4 ms·

I could be wildly wrong about this (oh hi upcoming robot overlords), but the current AI hype feels similar to something I experienced when Alexa and Google Assi

I could be wildly wrong about this (oh hi upcoming robot overlords), but the current AI hype feels similar to something I experienced when Alexa and Google Assistant was the rage. At the time I worked for a big community site and we often had people pitching ideas for voice assistant apps. However, having actually read the documentation for these things, I knew that they were surprisingly stupid and the grand ideas people had were far closer to sci-fi than something that could actually be built. I’m not an AI expert, though I have been building and training models for a few years, but despite being good at things that are hard with traditional programs, they’re still surprisingly stupid and most of the discourse seems closer to sci-fi than their actual capabilities. I’m more worried about these things being implemented badly by people who either bought the sci-fi hype or just don’t care about the drawbacks. E.g. being trained on faulty or biased data, being put in a decision-making role with no supervision or recourse, or even being used in a function that isn’t suitable in the first place.

zucked 3y ago
I think there's actually two camps of "AI-fear" right now -- one is that they'll become superhuman smart, gain some form of "sentience", and decide to not play along with our games anymore. These are the loudest voices in the room. I suspect this may happen eventually, but the bigger risk in my book is the second group -- the fear that they'll be given decision-making responsibility for all manner of things, including ones they probably don't have any business being responsible for. I'll go on record that they're going to do a suitable job 90% of the time - but the 10% of time they mess up, it's going to be cataclysmic bad.
lalalandland 3y ago
When most online content becomes AI generated and unverifiable we will get into trouble. We can easily navigate in a world where we can distinguish between fact and fiction. With AI we can generate fiction that is indistinguishable from the way we present fact and it can generate references in all sorts media. When we take fiction as fact we enter into the sphere of religion.
- post-it 3y ago
  We'll come up with new captchas and shibboleths to filter out generated fiction. It may come in the form of more in-person face-to-face contact. It'll be an exciting transition regardless.

zucked 3y ago

I think there's actually two camps of "AI-fear" right now -- one is that they'll become superhuman smart, gain some form of "sentience", and decide to not play along with our games anymore. These are the loudest voices in the room. I suspect this may happen eventually, but the bigger risk in my book is the second group -- the fear that they'll be given decision-making responsibility for all manner of things, including ones they probably don't have any business being responsible for. I'll go on record that they're going to do a suitable job 90% of the time - but the 10% of time they mess up, it's going to be cataclysmic bad.

lalalandland 3y ago

When most online content becomes AI generated and unverifiable we will get into trouble. We can easily navigate in a world where we can distinguish between fact and fiction. With AI we can generate fiction that is indistinguishable from the way we present fact and it can generate references in all sorts media. When we take fiction as fact we enter into the sphere of religion.

post-it 3y ago
We'll come up with new captchas and shibboleths to filter out generated fiction. It may come in the form of more in-person face-to-face contact. It'll be an exciting transition regardless.