I am an artist and a mother, and I am feeling extremely worried about the current state of the world. As much as I hate to admit it, I feel powerless when it comes to making a difference. I know there are many others like me who care deeply about the issues at hand, but we don't know where to begin when it comes to advocating for change.
The reality of everything you've been writing hit me the other day when I was looking into buying a common household item—a bug spray, what with it starting to get hotter where I am—and doing as I always do when buying anything, I tried to do a little research first, searching for some reviews or info on what people say works best.
I was halfway down reading a list of reviewed items that popped up in the search results when I realised what I was reading was unmistakably written by ChatGPT, with its characteristic writing style repeating through each "review" and none of them written by a human, with sentences like (e.g.): "When considering to purchase a X, there are a few things to consider. First..."
Amazed, I went back to look at the other results only to realise almost all of them had to be brand new AI spam sites pumped up in the results by SEO tactics, or perhaps copying other websites' metadata to displace them as I recalled seeing a CEO mentioned as doing (probably from this publication). It was not long ago every result was written by a human; now, I could scarcely find a single search result that was.
I had slightly more luck looking for a vacuum cleaner finding human reviews. On the other hand, I was looking for some new cat toys and found AI cats (of course never labelled) mixed into video results and marketing images (formerly photos).
What is the world coming to when there is so much junk AI "information" to wade through making everyday purchases? And if businesses can so quickly pollute the Internet with junk on things that don't matter that much, what are the better motivated like states, intelligence, their stakeholders, and other political actors doing that I haven't noticed? If business is doing it, they must be.
The consequences of LLMs are not a future issue but a present one, and the way they're being used is mortifying, drowning the Internet in a sea of crap.
I agree, and I wish I had any confidence in Washington to actually be competent enough to serve “the people” well… but I don’t. At all. Either party :(
When I read the announcement for the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board and saw the names of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai as members, I had to double check the whole thing wasn't a dark humour internet joke.
Timely. Uphill battle, though, as it generally is these days. Fifty years (at least) of the conviction that market forces are always the best for good societal outcomes (they are not, they are the best for profits, the bad — and good, that is there too — that arrive are side effects of the profit drive) has produced generations of people who think that regulation is 'bad'. This is true in a lot of complex situations, be it IT strategy in organisations (where 'silver bullets' reign supreme at top level, if the issues aren't neglected, that is) or in politics. You're not up against tech bros. You're up against deep cultural convictions. The same sort that gave us the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and then war. That outcome is of course not certain, but the situation is so far out of stability that anything can happen.
Maybe Terry Gilliam could script another black comedy: “Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley”? The only problem is that it’s t’other way round… yes, I too fear the technocratic CEOs.
Indeed. As I noted earlier, I wrote (and talked) about this stuff in 1991 after researching AI, philosophy, neuroscience, and politics at the university.
Reflecting back, the reasons no one cared:
• Too scary to even think about; switch topics :end of conversation
• Too esoteric
• Too futuristic
• Too hard to understand / techie
• Inevitable, too big, nothing I/we can do, powerless, others are handling/dealing
• Narrow Self interest, cynicism
• Pro AI/ tech - it’s good, you're just a luddite activist hippie judgement
• Belief in some grand shiny AI better Future - a quasi-religious faith/hope.
• Don’t have the mental bandwidth, time, resources to deal with social & political issues nor risk the professional repercussions/backlash.
As with many things in life, laws will only be enacted or changes made if there’s a huge disaster, so as to overcome the inertia, ignoring, inconvenience and self interest. The only way to get the attention, perhaps? As was the case with social media, it’s more of the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot: a general creeping malaise and mental/social rot, rather than an explosive type disaster.
Trying to explain to people that the tech CEOs are not necessarily the ones who best understand how their technology works is a nearly impossible task. The Ds want the tech industry to be their besties and the Rs want to either complain that it’s biased against them or ensure that it reinforces their own side of the culture wars. All short sighted. All style and no substance, just like ChatGPT.
1) U.S. lawmakers have jurisdiction over about 5% of the world's population. About the same for the EU.
2) We live in a globalized world interconnected by the Internet and other means, therefore....
3) If silicon valley were to vanish completely, the march towards an AI future would just continue elsewhere.
4) Therefore, getting all hysterical about AI is pointless, because we don't have the power to determine the future of this technology.
It's like the weather. We don't yell at the sky on rainy days because that wouldn't accomplish anything. The rainy day is bigger than us. Our only option is to adapt to the rain.
The fundamental premise of the AI community, that it should be allowed to regulate itself, is false. Negative feedback control systems are ubiquitous in nature, and are the shared characteristic of all stable and effective human-constructed systems. Regarding the latter, there are legitimate arguments to be made concerning the details, but no human-created entity has to my knowledge has succeeded in regulating itself. Once again our elected officials are guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to enact meaningful legislation setting guidelines for use of AI in the media and imposition of financial and criminal penalties for violations thereof.
We also need to enact legislation declaring that personhood is DNA-based. Otherwise we will see a move by the wingnuts of the SCOTUS to declare chatbots people, and therefore protected by the First Amendment, inter alia. Needless to say, the use of AI in the autonomous exercise of life and death decisions should be outlawed, both domestically and internationally.
It's the same problem we see with the military-industrial complex, big oil, the pharmaceutical industry...and pretty much every other major lobbying group in Washington - government was captured by special interests decades ago because we haven't gotten money out of politics. That's how you end up with things like "citizens united" and policies designed to benefit big corporations and the wealthy donor class (e.g. like private equity firms being able to buy up vast quantities of residential real estate).
In the meantime, everyone else gets screwed, and we're seeing it in all facets of our civilization right now.
From your lips to God's ears. History is repeating itself in the lack of AI regulation-exactly the playbook Silicon Valley used to block all attempts at data and privacy regulation. It's why the US is the only first world country without such regulation. Silicon Valley has paid off the regulators open to their bribes...ahem "Donations," and threatened to "primary" those politicians who won't take their money. When the lack of regulation merely allowed unbelievable concentration of wealth and heaps of online abuse, well that was bad, but survivable. When it's about whether a potentially disastrous tech gets developed with no guardrails-we're talking Silicon Valley getting carte blanche on the most important industrial policy in history! Make no mistake-Silicon Valley will not stop pushing to be virtually unregulated in AI development It will have to be MADE to stop, by politicians fearing their voters more than they do Silicon Valley. This will be a long and ugly fight.
The revolving door exists between every regulator and the industries they purport to oversee. Heck, that’s among the biggest problems in believe we have with any gov’t oversight. Whether it’s the oil & gas industry, the environmental industry, the healthcare industry, or any other, the claim is always that a small number of people truly understand the issues faced in the respective industry, that industry insiders are the only really qualified folks for the job…until of course their term is done & back to industry they go. It helps to have nice stacked the deck for their future employers (or in some cases, the employers they took the sabbatical from to serve their country before returning ;). I wouldn’t expect things to be any different in this industry hence why I don’t see gov’t and regulators as the solution either. Legislators will never do the right thing when it comes to regulation because they depend on these companies for the electoral fundraising. It’s a corrupt and rigged system and until money is no longer considered speech, and the Citizens United ruling stands, I see no way out of this regulatory mess across any industry.
I am an artist and a mother, and I am feeling extremely worried about the current state of the world. As much as I hate to admit it, I feel powerless when it comes to making a difference. I know there are many others like me who care deeply about the issues at hand, but we don't know where to begin when it comes to advocating for change.
The reality of everything you've been writing hit me the other day when I was looking into buying a common household item—a bug spray, what with it starting to get hotter where I am—and doing as I always do when buying anything, I tried to do a little research first, searching for some reviews or info on what people say works best.
I was halfway down reading a list of reviewed items that popped up in the search results when I realised what I was reading was unmistakably written by ChatGPT, with its characteristic writing style repeating through each "review" and none of them written by a human, with sentences like (e.g.): "When considering to purchase a X, there are a few things to consider. First..."
Amazed, I went back to look at the other results only to realise almost all of them had to be brand new AI spam sites pumped up in the results by SEO tactics, or perhaps copying other websites' metadata to displace them as I recalled seeing a CEO mentioned as doing (probably from this publication). It was not long ago every result was written by a human; now, I could scarcely find a single search result that was.
I had slightly more luck looking for a vacuum cleaner finding human reviews. On the other hand, I was looking for some new cat toys and found AI cats (of course never labelled) mixed into video results and marketing images (formerly photos).
What is the world coming to when there is so much junk AI "information" to wade through making everyday purchases? And if businesses can so quickly pollute the Internet with junk on things that don't matter that much, what are the better motivated like states, intelligence, their stakeholders, and other political actors doing that I haven't noticed? If business is doing it, they must be.
The consequences of LLMs are not a future issue but a present one, and the way they're being used is mortifying, drowning the Internet in a sea of crap.
I agree, and I wish I had any confidence in Washington to actually be competent enough to serve “the people” well… but I don’t. At all. Either party :(
When I read the announcement for the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board and saw the names of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai as members, I had to double check the whole thing wasn't a dark humour internet joke.
Any chance that the book could come out sooner?
This why I think we need to organize and get our voices heard, and at least try:
https://pauseai.info/2024-may
Please find information on the upcoming protests and coordinate with us in Discord as it helps:
https://discord.com/invite/vcUByb5F
Timely. Uphill battle, though, as it generally is these days. Fifty years (at least) of the conviction that market forces are always the best for good societal outcomes (they are not, they are the best for profits, the bad — and good, that is there too — that arrive are side effects of the profit drive) has produced generations of people who think that regulation is 'bad'. This is true in a lot of complex situations, be it IT strategy in organisations (where 'silver bullets' reign supreme at top level, if the issues aren't neglected, that is) or in politics. You're not up against tech bros. You're up against deep cultural convictions. The same sort that gave us the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and then war. That outcome is of course not certain, but the situation is so far out of stability that anything can happen.
Maybe Terry Gilliam could script another black comedy: “Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley”? The only problem is that it’s t’other way round… yes, I too fear the technocratic CEOs.
"But nobody did anything about it.”
Indeed. As I noted earlier, I wrote (and talked) about this stuff in 1991 after researching AI, philosophy, neuroscience, and politics at the university.
Reflecting back, the reasons no one cared:
• Too scary to even think about; switch topics :end of conversation
• Too esoteric
• Too futuristic
• Too hard to understand / techie
• Inevitable, too big, nothing I/we can do, powerless, others are handling/dealing
• Narrow Self interest, cynicism
• Pro AI/ tech - it’s good, you're just a luddite activist hippie judgement
• Belief in some grand shiny AI better Future - a quasi-religious faith/hope.
• Don’t have the mental bandwidth, time, resources to deal with social & political issues nor risk the professional repercussions/backlash.
As with many things in life, laws will only be enacted or changes made if there’s a huge disaster, so as to overcome the inertia, ignoring, inconvenience and self interest. The only way to get the attention, perhaps? As was the case with social media, it’s more of the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot: a general creeping malaise and mental/social rot, rather than an explosive type disaster.
Let's hope it won't take such an event.
Bruce Schneier is a good resource for risks and mitigations of unregulated AI
https://www.schneier.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/
Trying to explain to people that the tech CEOs are not necessarily the ones who best understand how their technology works is a nearly impossible task. The Ds want the tech industry to be their besties and the Rs want to either complain that it’s biased against them or ensure that it reinforces their own side of the culture wars. All short sighted. All style and no substance, just like ChatGPT.
1) U.S. lawmakers have jurisdiction over about 5% of the world's population. About the same for the EU.
2) We live in a globalized world interconnected by the Internet and other means, therefore....
3) If silicon valley were to vanish completely, the march towards an AI future would just continue elsewhere.
4) Therefore, getting all hysterical about AI is pointless, because we don't have the power to determine the future of this technology.
It's like the weather. We don't yell at the sky on rainy days because that wouldn't accomplish anything. The rainy day is bigger than us. Our only option is to adapt to the rain.
Thank you for your thoughtful post!
The fundamental premise of the AI community, that it should be allowed to regulate itself, is false. Negative feedback control systems are ubiquitous in nature, and are the shared characteristic of all stable and effective human-constructed systems. Regarding the latter, there are legitimate arguments to be made concerning the details, but no human-created entity has to my knowledge has succeeded in regulating itself. Once again our elected officials are guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to enact meaningful legislation setting guidelines for use of AI in the media and imposition of financial and criminal penalties for violations thereof.
We also need to enact legislation declaring that personhood is DNA-based. Otherwise we will see a move by the wingnuts of the SCOTUS to declare chatbots people, and therefore protected by the First Amendment, inter alia. Needless to say, the use of AI in the autonomous exercise of life and death decisions should be outlawed, both domestically and internationally.
It's the same problem we see with the military-industrial complex, big oil, the pharmaceutical industry...and pretty much every other major lobbying group in Washington - government was captured by special interests decades ago because we haven't gotten money out of politics. That's how you end up with things like "citizens united" and policies designed to benefit big corporations and the wealthy donor class (e.g. like private equity firms being able to buy up vast quantities of residential real estate).
In the meantime, everyone else gets screwed, and we're seeing it in all facets of our civilization right now.
From your lips to God's ears. History is repeating itself in the lack of AI regulation-exactly the playbook Silicon Valley used to block all attempts at data and privacy regulation. It's why the US is the only first world country without such regulation. Silicon Valley has paid off the regulators open to their bribes...ahem "Donations," and threatened to "primary" those politicians who won't take their money. When the lack of regulation merely allowed unbelievable concentration of wealth and heaps of online abuse, well that was bad, but survivable. When it's about whether a potentially disastrous tech gets developed with no guardrails-we're talking Silicon Valley getting carte blanche on the most important industrial policy in history! Make no mistake-Silicon Valley will not stop pushing to be virtually unregulated in AI development It will have to be MADE to stop, by politicians fearing their voters more than they do Silicon Valley. This will be a long and ugly fight.
The revolving door exists between every regulator and the industries they purport to oversee. Heck, that’s among the biggest problems in believe we have with any gov’t oversight. Whether it’s the oil & gas industry, the environmental industry, the healthcare industry, or any other, the claim is always that a small number of people truly understand the issues faced in the respective industry, that industry insiders are the only really qualified folks for the job…until of course their term is done & back to industry they go. It helps to have nice stacked the deck for their future employers (or in some cases, the employers they took the sabbatical from to serve their country before returning ;). I wouldn’t expect things to be any different in this industry hence why I don’t see gov’t and regulators as the solution either. Legislators will never do the right thing when it comes to regulation because they depend on these companies for the electoral fundraising. It’s a corrupt and rigged system and until money is no longer considered speech, and the Citizens United ruling stands, I see no way out of this regulatory mess across any industry.