It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.
Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.
Dear Diary – January 4, 2019
August 31, 2023
AI “loses its mind” when fed AI-created drivel
August 19, 2023
In other words, without “fresh real data” — translation: original human work, as opposed to stuff spit out by AI — to feed the beast, we can expect its outputs to suffer drastically. When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model’s training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it’ll soon start to crumble into itself.
https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data
So, as more and more lazy people ask AI to “write” for them, the programs get less and less accurate…
Or, as the authors of the study conclude, “…without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease.”
I.e., the use of AI-generated content to train AI doesn’t work, and since there is already way too much AI-generated garbage all over the internet, it’s almost impossible to sort out which is which when the AI-creators “scrape” data from the web.
So…
See, machines can’t replace us entirely — their brains will melt!
But then again, that might not be so hopeful after all. When AI takes over the world, maybe it won’t kill humans; perhaps it’ll just corral us into content farms…
At least we won’t wind up as batteries.
Yet.
PS. I find it both hysterically amusing and disturbing that my blog program offers an “experimental AI assistant.” Granted, the program does let you know that AI-generated content accuracy is not guaranteed, but wth would I want to use AI for a personal blog? The whole purpose of a blog is to WRITE. AI-generated text is not writing. It is intellectual property theft.
The real danger of unregulated AI
February 27, 2023
“I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.
“Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html
ChatGPT: Is this really the “death of the essay”?
December 17, 2022
I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)
The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.
By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.
As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.
So far, I have asked the program to:
- Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
- Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
- Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
- Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
- Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
- Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
- Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
- Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
- Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick
OK, and the verdict is:
Continue ReadingChatbots — Still not AI but still dangerous
December 13, 2022
[ChatGPT] could teach his daughter math, science and English, not to mention a few other important lessons. Chief among them: Do not believe everything you are told.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html
They’re all the rage online. Type in a request for a description how two historical people who never actually met would respond to each other had they actually met, and the program will oblige.
They’ll cause all sorts of rage online, too, once the peddlers of incessant false news and innuendo realize what a bonanza they’ve stumbled upon.
You want an image of an event that never really happened?
No problem. A program can generate one for you. We can even call it “art,” for what that’s worth.
No, BIG problem, especially when it convinces the gullible that it DID happen.
2023 will tell 2020 and 2022 to hold its coffee.
Just what we all wanted, right?
Still, chatbots are not (repeat, NOT) true AI. Sorry, Google engineer who watched too much Ghost in the Shell. Chatbots repeat our very human bias. Repeatedly.
As in, there are way too many racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic comments online. Full stop.
At a minor level, as a writing instructor, a student telling a chatbot to write a 600-word comparison-contrast essay is the least of my worries.
For starters, the damn things are probably scouring the Internet right now and “learning” from text on web pages like…uh…this one…
😱
Call a spade a
December 5, 2022
Just saw someone on my morning commuter train wearing a fluffy beige coat with a single word in all capital letters, stretching across the back from left elbow to right elbow:
EXPLOIT
Yeah. That’s what happened, alright.
Looking for aliens in all the wrong places?
August 12, 2022
Our search for alien life is getting serious. With better telescopes and a growing scientific consensus that we’re probably not alone in the universe, we’re beginning to look farther and wider across the vastness of space for evidence of extraterrestrials.
But it’s possible we’re looking for too few signs in too few places. Having evolved on Earth, surrounded by Earth life, we assume alien life would look and behave like terrestrial life.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alien-hunters-need-to-start-rethinking-the-definition-of-life?
I agree that we are biased, simply based on the basics of what we understand as (carbon-based) life (i.e., ourselves).
And I agree — in principle — that scientists need to keep an open mind when looking for other life forms on exoplanets.
However, they also need to retain a sense of skepticism.
Continue ReadingCarl Sagan at the Illinois ACLU: A lost 1987 lecture on civil liberties
July 1, 2022
…there has been a serious erosion of the tradition of skeptical inquiry, of vigorous challenging of government leaders, of public exposure of what the government is actually doing, rather than mere pomp and rhetoric. And it is in this area—skeptical scrutiny, public exposure—where the largest strides, in my opinion, are needed.
https://quillette.com/2022/07/01/science-and-civil-liberties-the-lost-lecture-of-carl-sagan/
Thank you, Stephen Pinker and Harvey Silverglate, for transcribing this. And Ann Druyan, for permitting it.
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