ChatGPT

[ghostrunner]

"Can it create great art?" seems like an unreasonably high bar for intelligence. Most people can't do that either.

I have no idea what will happen with this stuff, and the "it will become super intelligent and kill us all" prophecies seem like a huge leap. I'm just saying, it does not really make sense to say it's like various stupid hype things like the metaverse or whatever.

We can define intelligence in whatever ways we want to allow ourselves to dismiss this. That was my instinct as well. But it's a mistake. It's a huge breakthrough that displays intelligence nothing like anything that's come before.

Is that intelligence "like" human intelligence? I think probably not, but also I don't know. Getting at that type of question is largely impossible at this point and maybe forever.

Just to nitpick, I want to note that great art wasn’t my bar.

I’m thinking of how it’s different than a search engine right now, which is one of its good uses. It can take that information and lay it out in a traditional essay form. That’s nice, and probably useful. Is that intelligence? How do I separate that from a really well written program.


Part of the issue is my own - I admittedly don’t know what it depends on. If you ask it to write an essay on a given subject, is it A) referencing other essays on that subject and just paraphrasing them? Or is it B)taking that information and putting it into a coherent essay all on its own? Will it do A well only if that material is already out there and catalogued or able to be referenced? Plagiarizing, more or less.

I’m not saying it’s not impressive and innovative, or turning my nose up at it (“creative” uses are probably an exception). I just don’t know if intelligence is the right term. And maybe that doesn’t matter. Just isn’t what I’ve always thought of as AI.

[ghostrunner]

This is crazy. Sports Illustrated has been creating fake authors using AI generated headshots, and at least some of their articles are probably AI generated.

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated ... ed-writers

There was nothing in Drew Ortiz's author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.

"Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature," it read. "Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm."

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he's described as "neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes."

Ortiz isn't the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions.
"There's a lot," they told us of the fake authors. "I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist."

"At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, 'oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.' Stuff like that," they continued. "It's just crazy."
The AI authors' writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball "can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with."

[thrill]

I didn't know it was a secret, because there have been multiple articles I've read on SI over the last year or two that would be like, "The baseball player Molina is 40 years old. Baseball is a sport in which youth is excellent due to the strenuous demands of playing the catching position." like the author was ESL and googled its research. It seemed very obviously AI. The only part I didn't know is that the authors were fake. I just assumed it was a real person chucking everything into chat gpt and not editing anything.

[G. Keenan]

I too am not afraid of AI taking over the world because it thinks it can do a better job of running it that humans. Maybe AI weapons systems could wreak some havoc. I could see an autonomous drone being used by Russia in Ukraine deciding it wanted to attack a target in NATO territory, for instance. Stuff like that.

My guess is the problems from AI will be more political than existential. Like globalized manufacturing did, it's going to disrupt work and potentially put a lot of middle class workers out of a job. If you have a job producing "content" for the internet's insatiable maw, look out. Or advertising copy. Instead of a bunch of copywriters workshopping taglines and catalogue descriptions, an ad firm might need just a few people to curate the copy the AI can spit out in 10 seconds, choosing the stuff that sounds most human. I can see a lot of boilerplate legal documents like contracts and wills and user agreements and insurance policies and stuff like that being drafted by AI instead of lawyers. Medical scans and diagnostic tests being evaluated by AI systems instead of human doctors. Maybe even stock brokers and portfolio managers.

It could be to the information age what steam powered machines were to late 18th century manufacturing. The AI can do your taxes 24/7 in 30 seconds and won't charge you $200/hr.

The outcome might be a lot of middle aged white collar workers who suddenly find themselves obsolete and pissed off at having to reinvent themselves. On a macro level, AI might make the overall economy more productive but the disruptions will be felt locally, with unpredictable political results when lots of frustrated and angry people feel their status slipping away and lash out.

[Arthur Dent]

I mean, look at this. No intelligence detected? Just same old, same old with the computers?

[Arthur Dent]

The outcome might be a lot of middle aged white collar workers who suddenly find themselves obsolete and pissed off at having to reinvent themselves. On a macro level, AI might make the overall economy more productive but the disruptions will be felt locally, with unpredictable political results when lots of frustrated and angry people feel their status slipping away and lash out.

Perhaps I am misreading the tone here, but I think we should be a lot less dismissive than this. I don't know how sudden impacts will really be, but having your basis of economic support blown away along a good portion of what you see as your purpose in life is traumatic. Why would, "deal with it, loser" be in any way an appropriate reaction to this kind of development?

[G. Keenan]

The outcome might be a lot of middle aged white collar workers who suddenly find themselves obsolete and pissed off at having to reinvent themselves. On a macro level, AI might make the overall economy more productive but the disruptions will be felt locally, with unpredictable political results when lots of frustrated and angry people feel their status slipping away and lash out.

Perhaps I am misreading the tone here, but I think we should be a lot less dismissive than this. I don't know how sudden impacts will really be, but having your basis of economic support blown away along a good portion of what you see as your purpose in life is traumatic. Why would, "deal with it, loser" be in any way an appropriate reaction to this kind of development?

My tone was not meant to be dismissive. On the contrary. If AI gets good enough for that to happen, I suspect we'll get the same kind of pundit and policy establishment people saying that it's a net benefit and making promises to retrain displaced workers that we see with industries like coal, oil & gas, and so on. It's easy for people whose job it is to produce words on computers to tell a coal miner don't worry, just get retrained on machining windmills. Or tell autoworkers who make the current powertrains to get retrained on electric vehicles. It takes no account of their lived experience, their self-worth, and just how much it sucks to be making a decent living doing an honest job and have that yanked out from under you by either macro economic forces or government industrial policies. Not to mention that government backed worker training programs almost always involve ridiculous red tape and bureaucracy and weird funding clauses that make them very difficult for the average person to interface with.

So my point was that the same kind of disruptions that have been affecting manufacturing workers for the past few decades might be coming for white collar workers, and the political ramifications of that are a big wild card. A large supply of angry voters is a recipe for demagogues to come along selling vengeance against scapegoats in exchange for power.

[ghostrunner]

I think I’ve said it before, but it’s crazy to me that none of the big automation/Ai pushers who appear to be true believers seem very concerned about mass unemployment. Even as a practical matter, never mind true concern for other humans.

[Arthur Dent]

I think I’ve said it before, but it’s crazy to me that none of the big automation/Ai pushers who appear to be true believers seem very concerned about mass unemployment. Even as a practical matter, never mind true concern for other humans.

When technology eliminates jobs, people's intuition is that this causes unemployment, but historically, that's not really what happens. You used to need big rooms of people moving wires between plugs to run a phone system, for example. Now, you need a couple people to occasionally do some maintenance on the computers. Getting rid of those jobs may have left those workers in the cold for some time, but ultimately they just do other stuff.

In general, the level of employment is mostly about macroeconomics, not technology. Technology can certainly shape what kinds of jobs are available as well as the bargaining position of labor in setting labor conditions, but mass unemployment is not really the right way to think about the problem.

With AI, there's at least the potential that there will be a devaluation of the kind of intellectual labor I personally enjoy and rely on for income and a danger to white collar privilege in general. That would be a big deal and should certainly be a lesson for those who dismissed industrial job loss with "learn to code". It points to the fact that there's not actually a special meritorious winner class. We're all at the mercy of a society that is controlled by a small, unelected, capitalist class largely free to decide the fates of millions purely to serve it's own narrow interests.

EDIT: I do agree that the existential risk and AI God talk distracts from the more mundane but actually real issues and is probably about marketing at least to some degree.

[ghostrunner]

I don't mean that I expect mass unemployment, but the pronouncements on tech often promise results on that level. If not mass unemployment, then massive job loss in sectors. Maybe I'm overstating their forecasts, but I've definitely gotten that impression. Like Musk has said self-driving cars will make regular cars obsolete, for example. Obviously, he says a lot of things and it doesn't look like that's anywhere close yet. If it were true, that would be a huge dent in the job market over what I'd imagine would be a short time, even assuming delays with regulation, state variances, etc... I admit this is a bad example, because Musk talks out his ass and also certainly wouldn't much care anyway.

Altman has said jobs will go away because of AI, though to be fair he's said as you did that new jobs will emerge. That's probably true and it usually has been to some extent. But also there are whole cities and regions that haven't recovered from sudden job/industry loss, which everyone knows. I think you can safely say that's contributed to long-term political problems. Which has led to us being unable to do as much as we might like for those communities. So maybe it doesn't have to be mass unemployment to be very bad.