Essay by Eric Worrall
I’m currently working on three AI projects. All of the projects could produce novel AI capabilities. Which project should I “pace”?
The first project is a Kaggle competition – Kagriculture. At the moment my position is between 6000-7000 on a leaderboard of 10099 entries. The competition only has a few days to run. The payoff is US $5000 for winning a top position on the leaderboard. I’m almost certainly not going to win this competition, but I haven’t given up yet. The winner will be expected to present details of how their optimisation approach helped them win. But optimisation problems have far wider application than a farming competition on Kaggle, they can be used for everything from automating production lines, improving corporate profits, stock trading algorithms or automating aspects of military planning, logistics and combat strategy. Should competitors “pace” this competition because of the small possibility one of them will stumble across a major breakthrough which helps push forward the capability of military Artificial Intelligence?
The second project is a computer vision project which will help substantially improve safety in an important industry. The vision project could save lives. There is a big payoff if I or anyone else can make it work. The client has provided some very challenging conditions, but over a decade ago I worked on a primitive computer vision project which faced a comparable problem, and found an unusual old technology solution to improving the interpretability of challenging visual environments.
If someone solves the problem, one day that solution could be used for a lot more than improving safety. An innovation which improves robot visual acuity in difficult circumstances could boost the capabilities of hunter seeker terminator robots looking for enemies of the state in difficult terrain like underground tunnels or other complex environments. Should researchers abandon this safety project, because of the possibility that one day their safety feature breakthrough might be used to hurt people?
The third project is for a University, its an interesting challenge. I’m not going to make money directly from this project, though in the long term it will help me secure a higher income. What if one of the people tackling this challenge thinks of an idea which leads to an important new advance? Should we “pace” this project, because of the remote possibility one of the solutions to the challenge pushes forward the capabilities of AI?
My point is AI innovation is a series of small incremental steps. There is almost never a red flag which says “you’ve gone too far, this is where you should pace your AI development” – there’s just another problem to solve, and a payoff at the end for your solution. Occasionally someone realises they have had a consequential insight, but most of the time, its just an ordinary Joe or Eric solving day to day work related problems. Someone who has a job to do and bills to pay.
What form would the proposed policing of AI take?
To have any chance of policing AI advances which even the inventors of those advances don’t necessarily know are important, big picture experts with a high level of knowledge of the state of the industry would have to be inserted into every company with the potential to make significant advances, no matter how small.
From Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for pacing the Advancement of AI;
…
Embedded Evaluators. Each frontier AI company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes. This is the key step for verifiability of any pacing commitments, and has precedent in the banking industry, which sometimes involves regulatory “supervisors” embedded along with employees. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now. We intend this to be part of a broader push to redouble efforts on our safety and alignment work.
…
Read more: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
Top AI people with sufficient experience and expertise to make a call on any individual advance are not cheap. Paying for an “embedded evaluator” would wipe out the small end of the AI business, unless they perhaps negotiated a sponsorship and profit sharing arrangement with a large incumbent player.
There is an additional problem with this proposal. Questions have been raised about the alleged close ties between personnel in METR, Anthropic’s proposed AI oversight body, and AI giants like Anthropic.
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The documented network connections
METR grew out of the Alignment Research Center, or ARC. The organizations are associated with Paul Christiano, who worked with Amodei at OpenAI in the 2010s and later served as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.
The reported relationships also involve funding networks connected to Anthropic investors Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn. The Survival and Flourishing Fund, associated with Tallinn, reportedly earmarked up to $752,000 for METR since its founding: $324,000 in general cash and a $428,000 matching pledge.
Coefficient Giving, associated with Moskovitz, reportedly gave $1,515,000to ARC in 2022. METR says that donation was firewalled and was not used for its operations.
Separately, METR announced approximately $71 million in funding commitments raised during the six months before its August 14 announcement. METR says it does not accept funding from AI companies or their employees and takes no compensation from AI labs.
The important distinction is between direct corporate funding and overlapping philanthropic or personal networks. The reported relationships concern the latter. METR’s stated policy concerns the former, as well as control over its projects.
…
Read more: https://www.neoteo.com/en/why-metrs-ties-are-raising-questions-about-anthropics-ai-watchdog-plan
I’m not accusing METR of deliberate collusion, I’m sure they are genuinely trying to be independent. But these people all know each other, and in many cases have worked together. In the high stakes world of artificial intelligence, it only takes one bad actor and a quick phone call, or even a careless comment at a lunch meetup, for a billion dollar idea to be leaked to people who have the resources to develop that idea faster than the author of that idea.
Imagine if inventors in other fields were forced to accept an “embedded evaluator”, who potentially has strong personal ties to big players who would profit enormously from stealing their ideas. I believe most people in the AI industry, in any industry, would find such a commercial risk intolerable, and would put a lot of effort into circumventing the requirement for such oversight.
Any attempt to police AI in the way proposed by some AI giants (not all) would be counterproductive – it would drive commercially sensitive AI research underground. In many cases researchers have the resources they need to conduct AI research at home, why should they tell anyone else what they are doing? Most AI advances don’t need to be tested on billion dollar computers, a $10,000 computer has plenty of AI capacity for a proof of concept test. In the face of a serious clampdown, secret AI breakthroughs could be laundered through third party countries which hadn’t signed up to the AI oversight system.
If a clumsy oversight mechanism like what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed was implemented, we would end up knowing less about what cutting edge AI researchers were doing, not more.
AI is awesome! I get angry when people try to stop something this great. So to burn up that anger I have to pump iron.
I’ll have to remember to stay on your good side from now on!
Was that picture AI generated? 😎
(If this shows up as double or even triple posted, apologizes. My internet is acting up. (Intermittent connection.) I hit “Post Comment” but it doesn’t show up.)
It takes a while even when things are good.
That’s the real me. Not for bad for 77, huh? 🙂
The dog is a nice touch, and you have the correct number of fingers. The hand weight on the floor is glitchy, aibots still got some way to go. 😉
Er, just forget all of those downvotes I gave you (JK).
That’s a demerit for uploading it WUWT instead of just linking. And you should really lay off the ‘roids.
Who is paying for all those pro-AI articles on wuwt? Or are you shilling for free?
People using their brains as opposed to Luddites like yourself
What’s wrong with AI? Gonna take over the planet and kill us all, just like “carbon pollution”? Industrious, intelligent, not fearful people like AI.
Industrious, intelligent, not fearful people like AI.
Slight disagreement here, JZ.
I’m not fearful, but skeptical – mainly about how it gets used, though. I’ve learned to use it, and it certainly is a useful tool – but I’m concerned about how many people are offloading their THINKING to AI, and the long term consequences of that.
But that’s not the “fault” of AI – that’s on the users. And human nature is what it is.
I use it for property maintenance planning scenarios modeling.
Very powerful, helpful & informative.
However, I term my use of “A.I.” as –
“Augmented Intelligence”.
Good effort.
“but I’m concerned about how many people are offloading their THINKING to AI, and the long term consequences of that.”
Yes. High Schools, colleges, it’s rampant. Most of these young ‘uns can’t think as it is, this just makes them lazier.
People get their advice/information/values from trashy newspapers, gossip, scuummy websites, some politicians, bad ideologies like Marxism (hence climate catastrophist religion),….
And from dreams/hallucinations, …. They lack orientation to reality – don’t have thinking skills and personal values to think well for life.
We know the nature of software muddlers:
A lady in Iowa got an award for a presentation on doing a ‘desk check’ of software – have a colleague work through you code, before bigger steps in testing.
Disagree – intelligent people control it, program quality, don’t steal others’ IP, ……
Another red herring post.
So glad no one took the bait.
Laughing at your idiocies.
It would be very interesting to see the troll instruction manual tips on this and other targets. Can’t you just share some of the instructions and position list?
Okay, I’ll ask AI how best to identify trolls who persistently occupy websites with agenda positions in spite of data or publications or other evidence in the article posting.
What a jackass! I have been pro-AI since 1968. If you think everybody who disagrees with you is dishonest you are truly nuts.
Okay, AI helped explain you but the tools as simple as spell check tool setting for identifying trolls are not fully developed yet.
How typical, the leftists assumes that anyone who disagrees with the party, must have been bought off.
As someone who is increasingly involved in the AI industry I have an opinion I want to share. Why does that immediately trigger accusations of “shilling” or pay to play?
Maybe it’s projection. The alarmists are so used to working on grant money contingent on them toeing the line that they assume anyone espousing an option must be doing so on the direction of an unseen paymaster.
The site got so many pro-AI articles in recent weeks that it seems there is some bigger campaign behind this.
But maybe just a coincidence like this sites intimitade relationship with heartland and co – I guess they support AI for the increased energy usage, though.
If you read the comments and articles you’ll notice not everyone shares my enthusiasm for AI. But that’s how free people operate – in the town hall of ideas, everyone is free to argue their point of view and make their case.
The AI energy demand driven destruction of the renewable movement is just an entertaining bonus. Since renewables don’t work it was inevitable something would break, I don’t think any of us predicted the final straw on the green camel’s back would be AI.
“it seems there is some bigger campaign behind this”
Big Oil, or the monster under your bed …….?
Wait, I thought the monster under the bed ran Big Oil.
The monster under the bed only exists in his head.
“Intimate relationship with Heartland”
bwahahaha
We are laughing at you.
“intimitade”
You obviously don’t have an “intimitade” relationship with spellcheck.
He used to have a passing relationship with reality.
Then reality moved.
AI is the hot topic right now. You would have to be paranoid to believe it is all some kind of corporate scheme to take attention away from the dying global warming scam.
Well, no-one could every accuse you of having an “intimitade” (sic) relationship with reality (or proper spelling)
What Anthropic is asking for is regulatory capture, where the big players control the purported regulators to the detriment of any possible competitor not in the cartel.
Sounds like it.
bingo!
Be hilarious if the “slowing down” regulations stopped their trillion dollar IPOs. The big guns are losing other people’s money like crazy.
This short is quite apropos. Ironically made using AI.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/83X79cfuE3k
That and no liability.
Reminiscent of the AGW scare but I don’t see how it can gain traction. Tell some people they are victims of something they don’t understand, make up horrific consequences for not believing, and they’ll follow you anywhere. And once again the media is leading the charge.
And yet, recent events have shown that the “gee-whiz isn’t it so way cool” kids are developing tools without considering the possible bad consequences. Since there don’t appear to be any adults in the room, it will fall to the Government to put some boundaries on AI behavior (“try hacking into the DoD and we will find you”)
And when government puts boundaries on AI it will be to protect government and the AI companies and not really anyone else. So, these AI architects who are building AI, the smartest people in the room, are now saying “oh please, we can’t control what we are building so we need the government’s help to police ourselves.” Yeah right, do you believe the government will actually be better at this than they can be? The other wish of theirs will be immunity from liability. Liability from theft of IP due to their AI LLMs pulling all the corporate, copyrighted, and other people’s data for model training. If and when bad things happen there are laws and tools already in place to prosecute and handle. The problem will be whether the powers that be actually use those tools.
This is another catastrophe in making. We survived Paul Erlich’s 70s population bomb, the 70s approaching ice age, global warming in the 80s and 90s, Y2K, climate change, pandemics, etc. The AI catastrophe is the next step on this trail.
I wonder what they’ll come with next? Extraterrestrials? Of course they may exist- may already be here- but if they are- they’re not a threat- they could have wasted the human race a long time ago- so I think, if they are here, they are benevolent. But the perpetual whiners may try that one next unless they can invent another one first.
Together Darwin and Einstein proved there can be no ET: sentient intelligent life was home grown; it did not arrive through galactic colonization. No philosopher, biologist, or theologian can explain the evolution of sentience. Which critter was the first ever to feel pleasure or pain? Yet our absurd contemporaries are trying to tell us AI is about to behave as an entity with free will while at the same time insisting on a deterministic universe where humans and animals have none. Idiots all.
“Together Darwin and Einstein proved there can be no ET”
Of course they did no such thing.
That doesn’t even make sense from any perspective. The origin of personality is the central question: how does the impersonal plus time plus chance produce persons? If humans are machines, then no one should be surprised that machines are treated as persons, or persons as machines.
Both are consequences of the same collapse. I’d add that materialists can’t live consistently with determinism, so they act as if they were free while denying it.
The Christian answer removes the split. Persons come from a personal Creator, so personality isn’t a surprise to be explained away. It’s the starting point.
“The Christian answer removes the split. Persons come from a personal Creator, so personality isn’t a surprise to be explained away. It’s the starting point.”
That’s the lazy way out.
I can’t say I disagree–you’re not making much sense either. Humans ARE biological machines. Brains ARE computers. But animals can suffer pain and fear and pleasure. No computer EVER will. Animals can be hungry and greedy and ambitious. A machine can only be programmed to copy such behavior. Humans have free will often attributed to an ET soul, unlike any machine. I repeat, nobody can explain the existence of suffering in the universe–not why God allows it but how there evolved entities that can experience such a philosophically abstract concept. Some theologians claim the earth exists to teach the angels there can be such a thing. Don’t say, I think, therefore I am; say, I hurt therefore I exist. Appreciate the miracle.
Computers can feel pain, fear and pleasure, if they are programmed to.
That would only be mimicry.
Yeah, they used to make baby dolls that could pee if you filled them up, and they could have installed fake tears on Data but he’d get rusty. Data, like Pinocchio, wanted to be a real boy, but whether he was a mindless robotic machine or somehow fitted out with true emotions, the script leaves the viewer to decide. Just how DO you program real emotion into a computer anyway? How do nerves evolve that notify the brain the machine is under stress with a “pain” warning? How would you go about explaining pain to an angel or calculator–like explaining vision to a blind man.
Hacking into DoW/D is already illegal.
And already been done.
Covid anyone?
We’ll have to wear a new, special type of face mask when using AI that will filter out the bad vibes from AI. 🙂
Henry Ford really should have “paced” production of the Model T. Putting a dangerous machine into the hands of millions of people? What could go wrong?
With a fast production process he was able to pay his workers more than any other industrial workers. AI will result in far faster production for most who use their brains for work.
I have told my son to figure out how to use AI to make money, or be the one paying somebody who has. We are at that stage and it ain’t gonna slow down.
The people who’ll survive AI the best will be those who master it.
Mastering making fake pics of yourself?
Heck no, they’re all real. 🙂 Like this one, where I jumped off the top of Mt. Everest with a wing suit. I almost made to India.
Looks like that caused you to lose a LOT of muscle mass.
It might be a good idea to pause the Colossus and SkyNet projects.
You have a point, there. Leaving military decisions without human oversight would be a bad idea-IMHO.
I have my own concerns about AI, but they are not aligned with anything anyone cares to address.
I have only a few years left, so I choose my battles carefully. Only so much effort can be made and the topics I pursue are my choices.
The fear mongering does serve a purpose to expose Dems in their formula stance nonsense. Since voters don’t examine the tiny logos on every one of the mailers from Dems and their business cards, they can at least see AiI absurdity in the open.
Concern about AI and data centers is bipartisan. Other than that, I agree.
AI scare is crowding out climate scare and microplastics scare. That’s a problem for established scare advocacy armies of nonprofits. They cant handle donor swings to other scare causes.
AI is a tool. Just like a hammer or even a gun, whether it’s used for good or ill depends on who’s using it and to what purpose.
It’d be foolish to let those who want to harm you have the “bigger gun”.
+100 upvotes.
You can’t stop people creating, or even thinking differently. Assuming Chinese humans, for example, have the same mental abilities as American humans, then if China has 4 times the population of America, it will likely have 4 times as many smart people.
So I suppose that the likelihood that the smartest AI developer in the world is more likely to be Chinese than American is a fair assumption. How do you stop somebody from being more intelligent than you? Kill them?<g>
China may have 4 times as many geniuses as does the US, the problem for China is that capitalism does a better job of finding and promoting talent.
Are you sure? At the moment, the “capitalist” US seems unable to compete with “Communist” Chinese capitalism. The US version of capitalism these days seems to be to erect barriers to try to force your citizens to pay more for arguably inferior goods and services.
Many American companies source their products in China, and attach stickers like “Proudly American since 1929.” Some gullible customers might believe that the product has “Made in China” on the bottom as a joke, or something.
But assume that China has four times as many geniuses as the US, and three of the smartest are smarter than the smartest American genius. These three have come to the conclusion, after long and deep thought, that “American capitalism” is a failed experiment.
Time will tell, but even American cars don’t hold the appeal they used to. Even Elon Musk produces Teslas in China, and the Ford company wants to partner with Chinese companies to take advantage of their superior engineering and technology talent.
Nothing wrong with that – I bought a Ford Transit a couple of years ago, which was actually made in Turkey. My present vehicle is Chinese, and actually made in China. Not only less expensive, but probably more reliable and advanced than non-Chinese competitors, judging by the company’s 17 year history here.
I’m flexible – my previous daily drive was Japanese, although I had to expend a little effort to buy a vehicle which was actually manufactured in Japan. Better quality control, tighter tolerances and all that – hopefully.
If you believe that the USA has been appointed by God to rule the world (possibly under the watchful eye and guidance of Israel), then by all means pretend the laughter you hear is just a figment of your imagination.
Don’t blame me if the cost of diesel in the US goes up to unbelievable levels. That’s the price of freedom, capitalism, and the American way, you know.<g>
I’ve said that before.
Cannot be repeated too often.
You won’t be able to stop them. So you have to have the better gun, and better skills to use it.
If all of AI, SI, is nothing but code why can’t they just write code that says dont leave sand box, or don’t make billboard, etc?
Complexity. Contradictory requirements often apply, so the AI attempts to satisfy all and sometimes that means making an end run.
Consider this: software can only do what humans think to implement.
Perfection is unobtainium.
Maybe someone will query AI to identify those vulnerabilities and how to mitigate the risks?
“Complexity. Contradictory requirements often apply, so the AI attempts to satisfy all and sometimes that means making an end run.”
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.
Unobtainium. I like that. What’s its atomic weight?
I have yet to see a meaningful AI control proposal. It is just a meaningless political slogan at this point. I doubt it can be done.
It is like trying to stop the Industrial Revolution except the factories are laptops.
Mr. Wojick: The template is the slowing-down introduction of railroads in USA in the 1800’s, to preserve canals.
Sarc, I promise.
Language, language, language. I see the same thing happening with AI as happened with climate change. My guess is that the vast majority have little to no idea what AI is the same as climate change. The most they know is that some news casters say it is bad or dangerous so they parrot what they heard or it may have been a politician or academic or social media influencer or maybe just a friend. The same could probably be said for the side in favor of AI. The point is AI is neither good or bad but it can be used for good or bad. I know very little about AI but if we can use AI to make the best most efficient air conditioners or furnaces let’s get going. The same holds for power generators nuclear and fossil fuel, let’s make all the power we need as safely as cleanly and as affordable as possible. I see no reason to pause or slow down on any of this stuff. The problem is that we need to have the discussion about the ways it can harm us. Saying it could end humanity in so many decades is meaningless same as saying CO2 is going to boil the oceans. The dangers I can think of are privacy, finance, access to power for homes, hospitals, infrastructure, manufacturing and so on. Spying both domestic and foreign must be considered. The point is we can’t do a damn thing to protect ourselves if we are unwilling or incapable of discussing what we are protecting ourselves from.
A controversy is currently shaking the French-speaking literary world. An author named Thélyson Orélien is strongly suspected (there is now virtually no doubt about it) of having had his novel C’était ça ou mourir written, in part or in its entirety, by artificial intelligence. It was revealed shortly afterward that Thélyson Orélien had also plagiarized many things (poems, articles) in the past, which did not prevent his defenders (all woke left-wingers, obviously) from calling everyone who questioned Mr. Orélien’s good faith racist. Obviously, it is because he is Black, a Haitian refugee in Quebec, and because his identity and his story are “left-wing compatible”; if he had been white, the matter would already have been settled long ago.
My opinion on artistic creation through artificial intelligence is absolutely radical: it has no place in it. Art is fundamentally human; it results from pain, obsession, and a vital necessity. Using artificial intelligence to generate an “artistic” result amounts to treating the “work of art” as an outcome, a finished product. That is not what it is at all. I am absolutely inflexible on this point: it is the human soul and its specificity that are being tampered with; it is a debilitation of the human mind that the advocates of an “artistic” use of AI are campaigning for.
I am obviously not a Luddite: from the standpoint of medical advances and scientific progress in general, AI’s potential is absolutely gigantic and extraordinary. A humanity that progresses is both highly vexing to Malthusians and uncomfortable for people like me, who hate Malthusians and Malthusianism. Indeed, in my view, Malthusianism is a fairly reliable indicator of human progress: this poisonous ideology depends on humanity’s ability to progress and adapt; the evolution of the human species, by contrast, has no need whatsoever for Malthusians and other degrowth advocates in order to endure.
The image at the top of this article was created by artificial intelligence. I had the idea, but artificial intelligence performed the execution, much better than I could have, and in a very short time.
I only have a problem when someone claims AI work was all their own. If you “partner” with an AI, its just a force multiplier, a productivity booster. It might plagiarise other work, in the case of say writing something literary, or even drawing a picture, but its up to the human in charge to keep an eye on that.
Great minds think alike! Believe it or not, I thought exactly that a response like yours was likely to be given to me. Interesting! My conclusion is as follows: the image at the top of this article is a utilitarian rather than an artistic illustration. In the same way that it is difficult to consider stock photographs and videos as falling within the realm of art (although one can find things so bizarre, convoluted, and seemingly impossible to place in a “normal” video or article that they might qualify as an artistic practice), I think the same applies to images created via artificial intelligence for illustrative purposes.
The problem I have with the supposedly artistic use of AI is that it encourages a view of artistic work as a tedious and dispensable process. You use the word “productivity,” which is entirely justified in an entrepreneurial context; likewise, there is nothing dishonest about having a machine perform work that is intended to produce a useful result (putting up wallpaper, stacking bricks, hanging out the laundry, provided that one derives no pleasure from performing these tasks oneself, which would shift their nature from chore to something enjoyable or gratifying, and therefore beneficial to the individual).
It is a good thing to label the image as you have done with the illustration for this article — but it is an artificial product, “made by ChatGPT,” just as one can find “Made in China,” “Made in USA,” or “Made in France” products (I am not talking about the quality of the objects in question, but rather about what the accompanying description denotes: in this case, their industrial nature, just as the inscription “made by ChatGPT” makes explicit the mechanical, machine-generated, non-human nature of the image it accompanies).
As for the question of AI plagiarizing the original works that feed its databases, that is an interesting question that I would need to think about more deeply. It is not really plagiarism, incidentally (the works are generally not reproduced exactly as they were analyzed), and it might not even be a problem if the works used to train the machine were not being put to purposes that betray what is distinctive about humanity, namely its unique capacity to create, tell stories, and so on.
On the other hand, humanity’s propensity to continually advance technologically (innovations in medicine, engineering, etc.) in order to improve the condition of its species is another, and by no means lesser, of our defining characteristics; one could consider it immoral (unless one is a Malthusian lunatic) not to use the technological means at our disposal to increase the well-being of humanity.
So a human can’t use AI to be creative. Got it.
It all depends on what we mean by “being creative,” and above all on the value we attach to the objects in question. It would be criminal not to use AI to find, say, a cure for cancer (or several targeted treatments for subsets of cancers; in short, to spare humankind pain and suffering). Likewise, if AI can untangle seemingly insoluble problems that were holding back the construction of some critical piece of infrastructure—or not—it would be foolish to balk at using it. We should, however, always strive to understand the path taken by the machine to solve a given problem. It would be dangerous to let our own logic and capacity for reasoning fade away.
I would say that the term “ingenious” is better suited to describing excellent work carried out with AI than the term “creative,” insofar as the use of these machines should be limited to technical and scientific questions. One can be creative in finding an ingenious solution to a given problem. But there is a problem to be solved; failing to find a solution could have more or less serious repercussions, make our lives more complicated or less pleasant, or permanently hinder the advancement of a given endeavor.
In the artistic realm, it is different: the availability of reliable and inexpensive energy, to give an example that is close to our hearts, is in no way dependent on the splendor of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the emotion elicited by a searing blues solo. It is therefore unjustified (and, as far as I am concerned, unjustifiable—I fully embrace my radicalism on this point) to sacrifice to a machine even the slightest part of the conception of a work of art.
It is useful, and even indispensable in the eyes of most people, to find a cure for cancer. If AI can help us, we should use it in the most intelligent way possible.
But delegating all or part of the conception of an artistic work to an AI amounts to a self-centered act. Humanity’s physical well-being and material prosperity do not depend on the creation of this or that novel or painting. By contrast, not using AI in the scientific field results in stagnation, or even a regression, in the quality of human life.
That is a whole lot of blahblah simply to say you are mad because so many other people are smarter and more creative than you are. AI has nothing to do with your inadequacies and insecurities.
If the output is indistinguishable, what difference does it make.
A good story is a good story.
A pretty picture is a pretty picture.
I believe our opinions are fundamentally irreconcilable on this point. That’s not a problem!
One question, however, to address the substance of your message. (The equivalence between the image I develop below and my personal opinion on AI is not perfect, but I believe it is sufficiently evocative to illustrate my point):
Imagine that you walk into a restaurant and are served a piece of meat that is absolutely delicious, so much so that you think to yourself, “This is truly the best steak I’ve ever eaten!”, only to be told after the meal that you have actually been feasting on cockroach purée flavored with a synthetic “Angus flavor” that is more convincing than the real thing; that this mixture was shaped into a steak, with various additives and colorings added to give it the appetizing appearance of red meat. Wouldn’t you nevertheless feel at least somewhat cheated by this revelation? Would you go back regularly to eat cockroach pâté at that restaurant, or would you never set foot in the establishment again? Obviously, unless restaurants and their suppliers become completely transparent with their customers, you would have no way of knowing whether the meat you are eating comes from a free-range cow or from a writhing mass of insects crushed in a press and disguised as a steak.
Brave new world…
Shock value often has negative consequences.
After the fact implies one was tricked, deceived, lied to.
Would the result be the same if the diner was informed prior to receiving the “steak?”
A better analogy would be to be told after eating the steak, that it was cooked by a machine rather than a chef.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?
“pacing”, is this how the kids spell “monopoly” these days? I have made clear I am not a fan of jamming aibots into every damned thing. My concern is not AI taking over and killing us all, it is the people who will use it and what f*cked in the head crap they will do with it, and we are already seeing a plethora of examples. Imagine what Iran is going to do, cause you can bet your ass they are desperately trying to get this into their blood soaked hands.
I guess we are lucky personal computers got by along with the internet and the Amazon marketplace business model. Just think of all the jobs they destroyed before paid protesting took off.
Damn! I thought the Dear Leader has decreed that Artificial Intelligence is now to be called Super Intelligence.
An obvious use, whatever it’s called, is to replace all US politicians with “Super Intelligence” virtual avatars. This small action would save vast amounts of money, and would ensure that the US would go down the gurgles even faster than it is now – if that is possible.
I’m sure that incomprehensible computer programs written by other incomprehensible computer programs could quickly double or triple the national debt, and start bombing or starving every other country in the world into submission – it has already its ability to inflict massive damage on girls’ schools (slaughtering the students in the process), and a recreation area with the unfortunate name of “Police Park”.
At least when current stocks of missiles, bombs, and other ordinance are used up, the Super Intelligence will hallucinate that the US has “won”, and take the US back to 1950 or earlier, making America “Great” again!
Super Intelligence? Or Supreme Idiocy?
Time will tell.
Oh Michael, your TDS slip is showing.
Yep, supreme idiocy is oozing out of you like sweat.
I get it, Eric — AI is very useful. I use it for work and research. But, the baiting here with the AI stories is suspicious. These seem to be directed at the fault line separating those who worry about AI and data centers and those who don’t. That’s not helpful. Why can’t articles be balanced?
The main concerns in each category are worth understanding, exploring, discussing. AI — as the major guys involved, and not bloggers and comment-section loiterers — has a lot of inherent risks along with potential benefits. That can’t be denied, can it? Data centers have known, documented downsides (not risks, but empirically validated downsides) that are not evenly distributed. Why is that controversial?
Why should you ‘pace’ yourself? Who said you should? You and everyone here knows with some certainty that calls to slow down don’t mean that Eric Worrall cannot push forward on three projects. You aren’t just ‘sharing’; you are instigating. You aren’t discussing the relative merits; you are creating click-bait.
This manicheaistic framing isn’t helpful.
What strikes me most about this bruhaha is the rapidity of the flip-flops. Gates comes out and says climate change is not really an existential threat–pace Greta Thunberg–it’s something we can learn to live with. Of course the motive is the need to double the energy supply for AI without going nuclear. Then a few weeks later AI is dangerous…don’t need all those power plants after all…let China do it, etc. I try to keep up…can’t breathe. Back to Crichton’s “State of Fear” –all is choreographed, from Davos or wherever.
The dangerous monster is out of the cave.
Only education, courts ruling on damage and IP theft, … will help.
If you don’t want something stolen, keep it secure. Laws can’t even stop shoplifting.
When the “leaders” in an industry are asking for the government to regulate their industry, you know the real motivation is to put up barriers to entry to any potential competition so that they can remain the leaders in the industry.