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The danger of "AI" is that we actually believe the plausible fabrications it produces are "intelligent". The other day, I debated a guy who thought that the uto

• blibble 3y ago
  > The danger of "AI" is that we actually believe the plausible fabrications it produces are "intelligent". the thing I find scary is you see people on here believing this if a website full of techies can't tell the difference what chance do the general public have? I suspect the invention of the LLM will be the final nail in the coffin of liberal democracy (after the invention of social media)
  • extheat 3y ago
    People should never have blindly trusted anything on the internet in the first place. As far as I’m aware, most of the fears like this are overrated. People will live, learn and adapt as we always have. Constantly complaining about doom and having pessimism about anything seemingly scary is not a great way to live a fulfilling life.
• shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
  > The danger of "AI" is that we actually believe the plausible fabrications it produces are "intelligent". 100% this! I'm fed up with seemingly rational people who just can't comprehend that the AI hype is just sales talk. I had to convince a customer the other day we cannot write whole apps with ChatGPT. As far as I know, not a single example exists of a full app written by ChatGPT. It just can't be done, because ChatGPT is not reasoning!!! It is not intelligent. It can just spit out seemingly coherent, but often incorrect, snippets of code. I think it's best described as a word-calculator, or autocomplete on crack, in the sense that it is great on guessing what comes next. But it has no reasoning behind it's predictions, only statistics. EDIT: The AI apologetics are downvoting me LOL
  • _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
    Why didn't the customer write the whole app themselves with chatgpt?
    • shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
      They tried to show me what they meant. ChatGPT proceeded to spit out a snippet of rust code, starting with a dependecy outdated by 4 years, proceeeded to mix API from several versions of the dependency and completely ignored most of the request. Customer do not know rust so it looks amazing to them. ChatGPT is a great con-man for the gullible.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        > ChatGPT proceeded to spit out a snippet of rust code, starting with a dependecy outdated by 4 years, proceeeded to mix API from several versions of the dependency and completely ignored most of the request. If that's what you meant, I think everyone here, including the people disagreeing with examples (e.g. me), would have agreed. What I mean with my examples is: it can do all the bits. Is it perfect? Nope. Do you still need a human in the loop to understand the failure modes? Yup. That MS paint app you asked for 45 minutes ago? Features are decomposable, so it can do this step by step, so long as you're OK adding one feature at a time instead of trying to do it all in one go — 75% of the results are fully functional and do what you asked for (which isn't always what you wanted, "tool selector" can be the CSS or the widget itself).
        • shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
          Some people used to write crap code stitching together snippets from stack overflow, now the same people write crap code stitching together what ChatGPT spit out after trained on said stackoverflow clusterfuck of buggy or flat out incorrect solutions. You do you.
          • ben_w 3y ago
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  The utopian future is governments run by AI. The Culture series explores this to some degree.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Fiction isn't a good reference point for reality. The dystopian future is also governments run by AI. Terminator so much so it's a cliché, but also I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Also, never read this, but people sometimes point it out as an example of "Can we, like, not do that?": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/FriendshipIsOptimal https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/FriendshipIsOp...
    • unsupp0rted 3y ago
      Science fiction is a great reference point for reality. The people creating our reality today all read the same books I did as kids. Humans make lousy governors and suck at minimizing mass suffering. Barring I have no mouth and I must scream scenarios or Butlerian Jihad scenarios, AI can make a better world for us (or for whatever replaces us). The alternative is for our monkey brains to keep ramming each other with cars, slamming projectiles into ships to draw political attention, getting angry at people with the wrong skin color, etc I don’t want another 10,000 years of that.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        > Barring I have no mouth and I must scream scenarios or Butlerian Jihad scenarios, AI can make a better world for us (or for whatever replaces us). That's a fully generalisable statement: Barring ${environmental degradation and worker rights issues}, ${laissez faire economics} can make a better world. Barring ${racism}, ${colonialism} can make a better world. Barring ${dictatorships}, ${communism} can make a better world. Barring ${a Kessler cascade}, ${a Dyson swarm} can make a better world. > The alternative is for our monkey brains to keep ramming each other with cars, slamming projectiles into ships to draw political attention, getting angry at people with the wrong skin color, etc Our limited monkey brains are, unfortunately, also the reference example for all the AI we want to make. Human-like alignment with human-like interests and human-like values. The default is this plus bugs from the software not doing what we thought we wanted it to do, which means all those things but done at machine speed rather than biological speed plus a bunch of other things that just make no sense when they happen. The bugs in particular can be, and in some cases have already been, weird beyond human comprehension. I hope the safety/alignment people don't get caught up in either a scandal or a philosophical cul-de-sac.
• xanderlewis 3y ago
  There are entire subreddits of people who believe that ‘AI’ is by definition infallible. I feel myself getting sucked in and going slightly crazy just spending a few minutes reading it. Those places seem to mostly be populated by disenfranchised people who are desperate for some ‘crazy alien tech’ to come along and overturn whatever systems they feel led them to their current (miserable) lives. “Anyone who doesn’t think that in two years’ time AGI will have ushered in a new age where we all live on UBI and are free to explore our passions isn’t paying attention/has no idea what’s about to happen”, etc. etc. Needless to say, none of this stuff has anything remotely to do with, you know… empirical evidence or theory. But reading endless reams of it for hours a day can certainly make you think it does.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    > “Anyone who doesn’t think that in two years’ time AGI will have ushered in a new age where we all live on UBI and are free to explore our passions isn’t paying attention/has no idea what’s about to happen”, etc. etc. I'd be surprised if it takes less than 6 to fully generalise over all domains (what I expect to be hard is "learning from as few examples as a human"), and I'm not convinced there's the political will to roll out UBI fast enough, not even if AI that is sufficiently powerful as to require UBI to avoid economic collapse and popular revolution takes 20 years. But AI may well break a lot of things in 2 years even without being either of those. Radical economic disruption doesn't need to replace all humans, even 5% would be huge, and it doesn't need to be as evidence-efficient as a human if there's lots of humans doing the same thing that the evidence-inefficient AI can learn from. On the other hand I have just described the trucking industry, and yet even despite the ability to collect all that training data from all those drivers, Tesla has still not fully solved self-driving vehicle AI. And also, I do mean "replacing humans" rather than just doing specific tasks that are currently done by humans: if those same humans can "just learn a different job", then so long as they can retrain faster than AI can learn the same jobs by watching humans collectively, this isn't so bad. > empirical evidence or theory Theory, I'd agree. But then, we don't really have any theory suitable to this task. Empirical evidence? That's a weird take, to me. What it can already do, even despite the mistakes of the current generation, has me wondering how long I'm going to be economically relevant for — and hoping this is a repeat of Clever Hans.
• InsomniacL 3y ago
  I imagine after the first car was invented if somebody described our current situation with cars most people would be as sceptical as you are about this. If the purpose of Government is to govern as per the will of the people, AI's ability will likely surpass Humans in this task certainly in my lifetime. Talking about current gen AI is like talking about the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, We haven't reached the Ford Model T and we can't even imagine a Tesla Model X.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Given how bad the Benz Patent-Motorwagen was, I think the DIY/"open source" LLMs would count as equivalents of that, and that OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney (especially given their popularity and economic disruptiveness to buggy whip manufacturers/artists) are equivalents of the Model-T. Cars have become more efficient, comfortable and safe since then, but the utility is similar. But I also think cars are a terrible analogy. Internal combustion engines collectively are probably more apt, and for that case: OpenAI's various models may well be the 1776 Watt steam engine — a basic useful tool that displaces manual labor, which has a direct influence in its own right, but which would also see categorical replacement several times over.
    • InsomniacL 3y ago
      > Given how bad the Benz Patent-Motorwagen was, I think the DIY/"open source" LLMs would count as equivalents of that, and that OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney (especially given their popularity and economic disruptiveness to buggy whip manufacturers/artists) are equivalents of the Model-T It's difficult to put things on a scale when you don't know what the end outcome will be. There was over 20 years between the Benz Patent-Motorwagen and the Ford Model T. I think the AI equivalent of the Model T won't be available for 5 - 10 years but it will follow some of the notes of the Model T (Mass Produced, lower cost of ownership, Changes most other industries, mass customisation, etc)
• Springtime 3y ago
  I've wondered if the impression isn't so much caused by the answers themselves but a trust level has formed from its behavior. A core appeal of LLM bots is they're instructed to be non-judgemental and ever-helpful, so in most scenarios one won't 'butt heads' with them. This obviously has some real positives for learning (if the responses could be accurate) since you're more likely to continue eagerly the less ashamed you are asking 'dumb' questions to more rapidly gain an understanding of something (anonymous accounts online similarly facilitate shame-free question asking). I wonder though if it might be having an effect where people begin to prefer AI over humans since with real humans, whether online or IRL, there's no consistency of response—people could be cranky, disinterested in responding or criticize someone for even asking. So the more one interacts with an ever-willing, ever-pleasant, non-judgemental, human-esque answer machine—even if it's hallucinating things—I could see how it could become more of a go-to and even a trust begin to grow from familiarity and its generally polite ability to listen.