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The thought of my children being put to bed by a machine is horrifying. Then again, perhaps this is better than many kids have. Shudder.

clbrmbr 3y ago
And then the wedding speech. What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? This is supposed to be a productivity enhancer, not a way to outsource the most meaningful applications of human language…
- skepticATX 3y ago
  > What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? I know this is rhetorical, but luckily we don't have to speculate. OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it. This is not me passing judgement on whether said philosophy is right or wrong, but it does exist and it's not hidden.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    >OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it. Do you have evidence for this? I know two people who work at OpenAI and I don't think they have much in common philosophically.
    - skepticATX 3y ago
      > It’s not fair to call OpenAI a cult, but when I asked several of the company’s top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn’t believe AGI was truly coming—and that its arrival would mark one of the greatest moments in human history—most executives didn’t think so. Why would a nonbeliever want to work here? they wondered. The assumption is that the workforce—now at approximately 500, though it might have grown since you began reading this paragraph—has self-selected to include only the faithful. At the very least, as Altman puts it, once you get hired, it seems inevitable that you’ll be drawn into the spell. From https://archive.ph/3zSz6 https://archive.ph/3zSz6. Of course there is much more evidence - just follow OpenAI employees on Twitter to see for yourself.
      - sebzim4500 3y ago
        >I asked several of the company’s top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn’t believe AGI was truly coming—and that its arrival would mark one of the greatest moments in human history—most executives didn’t think so. No shit? How many people worked on the apollo program and believed that (i) Getting to the moon is impossible or (ii) Landing on the moon is no big deal
        skepticATX 3y ago
        It is notable considering that there are plenty of excellent researchers who don’t believe that AGI is imminent. OpenAI is also openly transhumanist based on comments from Sam, Ilya, and others. Again, many excellent researchers don’t hold transhumanist beliefs.
        sebzim4500 3y ago
        It is definitely not the case that all OpenAI employees are transhumanist. It is probably the case that they all believe AGI is possible, because otherwise they would not work at a company whose stated goal is to build an AGI.
        tessierashpool 3y ago
        that's completely apples to oranges. OpenAI is in the business of leveraging the utility of large language models. that's their moon. if they think instead that they're in the business of creating some kind of ridiculous robot god, that is definitely interesting information about them. because that's no moon.
        famouswaffles 3y ago
        >OpenAI is in the business of leveraging the utility of large language models. No Open AI is in the business of creating their vision of Artificial General Intelligence (which they define as that is generally smarter than humans ) and they believe LLMs are a viable path. This has always been the case. It's not some big secret and they have many posts which talk upon their expectations and goals in this space. https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment GPT as a product comes second and it shows. These are the guys that sat on by far the most performant Language Model for 8 months red teaming before even saying anything about it.
  - clbrmbr 3y ago
    Actually, can you expand on this? What philosophy leads one to put the bedtime story example on top? I’m genuinely curious about the different political/spiritual views that are growing up around AI. So maybe my question was not so rhetorical.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      Hypothetically, if you believe there's no such thing as a soul or consciousness, it's all just neurons and they can be simulated, and we're close to being able to simulate them - you're much more likely to think lofty AI goals can be achieved. If you follow a religious tradition like Shinto where even things like rocks can have spirits - the idea of your phone having a certain, limited form of intelligence might already be cool with you. If you think, much like a camera does most of the work in photography but it's the photographer that takes the credit, that when a person uses AI the output is nobody's work but the user - you might be completely fine with an AI-written wedding speech. If you think the relentless march of technology can't be stopped and can barely be directed, you might think advanced AIs are coming anyway, and if we don't invent it the Chinese will - you might be fine with pretty much whatever. If you're extremely trusting of big corporations, who you see as more moral than the government; or you think that censorship is vital to maintain AI safety and stamp out deep fakes; you might think it a great thing for these technologies to be jealously guarded by a handful of huge corporations. Or hell, maybe you're just a parent who's had their kid want to hear the same Peppa Pig book 90 nights in a row and you've got a hankering for something that would introduce a bit of variety. Of course these are all things reasonable people could disagree on - but if you didn't like openai's work, would you end up working at openai?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 3y ago
  > And then the wedding speech. What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? They are trying to make their product sound not as terrifying as it actually is.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I actually think that what is sad is that it seems as if having viable future as a creative visual artist is likely done. This was a major, major, major outlet and sanctuary for certain types of people to find meaning and fulfillment in their life which is now in the process of being wiped out for a quick buck. We'll be told by OpenAI and friends is that it shouldn't be a problem, because those were mundane tasks and now, people are free up to do more creative / interesting / meaningful things with their time, let's see about that... My gut feeling is that it's bad, the only thing I hope can save it all is that people actually don't find meaning in consuming AI generated art and actual artists with a real back story and something real to communicate remain relevant and in demand. The other day I needed a photo for a website I was working on and I actually purchased a real capture from a local photographer to use because the the authenticity means something to me and the customers... Edit: Is the plan that we just surrender our aspirations and just buy a subscription to ChatWHATEVER and just consume until the end of human history ?
- adroniser 3y ago
  fwiw the only piece of AI art that has given me the sense of awe and beauty that art you'd find in a museum gives me was that spiral town image https://twitter.com/MrUgleh/status/1705316060201681313 https://twitter.com/MrUgleh/status/1705316060201681313, which is something you couldn't have really made without AI. But that was only interesting because of the unique human generated idea behind it which was the encoding of a geometric pattern within a scene. Most AI art is just generic garbage that you scroll past immediately and doesn't offer you anything. We're gonna have to do something to stop the biggest crisis in meaning ever that comes out of this eventually though. Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society. Maybe just put someone in an ultra realistic simulation to give them artificial meaning.
  - notamy 3y ago
    > which is something you couldn't have really made without AI Serious question: Why not? > Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society. People have value outside of economics — I’m sure you know — and it makes me so sad that we as a society? seem to only care about the money in the end.
hapticmonkey 3y ago
If I could harness the power of AI to outsource my tasks, reading bedtime stories to my kids would be the last thing on that list. That's cherished time. Those are lifelong memories. Those are the moments we are supposed to be striving to have more of. It saddens me to think of the amount of engineering work that went into creating that example while entirely missing the point. These are the moments we are supposed to be working towards to have more of. If we outsource them to an AI company because we are as as overworked and underpaid as ever...what's the point of it all?
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  I agree. I worry my culture is truly losing sight of what’s good in life. I don’t mean that as in “I know what’s best and everyone’s doing it wrong”, because I fully acknowledge that I can’t know what’s best for others. Yet I watch my friends and family work hard at things they don’t claim to value, I watch them lose life to scrolling and tv and movies they don’t actually enjoy, and I watch them lament that they don’t see their friends as much as they’d like, they don’t have enough time at home, kids are so much work, etc. We have major priority issues from what I can see. If we want to live our lives more but put an AI to work doing something we tend to claim we place very high in our value hierarchy, we’re effectively inviting death into life. We’re forfeiting something we love. That’s incredibly sad to me.
  - haxiomic 3y ago
    This mirrors my feelings also, thank you for expressing it. It's so alien to me to see people trying to optimize way connection with their family and friends; to me that is what life _is_
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  The AI takes care of the bedtime stories, giving you more time for video games.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Deepmind can play the video games for you, too
tantalor 3y ago
You can put money on parents employing AI nannies to babysit/entertain/teach kids in next 5-10 years. At first people will react with horror.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Possibly in the next 5-10 days, assuming this works.
  - tantalor 3y ago
    Sure you could use the current tech with parental supervision. But a future version will let you walk away, leave the kids alone with the AI, check in occasionally. It will be marketed as safe to do so.
- bilsbie 3y ago
  Might be better than tv as a babysitter TBH.
ilaksh 3y ago
Hm. It is definitely horrifying if you've seen the movie M3GAN recently. On the other hand, as you say, it's likely better than the alternative. Which would probably be something like an iPad "bedtime story app" that is less humanlike. This could provide a viable alternative for exhausted parents to just giving a child an iPad with a movie. It may also open up a huge range of educational uses. One might imagine in 15-20years though that all of the young people sound like audio books when they talk. Which will be weird.
m3kw9 3y ago
How is it horrifying? Don’t use it if it scares you, the phone isn’t gonna walk over and start jostling for a spot to put your kids to bed
bottlepalm 3y ago
There are kids right now that spend more time in VRChat than real life. It's really something else.

clbrmbr 3y ago

And then the wedding speech. What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? This is supposed to be a productivity enhancer, not a way to outsource the most meaningful applications of human language…

skepticATX 3y ago
> What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? I know this is rhetorical, but luckily we don't have to speculate. OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it. This is not me passing judgement on whether said philosophy is right or wrong, but it does exist and it's not hidden.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  >OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it. Do you have evidence for this? I know two people who work at OpenAI and I don't think they have much in common philosophically.
  - skepticATX 3y ago
    > It’s not fair to call OpenAI a cult, but when I asked several of the company’s top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn’t believe AGI was truly coming—and that its arrival would mark one of the greatest moments in human history—most executives didn’t think so. Why would a nonbeliever want to work here? they wondered. The assumption is that the workforce—now at approximately 500, though it might have grown since you began reading this paragraph—has self-selected to include only the faithful. At the very least, as Altman puts it, once you get hired, it seems inevitable that you’ll be drawn into the spell. From https://archive.ph/3zSz6 https://archive.ph/3zSz6. Of course there is much more evidence - just follow OpenAI employees on Twitter to see for yourself.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      >I asked several of the company’s top brass if someone could comfortably work there if they didn’t believe AGI was truly coming—and that its arrival would mark one of the greatest moments in human history—most executives didn’t think so. No shit? How many people worked on the apollo program and believed that (i) Getting to the moon is impossible or (ii) Landing on the moon is no big deal
      - skepticATX 3y ago
        It is notable considering that there are plenty of excellent researchers who don’t believe that AGI is imminent. OpenAI is also openly transhumanist based on comments from Sam, Ilya, and others. Again, many excellent researchers don’t hold transhumanist beliefs.
        sebzim4500 3y ago
        It is definitely not the case that all OpenAI employees are transhumanist. It is probably the case that they all believe AGI is possible, because otherwise they would not work at a company whose stated goal is to build an AGI.
      - tessierashpool 3y ago
        that's completely apples to oranges. OpenAI is in the business of leveraging the utility of large language models. that's their moon. if they think instead that they're in the business of creating some kind of ridiculous robot god, that is definitely interesting information about them. because that's no moon.
        famouswaffles 3y ago
        >OpenAI is in the business of leveraging the utility of large language models. No Open AI is in the business of creating their vision of Artificial General Intelligence (which they define as that is generally smarter than humans ) and they believe LLMs are a viable path. This has always been the case. It's not some big secret and they have many posts which talk upon their expectations and goals in this space. https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment GPT as a product comes second and it shows. These are the guys that sat on by far the most performant Language Model for 8 months red teaming before even saying anything about it.
- clbrmbr 3y ago
  Actually, can you expand on this? What philosophy leads one to put the bedtime story example on top? I’m genuinely curious about the different political/spiritual views that are growing up around AI. So maybe my question was not so rhetorical.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Hypothetically, if you believe there's no such thing as a soul or consciousness, it's all just neurons and they can be simulated, and we're close to being able to simulate them - you're much more likely to think lofty AI goals can be achieved. If you follow a religious tradition like Shinto where even things like rocks can have spirits - the idea of your phone having a certain, limited form of intelligence might already be cool with you. If you think, much like a camera does most of the work in photography but it's the photographer that takes the credit, that when a person uses AI the output is nobody's work but the user - you might be completely fine with an AI-written wedding speech. If you think the relentless march of technology can't be stopped and can barely be directed, you might think advanced AIs are coming anyway, and if we don't invent it the Chinese will - you might be fine with pretty much whatever. If you're extremely trusting of big corporations, who you see as more moral than the government; or you think that censorship is vital to maintain AI safety and stamp out deep fakes; you might think it a great thing for these technologies to be jealously guarded by a handful of huge corporations. Or hell, maybe you're just a parent who's had their kid want to hear the same Peppa Pig book 90 nights in a row and you've got a hankering for something that would introduce a bit of variety. Of course these are all things reasonable people could disagree on - but if you didn't like openai's work, would you end up working at openai?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
amelius 3y ago
> And then the wedding speech. What are they thinking over there at OpenAI? They are trying to make their product sound not as terrifying as it actually is.

ChatGTP 3y ago

I actually think that what is sad is that it seems as if having viable future as a creative visual artist is likely done. This was a major, major, major outlet and sanctuary for certain types of people to find meaning and fulfillment in their life which is now in the process of being wiped out for a quick buck. We'll be told by OpenAI and friends is that it shouldn't be a problem, because those were mundane tasks and now, people are free up to do more creative / interesting / meaningful things with their time, let's see about that... My gut feeling is that it's bad, the only thing I hope can save it all is that people actually don't find meaning in consuming AI generated art and actual artists with a real back story and something real to communicate remain relevant and in demand. The other day I needed a photo for a website I was working on and I actually purchased a real capture from a local photographer to use because the the authenticity means something to me and the customers... Edit: Is the plan that we just surrender our aspirations and just buy a subscription to ChatWHATEVER and just consume until the end of human history ?

adroniser 3y ago
fwiw the only piece of AI art that has given me the sense of awe and beauty that art you'd find in a museum gives me was that spiral town image https://twitter.com/MrUgleh/status/1705316060201681313 https://twitter.com/MrUgleh/status/1705316060201681313, which is something you couldn't have really made without AI. But that was only interesting because of the unique human generated idea behind it which was the encoding of a geometric pattern within a scene. Most AI art is just generic garbage that you scroll past immediately and doesn't offer you anything. We're gonna have to do something to stop the biggest crisis in meaning ever that comes out of this eventually though. Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society. Maybe just put someone in an ultra realistic simulation to give them artificial meaning.
- notamy 3y ago
  > which is something you couldn't have really made without AI Serious question: Why not? > Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society. People have value outside of economics — I’m sure you know — and it makes me so sad that we as a society? seem to only care about the money in the end.

hapticmonkey 3y ago

If I could harness the power of AI to outsource my tasks, reading bedtime stories to my kids would be the last thing on that list. That's cherished time. Those are lifelong memories. Those are the moments we are supposed to be striving to have more of. It saddens me to think of the amount of engineering work that went into creating that example while entirely missing the point. These are the moments we are supposed to be working towards to have more of. If we outsource them to an AI company because we are as as overworked and underpaid as ever...what's the point of it all?

steve_adams_86 3y ago
I agree. I worry my culture is truly losing sight of what’s good in life. I don’t mean that as in “I know what’s best and everyone’s doing it wrong”, because I fully acknowledge that I can’t know what’s best for others. Yet I watch my friends and family work hard at things they don’t claim to value, I watch them lose life to scrolling and tv and movies they don’t actually enjoy, and I watch them lament that they don’t see their friends as much as they’d like, they don’t have enough time at home, kids are so much work, etc. We have major priority issues from what I can see. If we want to live our lives more but put an AI to work doing something we tend to claim we place very high in our value hierarchy, we’re effectively inviting death into life. We’re forfeiting something we love. That’s incredibly sad to me.
- haxiomic 3y ago
  This mirrors my feelings also, thank you for expressing it. It's so alien to me to see people trying to optimize way connection with their family and friends; to me that is what life _is_
optimalsolver 3y ago
The AI takes care of the bedtime stories, giving you more time for video games.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Deepmind can play the video games for you, too

tantalor 3y ago

You can put money on parents employing AI nannies to babysit/entertain/teach kids in next 5-10 years. At first people will react with horror.

ilaksh 3y ago
Possibly in the next 5-10 days, assuming this works.
- tantalor 3y ago
  Sure you could use the current tech with parental supervision. But a future version will let you walk away, leave the kids alone with the AI, check in occasionally. It will be marketed as safe to do so.
bilsbie 3y ago
Might be better than tv as a babysitter TBH.

ilaksh 3y ago

Hm. It is definitely horrifying if you've seen the movie M3GAN recently. On the other hand, as you say, it's likely better than the alternative. Which would probably be something like an iPad "bedtime story app" that is less humanlike. This could provide a viable alternative for exhausted parents to just giving a child an iPad with a movie. It may also open up a huge range of educational uses. One might imagine in 15-20years though that all of the young people sound like audio books when they talk. Which will be weird.

m3kw9 3y ago

How is it horrifying? Don’t use it if it scares you, the phone isn’t gonna walk over and start jostling for a spot to put your kids to bed

bottlepalm 3y ago

There are kids right now that spend more time in VRChat than real life. It's really something else.