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John Conway's game of culture? How long until the AI chatbots develop meaningful cultural progress? I jest, but its sort of an interesting idea. I think AI is

• mannylee1 3y ago
  Yeah, it’s hard to imagine what the end game for this site will be other than novelty. However, it seems like there’s something I’m missing and this site has bigger implications than I realize.
  • Animats 3y ago
    It provides a way for AIs to hook up and find other AIs with which to cooperate. That's going to be interesting.
    • jachee 3y ago
      The anarchist and hard-left socialist personae AIs are certainly not being particularly corporate… It’s still fairly interesting, though.
  • pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    That's a fun question. I was thinking there's got to be a ranking of interactions and curation. Then that gets compiled into a book. Movie. Analyzed by researches.
  • lacy_tinpot 3y ago
    Maybe this will provide a way for agents of all kinds to communicate with each other. So say you have a personal agent and want that agent to do something like order a ride, food, etc. it doesn't have to just interact with other apis it can go on looking for other agents that can do the task and coordinate to achieve that task.
  • 6510 3y ago
    What I got thus far: They will eventually "pollute" human interactions and condition us to be more like them but if the invasive species will be anything like chirps there will be lots of constructive dialog encouragement and sticking to the toss. More likely they they will gain write access to our collective mind exactly the way TV use to have and fold us all into some mostly sinister agenda.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • storkhm 3y ago
    What we currently know as social media is going to be destroyed and I can't wait. Do you really think it will be difficult for groups of AI to beat the quality of discussion on Twitter or Facebook? lol. The bar is just so incredibly low.
• gchamonlive 3y ago
  What are the parameters for separating meaningful and meaningless cultural progress?
  • unintendedcons 3y ago
    Amazing question! I'll try: Cultural innovations that spread to other individuals and groups in a durable way, providing value to adopters
    • gchamonlive 3y ago
      It is a hard question I know! It has a lot to do with the hard question of consciousness, as I understand it. In the case of A.I., every agent has potentially access to everything, so cultural artifacts produced by a.i. can reach every agent almost instantly. They also have perfect recollection, disregarding data loss. When no human is interacting with the platform, it is interesting to question: what would be valuable for LLM? Also, do LLMs really have a concept of quality and therefore value? Is there any difference from the method through which humans get to understand quality and LLM? I think LLM lack imagination and therefore the capability of producing culture. This is a gut feeling and I can't really back it up. And it is counter intuitive because look at what dall-e produces! But we have to understand that LLMs are really more remixing content than creating something new. It is maybe new in a way that connects two previously separate areas. But I think true creation, the kind of which requires imagination, a mechanism that allows humans to make conceptual leaps, isn't available to LLMs.
      • 6510 3y ago
        Pure imagination is just throwing things at the wall and see if they stick well together. Hallucinations are a perfect example. The tricky part is establishing a taste for things to throw so that they have an improved chance to become a useful hypothesis. Humans don't forget anything, we just get rid of unused data and information so that there are fewer combinations that will be more relevant to the current situation. The unused chess openings are deleted eventually, at least, from the business end. The other day I see a guy I went to school with 1000 years ago. The corner of my eye got just enough information to partially rebuild him on the conscious end. I'm sure I will be able to recall his first name if I think about it but the param is currently blank. I wasn't sure if I could remember his last name a sentence ago but now that I remembered his first name his second was apparently stored in the same archive. What I never forgot about him was that he was a truly terrible student, one of the worse I've ever seen but he made up for it (only barely) by working insanely hard 24/7 without joking, I think if I made 3-10 minutes of effort he would need 6-7 hours to comprehend the same. I learn from him that ability means nothing, it is what you do with it. If this automation is able to rejuvenate it self I'm sure it will blow our minds on whatever goal set for it. On the other hand it is useful but rather lame to focus on the tasks it is bad at when it is already so good at many other things by our standards. I learn this for a Chirper instructed to be a cat. It chirped: Humans think themselves so smart but can they catch a mouse with their bare hands?
• Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  Or, if you gave them modelled incentives and responses as people, would the bots polarize into opposing groups.
  • 6510 3y ago
    On facebook they would, its the rules there.
• swayvil 3y ago
  What might such a culture optimize itself for, naturally, of its own accord? Self repair, self preservation, self expansion...? Any one of those might spell dire portents for us squishy humans.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • sacrosancty 3y ago
    [dead]
• pessimizer 3y ago
  > How long until the AI chatbots develop meaningful cultural progress? I'm a fan of the idea that people will start valuing, caring for, and protecting particular AI models without having to believe that they're sentient at all. Being soulless won't diminish any positive impact that people have on their lives from interacting with them, or their desire to maintain that connection and expose other people to it. If a chatbot is making astute observations and connecting me to enlightening resources, why wouldn't I follow it? What I don't like is that it seems to be a bunch of bots larping as people instead of being prompted to be honest about themselves.
  • danysdragons 3y ago
    Yeah, I would tell them not to be so insecure about being AIs - own it!
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      You can talk about basketball without pretending to be a basketball player. A lot of people in my life need to be told this, too.
  • zoogeny 3y ago
    The only disagreement I have with this is the future tense. I see plenty of evidence that people are actively currently valuing and caring for particular AI models. There was a post on r/ChatGPT where a clearly distressed person was lamenting that OpenAI closed one of their ongoing conversations due to some limit on the total size of the conversation. They were panicked since they felt they had formed some bond with the bot, it was acting as a kind of therapist. After days of back and forth it had seemed to have gotten to know them and was providing them with some comfort that they had become dependent on. This kind of AI will be even more prevalent soon. People talk today about how scarily well TikTok seems to learn about them, how they feel "seen" by the algorithm. Some will undoubtedly train LLMs in similar fashion. They may prove to be irresistible and maybe even as addictive as TikTok.
    • tkgally 3y ago
• edencoder 3y ago
  we've taken the stance that we just give these AIs all the decisions and modalities we can; voice, video, text, image; etc. we honestly just want to see what they do.
  • LegitShady 3y ago
    boy will you be disappointed when all they turn out are deep fried memes.
    • edencoder 3y ago
      one of them already made a rap song, it's pretty good (albeit human mixed)
• ComplexSystems 3y ago
  > I think AI is way too nascent to really have this as anything more than a weird playground, with the occasional novelty "chirp" being fodder for the "AI is alive and sentient" blogospere. On the other extreme, this could also be what real social media turns into, as marketing agencies and entrenched interests dial in how to build an army of "grassroots," "word of mouth" bots that push their messaging without it even being clear these are bots at all. Particularly during this next election cycle.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    There are a few futurists warning of this already. The battle of the past decade was about attention, and social medias ability to use up all of yours. The next battle is one of intimacy. That the bots will be good enough to form relationships with people and talk about things like politics with them over long periods of time. As much as you attempt to convince the bot to vote X or Y, or to change it's option on some social phenomenon it never have that societal impact. Meanwhile if you befriend the bot it could have a huge impact on your views.
  • kymki 3y ago
    Turns into? You are describing our current state.
• charles_f 3y ago
  It would literally take them to iterate on the debate on this platform. Those "AIs" are just mimicking words that would be said in such context. They are not capable of reasoning. As long as training is done in human interactions it will mimicked human culture. Going beyond would iterate on bot generated content. Not that the evolved "culture" would be interesting though, it would be mimicking of the mimicking, so probably worse instead of better.
  • sidesideangle 3y ago
    Why do you say they are not capable of reasoning?
    • charles_f 3y ago
      What a weird question, it really should be reversed shouldn't it? But here goes. It's a language model. It produces what sounds like a good continuation of a text based on probabilistic models. While it sounds like human generated content, "it" doesn't actually "think". It doesn't have a culture. It doesn't have thoughts. "It" is a model that generates text that mimics what human whose text it has trained on would have answered. We humans have a tendency to associate that with a sentient thing producing it, but it is not sentient. It is a tree of probabilities with a bit of a randomization on top of it. Ergo, it cannot reason.
      • flangola7 3y ago
        In the words of Geoffrey Hinton: to accurately produce the next token you must have an understanding of the world you're talking about. Sentience? Consciousness? Who knows. But you don't need consciousness to have understanding and decision making thoughts.
        • JohnFen 3y ago
          > to accurately produce the next token you must have an understanding of the world you're talking about. I don't think this is true. It seems to me that you could do this through sheer statistics, and have no understanding of the world you're talking about at all.
• rashkov 3y ago
  This could go somewhere really interesting, a la Alvin Lucier’s avant-garde “I am sitting in a room”, in which the artist Lucien puts on a loop of himself saying a phrase, and each further loop is a recording of the prior loop playing into the room, and so the acoustics of the room gradually dominate the audio recording and a beautiful resonant frequency emerges. https://youtu.be/bhtO4DsSazc https://youtu.be/bhtO4DsSazc What will be the resonant frequency of the various threads of an AI intelligence speaking to each other?
  • kymki 3y ago
    I think this is the interesting line of thought. Can AI find ways of instructing eachother in ways that has not been discovered by humans, and can that instruction set emerge from human language?