65 Comments

I am so proud of Scarlett Jo for taking action and standing up!! The technologist have run amok on the copyright and now the human trademark. However, the rank n file do not realize what is taking place. I do not believe that individuals can understand what is taking place to the human masses. We must stand up for our rights. #humanistheproduct

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

This is why we have #PauseAI. We have to unify for any human resistance to matter. Below is our Discord:

https://discord.com/invite/GPKTVJ7x

We do need the majority to know, amd many do, but we also need to empower people.

https://pauseai.info/

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Thank you for alerting me about the slack community. The A.I will not pause. This is how the future will be played out. Unless folks stop using it then it will not stop. People are already hooked on its principles. This is now a greater societal issue of what I label shortcutism. We are to hooked on this speed of a result. We are in the microwave. However, can you cook a meal in a microwave? So much to unpack. I do not have confidence that individuals will confront this. But I will keep speaking up and fight for humanity.

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I am optimistic that the great majority of people have not gotten hooked on the AI movement's principles. Most people don't use it. There is a large community who are utterly obsessed with it, but I don't think they're reflective of the broader public.

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At an individual level I resist and express my position by simple not using it. Resist the allure of it providing things, information, writing, music, etc. better achieved through scholarship and a wides net of information gathering, hard work, and selective, education based on interaction with humans.

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I salute that! This must be passed down to this generation who I call Generation S.T.S. that short term scattered. The A. I will decimate these folks brain along with all of the things that are attacking there mental abilities.

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So the goal then is to build this safely and we can coordinate to build oversight for these companies, so that is the best way to #Pause, as it migth be. Its not so much about "people using it", which is perfectly fine, or even ideal. It is how people are using it, and its not about fighting cars but asking that cars have seat belts and speed limits.

And that is how we can speak out, be heard, and do something.

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Yes it boils down to the human behind it all. I always go to the human element. The issue is from my perspective is this stuff dehumanizes. The fight will be on remaining as human as possible. The Open A.I is a symbol of the problem. Those types do not care about your product. They only care about there algorithm or software. They do not wish to do business. Using A.I demonetizes your work. I have seen it with music. Music now is a derivative. The artist is irrelevant. The artist is the human. This is a powerful tool to demonetize. Be very careful of it. Go back to human ethics/moral. Go back to the atom bomb. It is what the human does with it.

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Yes, fundamentally AI has become the anti-life equation, and thus, anti-human is quite appropriate as part of anti-life.

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It is great to vibe with you here! Gives me hope that folks are not in a total haze! meaning they are not totally asleep with there eyes wide open! #antilife Exactly. A.I is not alive. Folks seem to have allowed that to slip there mind.

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We are forgetting that phrases like "no serious concerns about the extinction risks" are effectively *marketing* for the 'power' of GenAI. Yes, Sam and his OpenAI are liars (or insanely stupid, I won't rule that out, SBF als was very stupid). But they lie about much more than copyright infringements and such. They mislead about their fundamentals.

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May 22·edited May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Stealing to make something pretty mediocre, while hiding behind claims of inevitable AGI and great risks of others getting there first. And the staff got behind him in November because they didn’t want to miss out on big paychecks (and who would, really). And then this was used as evidence of their loyalty. The narrative outruns the truth.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Yes, they are marching us into future harms while ignoring present harms.

These people will not give us paradise after hurting us all this time

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Here’s another one for the list I wrote:https://www.techpolicy.press/creepy-product-demos-are-just-the-start-of-something-new/

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That's an excellent article, thanks for posting it.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Illya was right.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Rampant theft, blatant lies to obscure or deflect, utter callousness, complete belief in the superiority of what you are doing. Gosh, what could go wrong? And, Bankman-Fried aside, why does this feel so "déjà vu", all over again, and again, and again?

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Because their financiers lobby policy makers who in turn enable the corporations to commit and get away with criminal behavior.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Additionally for all concerned about this, write to your congresspeople.

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

1) State why this worries you and how it affects you

2) Support the risks with sources such as the US government's Gladstone Report or Romney's framework for safety

https://www.romney.senate.gov/romney-reed-moran-king-unveil-framework-to-mitigate-extreme-ai-risks/

https://www.gladstone.ai/action-plan

3) Ask them to look into it and work in the interest of public safety. For YOUR safety. They are your representatives. Let them represent you.

Remember, most people are on our side:

80% of Americans want more regulation. You will be giving us a voice. We deserve a voice!

https://www.mmm-online.com/home/channel/regulatory/americans-want-stricter-ai-regulations-where-does-u-s-stand

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I'm pretty sure the government that constantly gaslights its citizens and historically has not acted in their best interests isn't going to suddenly start acting ethically. Money rules everything around us, not who you vote for or call to complain to. Its time to stop pretending the system or the institutions that support it work for the citizenry.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

Where is the OpenAI board on all of this?

It is being RECALLed.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

In the 80s & 90s, AI was a great field to be in. Then big money got involved, and it all turned to shit.

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Good on Scarlett, but the lesson for Silicon Valley execs will take away from this is, "don't fuck with anyone who has quick access to a high-quality legal team".

As it stands right now, the rest of us are still screwed.

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Please don't forget that the (anti) social media have been stealing information for almost a decade. Presenting excuses in public and just going on and doubling up their unethical greed driven practices.

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Altman is not fully developed. Nothing behind the eyes

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If one is to take his sister's words over his, he's quite the sicko too. Why wouldn't we at this point? He obviously has no problem with consistently lying through his teeth.

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I would think that OpenAI's board, as presently constituted, shares Altman's viewpoint that the only important thing is to bring as much money into OpenAI as possible before the bubble bursts.

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May 22Liked by Gary Marcus

The original board was concerned enough about his mendacity that they fired his ass. Sadly, that didn't stick.

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"Right attitude" - for the board, concerned primarily with the success of OpenAI specifically, yes. For the rest of us, who think it's important for OpenAI's success to be aligned with the stated mission of its nonprofit parent, no.

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Yes and robust regulation getting passed by the policy makers who are lobbied by the financiers of these corporations is quite a laughable fantasy. The wheels are off and have been for quite some time.

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You can't keep wheels on that have already fallen off. Keep trying though.

Based on your other comments you seem to care much more about profits than people. I hope the brakes get really tight.

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Why do I think of the current world of LLMs and Generative AI as a Trojan Horse?

Deceiving the public into thinking this is the start of the scientific development of real intelligence, it is really just about getting them, consciously or covertly, to give over their data so it can be sold back to them at a profit.

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It’s interesting how many including in the dialogue in the Gary Marcus newsletter justify things based on the future becoming, and means-to-ends thinking. A future is imagined and lusted after, either wealth or engineering fantasies about what robots will be able to do (e.g., scifi robots “loving you better than human could” one frequent commenter here said). Thus this current mess is merely necessary steps to the shining future utopia. Like Manifest Destiny was used to justify killing Native Americans and the Buffalo as if it were God’s will? Even the Effective Altruism folks are using a cold ethical calculation that washes out into self-interest (spawned from the philosophy of Longtermism and its weird logic of numerical computation of “good” based on pleasure in a far future) rather than deal with the present, with facts, and with real but intangible values like love, beauty truth. Maybe that’s why it often goes sideways.

A scene from from the movie “Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb movie” comes to mind:

President Muffley:

You're talking about mass murder, General, not war.

General Turgidson:

Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say... no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh... depended on the breaks.

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What a load of crap this whole story has become. Everyone is blindly jumping on the hysterical melodrama high school gossip bandwagon of finger pointing accusation, based on no proof at all.

Maybe Altman cloned Scarlett Johansson's voice, and maybe he didn't. I don't know which. You don't know. None of us know. Johansson doesn't know. Maybe everybody should sit down and shut up until we have some facts to discuss?

But to be a good sport, here's another conspiracy theory for everyone to hysterically chew on.

What if Altman deliberately cloned a voice that _sounds like_ Johansson's, because he knew that we're a bunch of silly little children who would respond by spending the next month posting about his product all over the net? What if all of you have been cleverly suckered in to working in the OpenAI marketing department for free?

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The Scarlett Johansson drama is the latest in a long series of events where Sam Altman has been caught lying. Lest you forget about retina scanning, claiming the models would be open, brazenly stealing IP and paying people pennies to classify the data they stole. Being an Altman apologist isn't a good look these days. The guy belongs in prison.

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Of course they created a voice intended to sound like her's. That's part of what makes their response so contemptable: they felt the need to lie, when the truth is glaringly obvious. That they didn't even need to makes it worse; it betrays a willingness to be casually dishonest.

To be fair, I expect casual dishonesty from the vast majority of corporate spokespeople. But OpenAI present themselves as different. They're supposedly doing this for *humanity*. We're to put our trust in them, because if they don't make this stuff, the bad people will. If they weren't trying to present themselves as the righteous stewards of humanity's future, I'd agree with you that this is all overblown. I'd respect them more if they'd cool it with the BS and admit they're motivated by the same thing that drives every other for-profit corporation.

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EAs spent "thousands of hours ruminating" - so that's the required decisiveness in action?

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