this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Oh, you mean it wasn't just concidence that the moment OpenAI, Google and MS were in position they started caving to oversight and claiming that any further development should be licensed by the government?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
I mean, I get that many people were just freaking out about it and it's easy to lose track, but they were not even a little bit subtle about it.
AI is going to change quite a bit but I couldn't wrap my head around the end of the world stuff.
It won't end the world because AI doesn't work the way that Hollywood portrays it.
No AI has ever been shown to have self agency, if it's not given instructions it'll just sit there. Even a human child would attempt to leave room if left alone in there.
So the real risk is not that and AI will decide to destroy humanity it's that a human will tell the AI to destroy their enemies.
But then you just get back around to mutually assured destruction, if you tell your self redesigning thinking weapon to attack me I'll tell my self redesigning thinking weapon to attack you.
I’m an AI researcher at one of the world’s top universities on the topic. While you are correct that no AI has demonstrated self-agency, it doesn’t mean that it won’t imitate such actions.
These days, when people think AI, they mostly are referring to Language Models as these are what most people will interact with. A language model is trained on a corpus of documents. In the event of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, they are trained on just about any written document in existence. This includes Hollywood scripts and short stories concerning sentient AI.
If put in the right starting conditions by a user, any language model will start to behave as if it were sentient, imitating the training data from its corpus. This could have serious consequences if not protected against.
There are already instances where chat bots demonstrated unintended racism. The monumental goal of creating a general purpose intelligence is now plausible. The hardware has caught up with the ambitions of decades past. Maybe ChatGPT's model has no real hope for sentience, as it's just a word factory, other approaches might. Spiking neural networks for example, on a massive scale, might simulate the human brain to where the network actually ponders its existence.