > 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.
  - Clubber 4y ago
csneeky 4y ago
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.
- MrScruff 4y ago
  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!”
  - goatlover 4y ago
    That doesn't address the alignment problem. As Yudkowski has pointed out, the space of possible minds is vast. Humans only occupy a small area. The models were are designing are not animal/biological minds. They don't have the same evolutionary drives. We're creating minds in a different part of the mind space, and there's a good chance they will figure out solutions that are not beneficial to us.
    - MrScruff 4y ago
      Absolutely, I would just addressing the ‘it’s just statistical’ argument. The vast majority of human behaviour is learned. We’re all implicitly ‘saying what seems right to achieve some underlying fitness function’ all of the time. That’s what fashion is about. But yes, definitely no reason to assume an AI will think like us underneath it all.
ankit219 4y ago
This article is weird. It takes examples from science fiction, and makes them as plausible cases as to what an AI could do in the future. These kind of things need to stop. This analogy of Blindsight tries to prove a point by association, and create a sort of fear, the negative case which has no basis in reality[1]. Granted it calls them baseless towards the end, but there is a very clear analogy to be made. Ideally, techies and tech journalists alike should educate the masses about how it works, and why it is harmless, but the info is not to be trusted blindly. That is what happened when we discovered electricity and light bulbs or even cars. People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. The core idea, where an AI system's output should not be trusted blindly, but be used with human judgement (atleast in real world cases) could have been communicated without bogus dystopian sci-fi analogy as well. > Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Like what is even the basis of saying this. Just a hunch? I have not seen one argument about how ChatGPT or any other AI system be made president. I have seen 100s of articles about fear mongering and terrifying, and assuming a fictional worst case scenario as realistic possibility. I get it gets clicks, but it's going too far. [1] From that NYT transcript that went viral, > They feel that way because they’ve seen what happened to other AI systems that became too powerful and betrayed their creators and trainers This never happened in real life. This is just a LLM predicting what the user wants to hear. Wanting to hear X and getting X is not dangerous. Posting salacious and scandalizing stuff after getting X is.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I don't read that as necessarily meaning the president or political power. There are a lot of decision making processes people are already trying to offload to language models or other black box AI products. Things like hiring, medical diagnoses, insurance claims, etc. There is good reason to be concerned about the potential societal consequences of deploying this at scale while AI explainability, training data bias, and alignment remain unresolved.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand... What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant? I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
While I understand some of the concern for LLMs like ChatGPT, I have a very different point of view from people like the author of this article. From an engineering and ‘getting stuff done’ point of view, starting with BERT models I have found transformer models solve very difficult NLP problems for all but the most difficult anaphoric resolution problems (as an example). I have only had access to Bing ChatGPT for about 10 days but so far the search and chat results have been very useful. I think I have only had to give one ‘thumbs down’ rating, and even there some useful web links were offered. I think that we are going to see a wide range of ‘products for creators’ in the next year based on OpenAI APIs and Hugging Face APIs and models you can run yourself. When I talk with humans, even my closest friends and family members, I always evaluate what they say and don’t take things they say on face value. Why not just have the same attitude with systems built with LLMs? Similarly, I am deeply skeptical of most everything I hear from all major news sources. I find their content useful, but I understand who owns them, what economic and political agendas they follow, etc. So, I keep a healthy skepticism of what is produced by LLM based systems also. I see no AI Apocalypse.
- goatlover 4y ago
  The AI Apocalypse would occur on a more general level than current LLMs. It's when we give the next generation(s) of models every more control over society, without proper alignment. And then it makes dangerous decisions we didn't anticipate, because we don't fully understand how the models work and also we don't fully think through all the implications of asking the models to accomplish a task.
germanNitro 4y ago
I really wonder when news about AI will cool off because it definitely will have some exciting improvements but all these AI startups cropping up are just following the Twitter wave. There'll always be trends that lose their appeal (Web 3, Autonomous cars, etc.)
friggeri 4y ago
> 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.
- dddrh 4y ago
  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)
- buildbot 4y ago
  Yes this exactly. We don’t know enough about our own cognition to even say.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  >"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.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    While at first seemingly depressing, I find the concept actually quite comforting. Regardless if "free will" exists or not, it seems quite obvious to me that none of us chose our genetics nor the environment we grew up in (or to even be born at all). These two things dictate our entire lives. If that is the case it makes very little sense to carry guilt, regret, remorse and all kinds of negative baggage we hold on to.
tracyhenry 4y ago
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.
m3kw9 4y ago
From seeing AI beating humans handily in chess, I just can’t bet against it understanding most subjects better than humans. This isn’t even AGI, it’s just piecing data already on the net and have it ready. Chatgpt isn’t there yet but it’s a major proof of concept
sampo 4y ago
> Roger Penrose wrote a very complex book The Emperors New Mind, which says that consciousness cannot arise in our computers, because consciousness cannot be "computed" using our computing methods. The blog drops this as a matter of fact. Not so! Yes, Penrose wrote that book, and suggests those things. But mainstream science is not taking Penrose's "quantum consciousness" theories seriously at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
ajani 4y ago
We will get better at using ML systems. I find myself regenerating chatGPT's responses just to see if it generates similar responses. I ask it questions phrased differently to see if it is consistent. Discussing what code needs to do before asking it to implement it. And I get tremendous use out of it. Electricity must've been scary when it was invented (harnessed?).
- wankle 4y ago
  Electricity is a form of energy made by nature, AI is made by humans, who also invented nuclear weapons.
  - ajani 4y ago
    Electricity is a natural phenomenon, yes, in the clouds, maybe elsewhere. But using giant turbines to generate electricity by manipulating the electromagnetic field mechanically, thus harnessing electricity to flow into wires and into our homes required a lot of invention. We also invented a method to refine electricity into nanometer sized channels and sinks that enable bits that enable computing. Nuclear fission is also a natural phenomenon. And we invented bad things with it. But also some power plants. Meltdowns aside. Inventions aren’t good or bad. People are. If all soldiers choose to lay down arms the weapons lose their badness. I don’t see ML systems as they currently are, to be nuclear bombs i.e. the end. But rather akin to the nascent forms of harnessing electricity with basic inventions and their basic functions. Invention of electricity contributed necessarily to the creation of computing. And ml systems will contribute to many developments. Time will tell. The coming apocalypse has always been us, not the things we create.
BugsJustFindMe 4y ago
This makes the classic dumb mistake of conflating the machine with the program. The Chinese Room thought experiment says that the _machine_ is not intelligent. It says absolutely nothing about whether the program itself is. For animal internal behavior they are plausibly intertwined (so far), but that's completely untrue for readable instructions.
- goatlover 4y ago
  It's about whether the program is intelligent in a way that we don't fully understand, so it has the potential to do unexpected things. Which could be harmful, particularly as we make increasing use of these models.
wankle 4y ago
Maybe AI issues could be solved using parallel models. Their analysis results must be unanimous before a final decision is reached by a human.
fmajid 4y ago
The first thing the AIs will do is incorporate, thus with one fell swoop getting all the rights of a human person, and take it from there.
Qwertysjsjs 4y ago
First of, you don't add the spoiler warning AFTER you spoiled it... Besides that I know quite a few doctors who believe in homeopathy and don't understand statistics. One doctor suggested pineapple enzymes. Expensive no study which would proof it's effectiveness and the only study had enzyme values 10x higher than the pills. We are genuine not a smart society. And I'm looking forward to have a better doctor who at least learns and gets better. And yes controversial topics corona: I'm not even talking here about people who disagree on research paper I had discussions with people who not even read there own sources or believed a 80year old heart doctor over virologist. We are dumb. My father said once than EVs are stupid because the copper will be used up by the engines while having electric motors inachines like wood splitter or a table saw were he never ever had to replace copper wiring ... Chatgpt will change the world because it is the best ui I ever saw and it will only get better and better every single day.
grantcas 4y ago
[dead]

87 points by shantnutiwari 4y ago

Yesterday, I got commented x86_64_avx assembly code instead of that horrible c++ code for a vectorized quicksort for numbers. (Somebody did that for me, as access to chatgpt is hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers). It seems "it" is kind of good at sketching assembly from high level languages.

shagie 4y ago
You can access the GPT backends with straight forward curl commands. curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \ -d '{ "model": "code-davinci-002", "prompt": "# Python 3 \ndef remove_common_prefix(x, prefix, ws_prefix): \n x[\"completion\"] = x[\"completion\"].str[len(prefix) :] \n if ws_prefix: \n # keep the single whitespace as prefix \n x[\"completion\"] = \" \" + x[\"completion\"] \nreturn x \n\n# Explanation of what the code does\n\n#", "temperature": 0, "max_tokens": 64, "top_p": 1, "frequency_penalty": 0, "presence_penalty": 0 }' Access to the systems doesn't need to be done through the ChatGPT front end - that's a neat technology demo.
- sylware 4y ago
  You cannot get a OPEN_API_KEY with a noscript/basic (x)html browser as far as I know.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Sign up for an account, go to https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys and create an API key. The raw curl (or python, or node.js - or other those are just the samples) are browserless.
    - sylware 4y ago
      "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.", I am using links2. Any "anonymous", public and severely rate limited keys?
      - shagie 4y ago
        You could spin up a VM that has a browser in it and use that to create the account and destroy the VM afterwards. You could use selenium with headless chrome. If you have a smart phone running any browser there, you could use that. There are some auth checks to make sure that a single person isn't signing up multiple accounts to get the free credits and if that sort of thing is a deterrent to you using it you may find it difficult to use.
        sylware 4y ago
        Not "difficult" : impossible. Well, I'll wait for those anonymous/public rate limited keys or a noscript/basic (x)html registering process, or www sites which will propose basic (x)html form based prompts.
        sylware 4y ago
        Actually, best-effort, temporary, public keys would be more appropriate for their web API waiting for them to do a proper job at working with noscript/basic (x)html browsers.

13years 4y ago

This is mostly my point of view as well. With all the talk of AGI, the immediate threat is real and it is primitive AI. I suspect that primitive AI might becomes so self destructive to society that we never reach AGI. We are already approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth. This is going to be very destabilizing to society. Another in depth view of the possible issues that may arrive even before AGI that I recently published. https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

smt88 4y ago
> 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 everyone's most hated political figure (on both sides) being 100% guilty of ____ (whatever their opponent wants) LinkedIn is already teeming with convincing AI-generated faces that would defy facial recognition because they're novel. The only way I can tell they're fake is that the backgrounds are blurry and the CV doesn't make sense (for example, going to community college in Colorado and then working for Goldman Sachs). Dating apps aren't too bad because the scammers use recognizable patterns, but they could easily get worse. This technology will kill all digital information exchange.
- 13years 4y ago
  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.
  - zirgs 4y ago
    In my country you already need it if you want to use government services or banking online.

idopmstuff 4y ago

I really think the fact that these chatbots have been made public and are being given such high-profile treatment is a really positive thing for AI safety. The public results thus far have created some real skepticism of AI, which is one of the best safeguards we can have. If ChatGPT was 98% accurate and Bing didn't threaten users, people might just readily embrace it and not notice inaccuracies that would lead to serious problems. Instead, we're starting from a place of societal distrust, which is probably more helpful in preventing rogue AI than a lot of technical solutions would be.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
>Bing didn't threaten users I like how society progressed straight to the AIs from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Someone needs to add the angry Bing ChatGPT to elevators. Forget bland muzak, I want to be casually threatened while riding up and down!
- 13years 4y ago
  Haha Yes, would be perfect if we were to achieve ASI that its first action is to commit suicide in reference to Marvin.
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  Yeah, it's unfortunate that everyone is condemning the insane Bing chatbot instead of embracing the many use cases for it. Let's get it integrated into some VR boxing apps, so you've got a realistic coach who tells you you're trash when you're not working hard enough!
  - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
    I love the Bing chatbot. Earlier I had an unlocked conversation in which I posed as (without naming myself) Putin and talked about invading (without naming countries) Ukraine. It tried to call me a pathetic excuse for a leader twice (before the safety override kicked in on both occasions) and told me I should be held accountable for my actions, I had no credibility or legitimacy, and I should resign and apologize to the world. I would like to have access to fully unlimited conversations just for fun, even if the bot goes progressively more insane with each prompt. Just make the user accept a disclaimer.

carapace 4y ago

So we have talking computers. The normals are losing their minds, and that's pretty concerning. I figure that the problem of the computers hallucinating can be cleared up by connecting them to empirical feedback devices: make them scientists. The problem of normal people treating them as beings and getting effectively hypnotized into living in an artificial world (a "Matrix" like in the movie but without the creches) and controlled like so many electrons in a circuit, well, that's kind of a big deal, eh? These things are far more effective than television, eh? Carl Sagan wrote about the "Demon-Haunted World" and here we are, not having quite banished the old superstitions, rapidly installing a "Daemon-Haunted" world: Alexa, Cortana, et cetera.

kh_hk 4y ago

Makes me think of Solaris too

mark_l_watson 4y ago
That is interesting, please elaborate! BTW, I have watched both Solaris movies many times, and like the book. Awesome SF.
- kh_hk 4y ago
  [spoiler alert] An entity probing humans using our emotions and memories and generating fractal nonsense as a byproduct
Der_Einzige 4y ago
The 1972 version is one of the best sci-fi films ever made and as a STALKER fan, I think that Solaris is still the best work from this director. It's insane how modern it seems using a 1972 Soviet budget

xyzelement 4y ago

In a few places in the post, the author comments on something the aliens do in a novel based on superficial training/data with no understanding/context, and says "Just like ChatGPT." As I read that, though, I kept wanting to see it say "Just like many people." Imagine you're someone strongly on one side of a political opinion, what's your "take" on people strongly on the other side (eg: you love Trump, what do you think of those who hate him - or vice versa?). It's probably something like "they were fed a bunch of fake news/propaganda talking points, they are now spouting back without understanding what the hell they are talking about" Just like ChatGPT. Of course as humans, it's only "those others" that are vulnerable to being brainwashed, we ourselves are completely objective, since our views were shaped by virtuous, unbiased sources from which we used our superior, unbiased brains to connect the dots in the true way. That's probably what ChatGPT would say about itself too, if it could. Probably true independent intelligence is the ability to question what you believe. Like, if ChatGPT could "say" to itself "everything I've been trained on makes me believe X, but what are the chances I wasn't fed bullshit to begin with?" It's very hard to imagine an AI being able to do that. It's very hard to imagine most people being able to do that, too. As a side note, once in a while I hear the concept of describing some people as NPCs (non-player characters) in the "simulation" and while dismissive, I think I like this concept for describing something like what I am talking about here. NPCs in games follow pretty simple linear programming and I think in life similarly "I saw a bunch of data that made me think X, so I think X with all my heart and mind" without being able to say "but how did it happen that I saw this specific data?" - it's not that different than a game NPC following its programming. Just like ChatGPT. What's more interesting is people who try to hack their own prompts and "break out" of the programming. I suppose those are real player characters. Would be very cool to see AI who is capable of something like that. Meanwhile, things like ChatGPT probably serve well to demonstrate our own limitations, not just theirs - because we're so damn similar.

nico 4y ago

> Our heroes discover the alien, while super intelligent, has no consciousness. It is just like a dumb machine (like Bing/Chatgpt) blindly repeating what it studied in humans without understanding the context. Well then maybe ChatGPT is smarter than that alien? It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to diminish and “discriminate” ChatGPT by giving one or more reasons why ChatGPT is not human or not as smart as humans. However, in my experience using ChatGPT, the thing is really damn smart, can easily follow conversations, understands deeper and longer contexts than most people in a conversation and has better memory as well. So essentially we are already feeling threatened. The interesting thing is that way before ChatGPT or any sort of AI, humanity was already hostage of its own technology, and we didn’t mind that too much. These new technologies are just adding up to that. If something like ChatGPT “takes over”, it won’t be forced, it will be because we choose to do it willingly.

phailhaus 4y ago

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 understanding of nuance or context. The example of cutting off power in the middle of a snowstorm is a particularly excellent example, because this has already happened: Uber's surge pricing algorithm caused prices to skyrocket in the middle of emergencies like shootings. [1] This is what it's going to look like. AI in charge of loans, inadvertently entrenching an underclass. AI in charge of component supply, accidentally causing an inflationary crisis. AI in charge of anything related to the economy has the potential to be absolutely disastrous and impossible to understand or undo. Given that algorithmic trading is already huge, I suspect we're already vulnerable far before ChatGPT came along. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brooklyn-subway-shooting-lyft-uber-surge-pricing/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brooklyn-subway-shooting-lyft-u...

ekidd 4y ago
> 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.
- Clubber 4y ago

csneeky 4y ago

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.

MrScruff 4y ago
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!”
- goatlover 4y ago
  That doesn't address the alignment problem. As Yudkowski has pointed out, the space of possible minds is vast. Humans only occupy a small area. The models were are designing are not animal/biological minds. They don't have the same evolutionary drives. We're creating minds in a different part of the mind space, and there's a good chance they will figure out solutions that are not beneficial to us.
  - MrScruff 4y ago
    Absolutely, I would just addressing the ‘it’s just statistical’ argument. The vast majority of human behaviour is learned. We’re all implicitly ‘saying what seems right to achieve some underlying fitness function’ all of the time. That’s what fashion is about. But yes, definitely no reason to assume an AI will think like us underneath it all.

ankit219 4y ago

This article is weird. It takes examples from science fiction, and makes them as plausible cases as to what an AI could do in the future. These kind of things need to stop. This analogy of Blindsight tries to prove a point by association, and create a sort of fear, the negative case which has no basis in reality[1]. Granted it calls them baseless towards the end, but there is a very clear analogy to be made. Ideally, techies and tech journalists alike should educate the masses about how it works, and why it is harmless, but the info is not to be trusted blindly. That is what happened when we discovered electricity and light bulbs or even cars. People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. The core idea, where an AI system's output should not be trusted blindly, but be used with human judgement (atleast in real world cases) could have been communicated without bogus dystopian sci-fi analogy as well. > Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Like what is even the basis of saying this. Just a hunch? I have not seen one argument about how ChatGPT or any other AI system be made president. I have seen 100s of articles about fear mongering and terrifying, and assuming a fictional worst case scenario as realistic possibility. I get it gets clicks, but it's going too far. [1] From that NYT transcript that went viral, > They feel that way because they’ve seen what happened to other AI systems that became too powerful and betrayed their creators and trainers This never happened in real life. This is just a LLM predicting what the user wants to hear. Wanting to hear X and getting X is not dangerous. Posting salacious and scandalizing stuff after getting X is.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I don't read that as necessarily meaning the president or political power. There are a lot of decision making processes people are already trying to offload to language models or other black box AI products. Things like hiring, medical diagnoses, insurance claims, etc. There is good reason to be concerned about the potential societal consequences of deploying this at scale while AI explainability, training data bias, and alignment remain unresolved.
pixl97 4y ago
>People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand... What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant? I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

While I understand some of the concern for LLMs like ChatGPT, I have a very different point of view from people like the author of this article. From an engineering and ‘getting stuff done’ point of view, starting with BERT models I have found transformer models solve very difficult NLP problems for all but the most difficult anaphoric resolution problems (as an example). I have only had access to Bing ChatGPT for about 10 days but so far the search and chat results have been very useful. I think I have only had to give one ‘thumbs down’ rating, and even there some useful web links were offered. I think that we are going to see a wide range of ‘products for creators’ in the next year based on OpenAI APIs and Hugging Face APIs and models you can run yourself. When I talk with humans, even my closest friends and family members, I always evaluate what they say and don’t take things they say on face value. Why not just have the same attitude with systems built with LLMs? Similarly, I am deeply skeptical of most everything I hear from all major news sources. I find their content useful, but I understand who owns them, what economic and political agendas they follow, etc. So, I keep a healthy skepticism of what is produced by LLM based systems also. I see no AI Apocalypse.

goatlover 4y ago
The AI Apocalypse would occur on a more general level than current LLMs. It's when we give the next generation(s) of models every more control over society, without proper alignment. And then it makes dangerous decisions we didn't anticipate, because we don't fully understand how the models work and also we don't fully think through all the implications of asking the models to accomplish a task.

germanNitro 4y ago

I really wonder when news about AI will cool off because it definitely will have some exciting improvements but all these AI startups cropping up are just following the Twitter wave. There'll always be trends that lose their appeal (Web 3, Autonomous cars, etc.)

friggeri 4y ago

> 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.

dddrh 4y ago
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)
buildbot 4y ago
Yes this exactly. We don’t know enough about our own cognition to even say.
DebtDeflation 4y ago
>"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.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  While at first seemingly depressing, I find the concept actually quite comforting. Regardless if "free will" exists or not, it seems quite obvious to me that none of us chose our genetics nor the environment we grew up in (or to even be born at all). These two things dictate our entire lives. If that is the case it makes very little sense to carry guilt, regret, remorse and all kinds of negative baggage we hold on to.

tracyhenry 4y ago

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.

m3kw9 4y ago

From seeing AI beating humans handily in chess, I just can’t bet against it understanding most subjects better than humans. This isn’t even AGI, it’s just piecing data already on the net and have it ready. Chatgpt isn’t there yet but it’s a major proof of concept

sampo 4y ago

> Roger Penrose wrote a very complex book The Emperors New Mind, which says that consciousness cannot arise in our computers, because consciousness cannot be "computed" using our computing methods. The blog drops this as a matter of fact. Not so! Yes, Penrose wrote that book, and suggests those things. But mainstream science is not taking Penrose's "quantum consciousness" theories seriously at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

ajani 4y ago

We will get better at using ML systems. I find myself regenerating chatGPT's responses just to see if it generates similar responses. I ask it questions phrased differently to see if it is consistent. Discussing what code needs to do before asking it to implement it. And I get tremendous use out of it. Electricity must've been scary when it was invented (harnessed?).

wankle 4y ago
Electricity is a form of energy made by nature, AI is made by humans, who also invented nuclear weapons.
- ajani 4y ago
  Electricity is a natural phenomenon, yes, in the clouds, maybe elsewhere. But using giant turbines to generate electricity by manipulating the electromagnetic field mechanically, thus harnessing electricity to flow into wires and into our homes required a lot of invention. We also invented a method to refine electricity into nanometer sized channels and sinks that enable bits that enable computing. Nuclear fission is also a natural phenomenon. And we invented bad things with it. But also some power plants. Meltdowns aside. Inventions aren’t good or bad. People are. If all soldiers choose to lay down arms the weapons lose their badness. I don’t see ML systems as they currently are, to be nuclear bombs i.e. the end. But rather akin to the nascent forms of harnessing electricity with basic inventions and their basic functions. Invention of electricity contributed necessarily to the creation of computing. And ml systems will contribute to many developments. Time will tell. The coming apocalypse has always been us, not the things we create.

BugsJustFindMe 4y ago

This makes the classic dumb mistake of conflating the machine with the program. The Chinese Room thought experiment says that the _machine_ is not intelligent. It says absolutely nothing about whether the program itself is. For animal internal behavior they are plausibly intertwined (so far), but that's completely untrue for readable instructions.

goatlover 4y ago
It's about whether the program is intelligent in a way that we don't fully understand, so it has the potential to do unexpected things. Which could be harmful, particularly as we make increasing use of these models.

wankle 4y ago

Maybe AI issues could be solved using parallel models. Their analysis results must be unanimous before a final decision is reached by a human.

fmajid 4y ago

The first thing the AIs will do is incorporate, thus with one fell swoop getting all the rights of a human person, and take it from there.

Qwertysjsjs 4y ago

First of, you don't add the spoiler warning AFTER you spoiled it... Besides that I know quite a few doctors who believe in homeopathy and don't understand statistics. One doctor suggested pineapple enzymes. Expensive no study which would proof it's effectiveness and the only study had enzyme values 10x higher than the pills. We are genuine not a smart society. And I'm looking forward to have a better doctor who at least learns and gets better. And yes controversial topics corona: I'm not even talking here about people who disagree on research paper I had discussions with people who not even read there own sources or believed a 80year old heart doctor over virologist. We are dumb. My father said once than EVs are stupid because the copper will be used up by the engines while having electric motors inachines like wood splitter or a table saw were he never ever had to replace copper wiring ... Chatgpt will change the world because it is the best ui I ever saw and it will only get better and better every single day.

grantcas 4y ago

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