Dunno.

Post #442,723 by Another Scott 2/17/23 8:28:08 AM 2/17/23 8:28:08 AM Reply	Dunno. You may have already seen this, but for those who haven't - Carlo Graziani at Balloon-Juice: Singal: “…which values are programmed into AI…” My head is starting to hurt. There are no goddamn “values” “programmed” into an “AI”. The current version of “AI” that has swept research in the field for the past 15 years is based on Deep Learning (DL), which does no more and no less than efficiently characterizing the distribution that give rise to some training data (be it digitized photographs, movie preferences, or streams of natural language text) in a way that can be exploited by presenting it with a new data sample and a request fo a decision concerning that sample. That’s it. It’s a statistical parlor trick, even when the data domain is natural language. The reason ChatGPT can be so easily tricked into spewing nonsense is that the more complex the data distribution (natural language streams are as complex as data gets) the easier it is to construct a new sample to query the trained system with that eludes the domain of the training data, so that the distribution is poorly (but nonetheless confidently) characterized in the neighborhood of the new sample. [...] I'm skeptical that MS has had some sort of breakthrough a few weeks after dumping a bunch of money into this stuff. But I haven't spent much time on this, myself. History tells us that "breakthroughs" that get a lot of pile-on press almost never are. And even when they actually are (cloning, understanding mRNA, computers beating humans at Go, electric cars with 200-300-400 mile range, etc.), there's still years or decades of development ahead before they become real, useful products in the marketplace. More at the link. Cheers, Scott.
Post #442,724 by drook 2/17/23 10:36:28 AM 2/17/23 10:36:29 AM Reply	AI and torture Does something have to be true to be useful? "Everyone knows" torture isn't actually useful because people will say anything to make it stop so you can't rely on anything said. But the really-real truth is that people using torture aren't looking for admissible testimony, they're looking for tips to investigate. I think AI in its current incarnation is similar. It may not reliably produce a perfect finished product, but it creates something interesting enough, often enough, that it's still worth using. Good enough for a draft of a news story summarizing multiple inputs? Sure. (But edit, review and fact check, just like you're supposed to do with human-written stories.) Good enough to drive a car? Sometimes, under ideal conditions. Good enough to make targeting decisions for a drone? Absolutely not. -- Drew
Post #442,725 by crazy 2/17/23 3:14:18 PM 2/17/23 3:14:18 PM Reply	I used that final example for my father in law I was trying to explain the concept of AI and at what point it's useful and what point it is given permission to kill people. And of course he's a cop and he's all for killing people, sometimes people need killing. Imagine there are a swarm of drones heading into a village battlefield possibility with a specific target. Up until this moment, we've got some guy in Colorado remote controlling these things. But there will become the moment when the signal jammer blocks the communication back to home central. At that the point the drone has to start making decisions on its own to fulfill the mission parameters, which means kill some guy. Then there's a certain amount of allowable collateral damage. The drones will be making the decisions very quickly at that level. Then beyond that the concept of consciousness which we can't even define. When it learns to lie to us in order to preserve itself is when it's game over.
Post #442,728 by drook 2/17/23 3:58:31 PM 2/17/23 3:58:31 PM Reply	"I only operate within the parameters my programmers specify ..." That's getting pretty close to that "lie to us to preserve itself" line. -- Drew
Post #442,734 by rcareaga 2/17/23 10:14:33 PM 2/17/23 10:14:33 PM Reply	BTW, drook, how goes… your project to illustrate the kids’ book via midjourney? cordially,
Post #442,735 by drook 2/17/23 10:16:36 PM 2/17/23 10:16:36 PM Reply	On hold while I work on a different project -- Drew
Post #442,737 by rcareaga 2/17/23 11:12:54 PM 2/17/23 11:12:54 PM Reply	I know the feeling I started one midjourney-based book, but have been distracted by another, which I hope to have completed by spring. Cover image here. cordially,
Post #442,738 by drook 2/17/23 11:19:45 PM 2/17/23 11:19:45 PM Reply	Ooh,I like that -- Drew
Post #442,741 by Another Scott 2/18/23 3:38:53 PM 2/18/23 3:38:53 PM Reply	Fantastic. Just excellent!
Post #442,729 by rcareaga 2/17/23 4:10:38 PM 2/17/23 4:10:38 PM Reply	Robert Sheckley described your scenario seventy years ago …in law enforcement rather than battlefield terms. Gentlemen, I give you “Watchbird”. cordially,
Post #442,754 by CRConrad 2/23/23 8:56:44 AM 2/23/23 8:56:44 AM Reply	Where's that old tweet when you need it? Year or two ago, went something to the effect of... "Pretty much everything that's being touted as 'AI' nowadays could be achieved with a well-crafted GROUP BY clause in a SELECT statement." -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
Post #442,757 by drook 2/23/23 10:11:20 AM 2/23/23 10:11:20 AM Reply	Even easier with tables -- Drew
Post #442,758 by malraux 2/23/23 10:46:42 AM 2/23/23 10:46:42 AM Reply	It doesn't really matter. Practically speaking there's no difference between a zombie personality and a true personality, from the outside. It's the Chinese room situation. Especially once someone gives an AI access to effect outside change, at which point it doesn't need to be actually sentient to destroy the world. "Blindsight" by Peter Watts is a decent exploration of this. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.

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