We've got plenty of AI now but who asked for it? El Reg's vultures chime in AI-powered chatbots are 2023's hot tech topic, although users report the results they produce are mixed. At best. Who's who: After the intro, clockwise from the top left corner is Jessica Hardcastle, Thomas Claburn, Brandon Vigliarolo, our host Iain Thomson, and Chris Williams. While Google has taken its Bard system public …
With regards to the bot just making stuff up, it seems like it shouldn't be impossible to train it to peg it's "facts" to references. In all kinds of academic endeavors, from humanities to science, compiling references to back up new research or or reviews of existing research is a fundamental requirement. With a computers enormous recall capability that ought to be possible.
It seems that the 'crazies' in Florida objected to 6th graders being shown pictures of said statue and also the fresco's in the Sistine Chapel that also contain nude figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDPnSd0I0Fk
The USA is rapidly regressing to the age of the puritans and it is just one step to the world of 'A Handmaids Tale'.
This should suffice better than anything one could possibly come up with.
Setting aside the ongoing bizarro exaggeration that is AI marketing hype...
What confuses people is misunderstanding what this AI stuff actually is. So here are a couple important points:
1) What we currently call "AI" is only advanced Expert System (ES) software. ES has been around for several decades. It takes in questions, queries its database, then offers an answer. What's advanced about it is the use of speech, both input and output, as well as learning. It knows how to gather more data to put into its database. Some AI also allows for scripting whereby an input can trigger a series of events, either resulting in data output, triggering an event outside of the AI system, such as turning on a networked lightbulb.
2) AI is nothing more than a tool. Tools create nothing and never will. Artisans use tools to make something. Never reference, give credit to or blame an AI. Instead, point to both the person who used the AI in the act of creation, as well as the people who coded that AI software. As such, there is not and never will be AI 'art'. According to every dictionary ever written, only we humans and possibly some other living creature make art. Tools don't make art. Paintbrushes don't make art. Artists use a paintbrush to make art. Ai doesn't make art.
^^^You don't know how many years I've been told that the tech is "just a tool" by young 20 somethings in other areas of creation. The AI is the creator now. Just because you are able to copy write it, doesn't mean the AI didn't make it for you, or even stumble upon it by accident. What did you do, exactly, before copywriting something your wouldn't, or couldn't create on your own, and then calling it your own?
The most dangerous part about all of this is not being discussed yet. People can no longer tell reality from virtual. A whole generation living in a virtual, computer generated world, not knowing reality from fiction.
"...People can no longer tell reality from virtual..."
How else does one explain the almost lemming-like rush to accept that abortion known as "The Metaverse"?
The terrifying aspect of this is that this is what the majority of the population wants. 'Thinking' is hard work; 'critical thinking' is well-nigh impossible for most. The majority does not want to have to think. About anything.
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"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now think about the fact that half the people are stupider than that."--George Carlin
The good news is that Zuckerberg found out he had dug his own grave and has now filled it in again - we were all so worried!. However, other practical uses of VR: e.g., architectural design, remote maintenance, training, surgery assistance, are moving along appropriately.
Happily, it appears that the lemmings, by and large, looked upon the Zuck's Metaverse and said, "what the hell is THAT?"
One can hope that AI will prove to be the same ... But probably we're going to be cursed with it. Lots of it.
Perhaps it'll turn out to be good for something or other.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now think about the fact that half the people are stupider than that."--George Carlin
Thanks you, I'll remember that quote. But because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I've no way of knowing whether I'm in the stupider category or not.
From a 'Statistics Ignoramus"--
It has always been my impression that with a VERY large (statistical) population, the median and the mean (what us common people call the "average") converge to the same value.
1) With seven billion people in the world--plus or minus three or four, now--how much larger a sample is needed in order for your point to be valid?
2) How do you absolutely know which statistical parameter to which George Carlin was referring?
George Carlin was correct. Seems as though he knew more about statistics than he's been given credit for.
"Seems as though he knew more about statistics than he's been given credit for."
Either that, or George didn't give a shit.
He knew full well that he was addressing an audience full of normal people looking for a laugh, not a room full of pedant statisticians who have never laughed in their entire lives.
what is the value of reality v. fiction, if neither can be distinguished from the other?
p.s. short or long term, politicians, as usual, would have an answer to that|! Fiction - goooood! [for 4 years], reality - goooood! [for election time]. Think of the savings, think of the children! And hell, you can have any many fiction children as you like, we'll even pay you fiction benefits to feed them and send them to virtual schools and stuff! NOTHING wrong with fiction on that front...
"AI is nothing more than a tool" is, an extremely practical viewpoint to start from. Like dynamite, AI can be harmful, it is able to alter the landscape, but also has the potential to be extremely beneficial. Perhaps the timing of AI's coming is unfortunate - because we live in the age of ascendant parasitic social media hype and manipulation, AI is definitely going to be used in ways that magnify the worst of that. So it is up to us to pursue the better uses - for example to onshore manufacturing with the assistance of AI automation and quality control. If we don't, someone else will.
As for the definition of art, when I was in the fourth form my art teacher scolded me - "you draw like a third year", to which I replied "it's not my bloody fault", and I was promptly sent to the headmasters office for a lecture on attitude and respect. Yes, I received a low grade too. So I am not really qualified to comment on the subject. Nevertheless, I see a lot of computer-aided art already being labelled as art. So the problem is already there.
I just know some of the fields I have dealt with have been dealing with the transition to digital for 25 years or so, and it hasn't been pretty. It culminated in a transition to quantity of quality, and nobody cared. The younger generation gets to take advantage of the easy route, and nobody blinks an eye. Eventually, nothing matters. Entropy happens. Nobody can tell the difference anymore, and it all goes to poop. Everyone gets an award and claps. What mattered is forgotten.
I don't think it really matters what this AI stuff actually is. This matters in a more... abstract way (is it 'alive', etc.) and, by implication, is it a jinn that's going to fuck us up real bad. But this is for later, and when it happens, let's just hope the dice isn't against us. But what matters is what this AI stuff actually DOES. And it does things and it will do things better and better. I'm thinking about google translate and how we laughed at 'every' website that used it in 2000s and 2010s, and how god-awful horrible that translated content was. Yet, it never stopped those websites and businesses to use this shite. Maybe they didn't realize, maybe they didn't care. But they used it. And, fast forward 2023, google translate, while it stumbles hilariously every now and then, is very, very good - in comparison with what it was 20 years ago. For me, the analogy with the current bot-craze is the same, only on much more massive scale and scope, across the board. Yes, they will be fuckups, yes, people will die and chat-bots will write mournful stories on endless 'news' sites and even more endless (!) blogs, etc. - but this will not stop businesses jumping on this wagon, and the more will jump, the more lemmings will follow. I could continue with this lemming analogy for ever, but it's Friday and I need to chat with 200,000,000 other humans, gotta stop this hallucinating nonsense, daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do, I'm half cra
“It takes in questions, queries its database, then offers an answer.”
This is not how LLMs like GPT work. No database involved. They are simply predicting the next characters and words from the prompt supplied. Bing is likely feeding in the contents of the web page into a prompt to rewrite or summarise it.
You are correct for systems like Siri/Alexa which classify text into intents, and then query database/API etc. based on that intent.
I largely agree with you.
...Ai doesn't make art.
We believe that only humans (and possibly other living creatures) can make art, can be creative. A few months ago I came across an AI model predicting art work of existing artists. The results, while surely selected, were more than impressive. And that is just the beginning, within the limited space of a master thesis. I fully agree, what the AI model created was not as such creative. But it raises the question what creativity actually is. Art and creativity do not happen in a vacuum. Large part of it is learnt, influenced and then, possibly adding something genuine, put together to create something new.
Derek Currie writes: "AI is nothing more than a tool. Tools create nothing and never will. Artisans use tools to make something."
I would like to speak up for tools - of all sorts.
Tools allow (in appropriate circumstances) the creation of solutions to problems that are more cost-effective and/or more timely than what existed pre- any particular tool. This applies to so-called AI tools, such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), precursors such as Machine Learning based on Statistical Pattern Matching; also 'old fashioned' tools such as the spanner; also the paintbrush - whether used for art or for covering a surface with a protective (or otherwise worthwhile) coat of paint.
What needs to be known, for any tool and by each of us, is what does the tool enable us to do that we actually want to do.
[Going further, if we wish, we can get on to mass-produced embodiments of or for tool use - such as nuts and bolts, rust-proofed fencing, computer programs that are usefully run on many many computers, machine-produced grammatical sentences, etc.]
Best regards
It knows how to gather more data to put into its database.
ChatGPT can't even do that. I asked him about specific words in song lyrics by a particular artist, it just couldn't help me. It answered that as part of its training it knew the song titles, but wasn't able to search for the lyrics and I'd just have to do that by myself. But it was really sorry and apologized many times. Useless but polite!
"AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder." --Donald Knuth
and these, from another world-class computer scientist, David Parnas:
"I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one."
"Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers."
... is that the whole AI/ML promotion-and-hype is a way to boost cloud providers' revenue by consuming many CPU cycles on said cloud providers' increasingly-less-used systems. (Less-used as their clients' executives slowly realize/admit, "Hey, this cloud stuff is costing us way more than we expected! Let's migrate our stuff back in-house.")
The so-called AI we have today is pretty much just complex procedural learning scripts with a little added ability for random deviation. It's not vastly different to the majority of human intelligence and underestimating just how predictable, linear and procedural almost all human thoughts and deeds are is the risk. Yes, we have massive capacity for creativity and can make leaps of abstraction and create new constructs for reality, but we don't 99.99999% of the time and we've constructed societies to support this lack of thought, bombarding free-thinking with junk.
We are not as clever or complex as we think we are, by choice. Future iterations of AI are about to show us that.
and I will make a lame joke about whether the people shown in this vid are real. But give it a couple of years, a chat-bot commentard might question whether another chat-bot commentard is chat-bot, or whether he/she/it is a human trying to pass for a chat-bot, and the flame war shall begin, etc. A couple of years, not much longer.
Mind you, I'm not saying that a chat-bot commentard 'questioning' the true nature of another commentard is going to be a sign of 'intelligence' lurking behind. It's just that it will be simply impossible for humans, who 'watch' such exchange, to establish, whether the participants are real or not. Unless that human applies another chatbot to identify the true 'nature' ;)
In other words, nothing that is sensed remotely, will be human-verifiable, and only direct, face-to-face contact, will provide such verfication (until humandroids, etc.). But I don't think this 'unverifiability' will change humans profoundly. Or maybe it will, but in subtle, gradual ways that would only be noticeable in contrast, after some time has passed. But then, of course, there will have been no sample of 'old' left to compare against the 'new'.
I've been using an algorithm I developed for commercial gain since 2004, analogous to how Gaussian diffusion is used by the ingenious Stable Diffusion. No longer occupying any of the intellectual playgrounds of academia, I'd only use AI for profit in some way, which seems unlikely at present.
What will society look like if everyone had their very own unique independent AI life coach/personal assistants/accountants/Jeeves/teacher/coder/slave on their phones? If home grown wasn't as good, the wealthiest would buy the best, the rest might have to rent. Human wetware and artificial wetware will eventually merge, which opens opportunities for makers of custom hats accommodating the unsightly protuding wetware AI tumour shaped augmentations cut into human skulls, grafted onto our brains.
"And there's no reliable way as yet to filter AI content out."
Of course there is. Use your wetware and verify your source(s).
Computers and networking are not supposed to take over from human thought, they are supposed to augment it. They will NEVER remove the need to think.
Sadly, religions and politicians are trying to remove the teaching of thinking, so my point is moot ...
Stories and myths from previous eras made sure to teach the lesson that pride comes before the fall. But those were eras where religions held a more prominent position in how governments worked. This is the first era without that synergy, but we also have plenty of science fiction about all the dangers lurking up ahead. We'll probably stumble into one we could never have imagined, just by how surreal the 21st century has played out thus far. I'll be sitting on the sidelines with a big bucket of popcorn.
I personally don't agree with this New Trend of this AI. this reminds me of something that is being forced on the consumer that didn't ask for it or at least some consumers didn't ask for it. this just in my opinion opens the door to criminals for easy access. Why has this come about in the first place, what happened to the old way of doing research and getting the information needed? this AI stuff reminds me so much like the movie " IRobots" with "Will Smith" and the robot started killing people, I am sure that in order for AI to work, there has to be "Input" from some type of human form, if I am wrong, someone please correct me.
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