Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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AI vs. Human Intentionality

If ChatGPT were trained over and over on its own output, it would eventually turn to gibberish

We can do a simple experiment that demonstrates the difference between AI and human intentionality. ChatGPT and the like are a sophisticated form of a mathematical model known as a Markov chain. A Markov chain is based on the Markov assumption that the future is entirely a product of the recent past. In other words, if we know the recent past, then nothing else we learn about the more distant past will improve our ability to predict the future. In ChatGPT terms, this means ChatGPT is based on the assumption that everything we need to know to predict future words is contained within a limited window of previously seen words. ChatGPT’s window was 3,000 words, and I believe the newest version has Read More ›

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Robert J. Marks on Fox News

Dr. Marks talked about the hype over AI and where the danger really lies

Robert J. Marks, director of the Walter Bradley Center, was the subject of a new op-ed at Fox News, which featured his unique insights on artificial intelligence and how it can best be used by human beings. Contrary to much of the present alarmism over AI systems like ChatGPT, Marks remains level-headed about AI’s place in today’s world, pushing back against “sci-fi” apocalypticism while at the same time addressing real issues and concerns. Marks said, “No, AI is not going to take over. You’re not going to be its pet in the future. It’s going to be a tool which disrupts society, but we’re still going to be in charge. -Scott Whitlock, AI expert warns of too much ‘hype’: Humans Read More ›

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Moon detailed closeup

We Can’t Build a Hut to the Moon

The history of AI is a story of a recurring cycle of hype and disappointment

Once upon a time there live a tribe who lived on the plains. They were an adventurous tribe, constantly wanting to explore. At night they would see the moon drift lazily overhead, and became curious. How could they reach the moon? The moon was obviously higher than their huts. Standing on the highest hut no one could reach the moon. At the same time, standing on the hut got them closer to the moon. So, they decided to amass all their resources and build a gigantic hut. Reason being that if standing on a short hut got them closer to the moon, then standing on a gigantic hut would get them even closer. Eventually the tribe ran out of mud and Read More ›

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Retro wave 80s computer all-in-one illuminated by neon light isolated on black

AI is Old News, Says Tech Consultant

AI actually dates back to the 1950s. It is not new, says Funk

This week, Robert J. Marks sat down with technology consultant and retired professor Jeffrey Funk, who contributes often to Mind Matters, usually in tandem with Gary Smith. Marks and Funk talked about tech startups, where the industry is headed, and the exaggerated hype that currently attends the discourse over AI. Funk talked about the various stages of AI development. “AI is not new,” he said. AI is 70 years old. ChatGPT and other generative AI models are based on neural networks, which have become economical through Moore’s Law, through this incredible increase in computing power that has been going on since the 1950s. But it’s slowed dramatically. -Jeffrey Funk, Jeffrey Funk on AI, Startups, and Big Tech | Mind Matters Read More ›

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ChatGPT Chat concept AI, Artificial Intelligence. businessman using technology smart robot AI, enter command prompt, contact for business information analysis, Futuristic technology transformation.

Jeffrey Funk on AI, Startups, and Big Tech

In this podcast episode, technology consultant and author Jeffrey Funk joins Robert J. Marks to talk about the artificial intelligence industry, how it’s used by Big Tech, and AI’s exaggerated hype.  How do we respond to AI when technology is changing every year? Additional Resources

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Cute 3D Snapchat Ghost Cartoon Character

You Too, Snapchat? Another AI Bot Hits the Scene

"My AI" is eerily human, like the Bing bot, and just as inappropriate

Snapchat introduced a new feature in its app: an AI chatbot “friend” called “My AI.” (Just what lonesome teens need.) We’ve already seen the rogue behavior of Bing’s chatbot, which, in conversation with a New York Times tech journalist, dubbed itself “Sydney” and started beseeching its human counterpart to leave his wife and fall in love with it. Romantic, right? Not so much. The journalist left the experience with the creepy sense that AI had just crossed a sensitive boundary, and that tech companies need to get better at controlling the unpredictable beast they’ve unleashed. “My AI” Gives Shady Advice to Kids Just a couple of weeks later and here we are with AI making inroads into an app used Read More ›

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Love Thy Robot as Thyself

Academics worry about AI feelings, call for AI rights

Riffing on the popular fascination with AI (artificial intelligence) systems ChatGPT and Bing Chat, two authors in the Los Angeles Times recently declared: We are approaching an era of legitimate dispute about whether the most advanced AI systems have real desires and emotions and deserve substantial care and solicitude. The authors, Prof. Eric Schwitzgebel at UC Riverside, and Henry Shevlin, a senior researcher at the University of Cambridge, observed AI thinkers saying “large neural networks” might be “conscious,” the sophisticated chatbot LaMDA “might have real emotions,” and ordinary human users reportedly “falling in love” with chatbot Replika.  Reportedly, “some leading theorists contend that we already have the core technological ingredients for conscious machines.”  The authors argue that if or when Read More ›

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Observing and Communing

What human art and literature do that AI can't

AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E are generally adept at capturing the accuracy of the human form. The concerns over copyright, job infringement, and general degradation of the visual arts via such AI are ongoing concerns for many artists and practitioners. However, a new New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka identifies a noticeable flaw in AI artwork: human hands. Missing the Big Picture Chayka begins by recalling an art class where he was asked to draw his own hand. It’s an assignment for beginners, and as behooves a novice, tempts the artist to focus more on the specific contours of the hand instead of the overall structure and form. The forest gets lost in the trees, so to speak. Read More ›

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Digital Fractal Realms

Blake Lemoine and the LaMDA Question

In this continuation of last week’s conversation, ex-Googler Blake Lemoine tells Robert J. Marks what originally got him interested in AI: reading the science fiction of Isaac Asimov as a boy in rural Louisiana. The two go on to discuss and debate sentience in AI, non-computable traits of human beings, and the question of the soul. Additional Resources

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Mature woman having scones with orange jam

AI and “Qualia,” the Ability to Experience

Robert J. Marks writes on AI's limits in new article at Salvo

Robert J. Marks wrote an article for the Spring Issue of Salvo Magazine on AI, covering his ideas on its “non-computability” in the areas of love, empathy, and creativity. The Quality of Qualia I was particularly intrigued by Marks’s thoughts on qualia, a term used to describe the multifaceted realm of sensory experience. We often report on AI’s inability to be creative here at Mind Matters, but what about experiencing the world through touch, smell, and sight? Qualia is related to the mystery of consciousness, another non-computable feature of human life, and according to Marks, is far out of the purview of AI capabilities. Marks writes about the experience of biting into an orange as an example: If the experience Read More ›

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Time for Artificial General Intelligence? Not So Fast, OpenAI

OpenAI CEO is ambitious about the company's direction, but are his hopes profoundly misguided?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is ambitious about his company’s future, promising the world that they are developing “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) that will supposedly compete with human intelligence, per a recent Futurism piece. However, the ambition is misguided. Or more than that, the ambition is simply delusional. AI is “not even close” to attaining the creativity and intelligence of human beings, and Altman shouldn’t be parading OpenAI products as if it is. Victor Tangermann writes, In reality, however, LLMs have a very long way to go until they’re able to compete with the intellect of a human being — which is why several experts are calling foul on Altman’s recent blog post, calling it meaningless and misleading. After all, AGI Read More ›

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Chatbot computer program designed for conversation with human users over the Internet. Support and customer service automation technology concept.

A Chat with Blake Lemoine on Google and AI Sentience

Former Google employee Blake Lemoine claimed that the Large Language Model LaMDA was a sentient being. The claim got him fired. In this episode, Lemoine sits down with Robert J. Marks to discuss AI, what he was doing at Google, and why he believes artificial intelligence can be sentient.   Additional Resources

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A holographic head representing modern technology / ai floats in a classroom setting. Created with generative ai

Text Generators, Education, and Critical Thinking: an Update

The fundamental problem remains that, not knowing what words mean, AI has no critical thinking abilities

This past October, I wrote that educational testing was being shaken by the astonishing ability of GPT-3 and other large language models (LLMs) to answer test questions and write articulate essays. I argued that, while LLMs might mimic human conversation, they do not know what words mean. They consequently excel at rote memorization and BS conversation but struggle mightily with assignments that are intended to help students develop their critical thinking abilities, such as Lacking any understanding of semantics, LLMs can do none of this. To illustrate, I asked GPT-3 two questions from a midterm examination I had recently given in an introductory statistics class. Both questions tested students critical thinking skills and GPT-3 bombed both questions. I was hopeful Read More ›

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Book drop-off zone

Wesley J. Smith on Why You Should Read Dean Koontz

The bestselling novelist's work is both entertaining and profoundly insightful into our cultural moment

Wesley J. Smith, Chair of Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, wrote an article praising the prolific literature of his friend Dean Koontz, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Smith finds Koontz both a unique writer and a remarkable person with a powerful story of redemption. Born in poverty in Pennsylvania under the hand of an abusive father, Koontz persevered and pursued novel writing with the help of his wife’s encouragement. The rest is history. Through daily discipline, keen research, and profound imagination, Koontz has written dozens of bestsellers. First and foremost, his books entertain and delight. In addition, however, they deliver their fair share of social commentary and critique. Much of his work explores the Read More ›

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Klara and the Sun: A Review

The sci-fi bestseller asks us: can machines become humans?

Klara and the Sun is novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, a dystopian story told through the lens of an “artificial friend” (AF) named Klara. Ishiguro is known for his provocative speculative fiction, including the novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Klara and the Sun similarly alludes to a dark, post-industrial, futuristic world, but it is told through the innocent lens of an artificial mind, highlighting the vestiges of human behavior and brokenness in ways that perhaps an “ordinary” narrator might not be able to manage. The novel starts out with Klara on display in a store waiting to be purchased. Eventually, she’s chosen by a girl named Josie and her mother, and thus begins her Read More ›

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portrait of a woman in a black hat on a black background black and white photo

Photographer Who Used Midjourney Calls His Own Bluff

The lifelike portraits gained attention, but alas, weren't real

Joe Avery started posting portraits on his Instagram page in 2022, getting attention and gaining followers at a surprising pace. His pictures were aesthetically pleasing, rendered in black and white, and given captions that assumed the faces in the pictures were legitimately human except, oops. Turns out, they were all AI-generated. Richard Whiddington writes at Artnet News, The problem, one Avery struggled to disclose to his 28,000 followers, was that he was creating the images using Midjourney, an A.I. image generator. Avery made the images by entering a text prompt into Midjourney and then fine-tuning them using Photoshop.” -Richard Whiddington, A Photographer Who Found Instagram Fame for His Striking Portraits Has Confessed His Images Were Actually A.I.-Generated (artnet.com) Avery claimed the images Read More ›

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The Metaverse was a Bust. Will AI Save the Day?

Microsoft is counting on it, investing billions into AI research and development

Just a couple of years ago, the metaverse was taking the tech world captive with grandiose promises of revolutionizing the internet and representing the future of human interaction. Microsoft was among the moguls who embraced the metaverse project with open arms, only to face the harsh fact that the technology was underdeveloped, investors were skeptical of its viability, and a massive swath of the American public seemed simply uninterested in the product. But, it was new technology. It was exciting. It was supposed to be the future. Now, Microsoft is hailing AI as the destiny of the internet, again with the sort of optimism that directed their love affair with virtual reality. The company has jumped the gun and sought Read More ›

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Does New A.I. Live Up to the Hype?

Experts are finding ChatGPT and other LLMs unimpressive, but investors aren't getting the memo

Original article was featured at Salon on February 21st, 2023. On November 30, 2022, OpenAI announced the public release of ChatGPT-3, a large language model (LLM) that can engage in astonishingly human-like conversations and answer an incredible variety of questions. Three weeks later, Google’s management — wary that they had been publicly eclipsed by a competitor in the artificial intelligence technology space — issued a “Code Red” to staff. Google’s core business is its search engine, which currently accounts for 84% of the global search market. Their search engine is so dominant that searching the internet is generically called “googling.” When a user poses a search request, Google’s search engine returns dozens of helpful links along with targeted advertisements based on its knowledge of the Read More ›

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Love at First Click? A Creepy Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot

New York Times tech journalist thinks AI has crossed a line

The new Bing bot is freaky. Kevin Roose is a technology reporter for The New York Times and wrote a piece today detailing his “conversation” with Bing new’s chatbot. To put it simply, it was weird. The chatbot diverged from its initial informational output and ended up introducing itself as “Sydney” and then “confessed its love” for Roose. He writes, For much of the next hour, Sydney fixated on the idea of declaring love for me, and getting me to declare my love in return. I told it I was happily married, but no matter how hard I tried to deflect or change the subject, Sydney returned to the topic of loving me, eventually turning from love-struck flirt to obsessive Read More ›

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Will ChatGPT End Up Improving Higher Education?

Oral exams are an endangered species in higher education today, but they are a powerful tool for evaluating knowledge in a world of AI

This article was written by Peter Jacobsen and was reposted from MercatorNet under a Creative Commons License. A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called ChatGPT has been released to the public, and many have been shocked to see the extent of its abilities. ChatGPT can accomplish many tasks. For example, it can write poems about any topic, give book recommendations, summarize specific chapters of books, and create workout routines. If you’re asking whether the AI just Google-searches for responses, the answer is no. If you try to find the source of ChatGPT’s responses, you’ll find they are fresh writing. This brings us to the most impactful thing ChatGPT can do when it comes to my fellow academics and me. ChatGPT can write Read More ›