Blubbering idiocy can be avoided in LLMs by transfusion of fresh information from the creative minds of humans.
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Left to its own devices, ChatGPT is heavily biased toward methodological naturalism and will not say that intelligent design is a theory of biological origins
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17 prominent authors including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham are suing OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, for copyright infringement and “theft,” according to the Associated Press (AP). The authors are among many in the creative field who are expressing concern over the ethics of AI use. A spokesperson for the Authors Guild said that it’s imperative to stop AI’s theft to preserve America’s “incredible literary culture,” according to the AP. Hillel Italie reports, The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters Read More ›
A new in-depth report from Wired recounts the story of an Argentinian man, Guillermo Ibarrola, who was falsely accused of a crime and pinpointed via video surveillance. According to Wired, Ibarrola spent nearly a week in custody before the “mixup” was spotted and authorities realized they had nabbed the wrong Guillermo Ibarrola. It was a data entry mistake. The case is only one of many others in Argentina’s mishaps with video surveillance, and how data mistakes can end up impacting innocent lives significantly. Karen Naundorf writes, When speaking of South America, mass surveillance technology is likely not the first thing that comes to mind. But a study by the data protection organization Access Now shows Argentina is one of the most surveilled Read More ›
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are terrific at discovering statistical correlations but terrible at distinguishing between correlation and causation. A computer algorithm might find a correlation between how often a person has been in an automobile accident and the words they post on Facebook, being a good software engineer and visiting certain websites, and making loan payments on time and keeping one’s phone fully charged. However, computer algorithms do not know what any of these things are and consequently have no way of determining whether these are causal relationships (and therefore useful predictors) or fleeting coincidences (that are useless predictors). If the program is black box, then humans cannot intervene and declare that these are almost certainly irrelevant coincidences. Even if Read More ›
Perhaps ChatGPT’s prowess at IBE is, in some way, no more impressive than the prowess of Stockfish, the world’s best current chess program.
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Will modern AI systems, these fascinating Large Language Models, make the trend of centralization worse or better? Most likely worse.
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Computer scientist and tech entrepreneur Erik Larson recently launched a Substack account where he’ll be covering AI, tech, and human exceptionalism in the digital age. A new post from the channel discusses the dangers of “mythical AI” and how the evidence is inconclusive (at best) that AI could ever think or interact like a human being. Here’s an excerpt: In spite of the almost religious fervor about the mental powers of AI, we have at best inconclusive evidence that AI systems will get smart like humans—the so-called general intelligence attributed to us has so far proven entirely elusive for machines. It’s an open question whether future AI can really achieve general, or human-level, intelligence. To date, we have evidence that AI Read More ›
AI’s greatest threat may not be its sophistication, but our own over-reliance on it. As a technology, it has its uses and benefits. As a religion, it fails.
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In today’s featured video, watch Peter Thiel from COSM 2022 speak on how we should think about artificial intelligence. Is it really intelligent and even conscious? And is it likely to be a force for good, or does it have the dangerous potential to control us? Listen in to learn more on this broad and often contentious topic. Peter Thiel is an internationally known venture capitalist and investor. (REGISTER NOW FOR COSM 2023) COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. From artificial intelligence to 5G and WiFi6, from tokenized time to blockchain, from cloud computing to the quantum revolution, and from biotech to the nanotech revolution, COSM brings together some Read More ›
AI experts differ on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and where this technology is headed.
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ChatGPT’s traffic has declined for the third month in a row, according to Reuters. The Large Language Model (LLM) AI tool took the world by storm in November of 2022 when it was released by OpenAI, posing questions of academic integrity, and urging a host of tech giants to incorporate LLMs into their own platforms and search engines. Anna Tong writes, Worldwide desktop and mobile website visits to the ChatGPT website decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion in August, following approximately 10% drops from each of the previous two months. The amount of time visitors spent on the website has also been declining monthly since March, from an average of 8.7 minutes on site to 7 minutes on site in Read More ›
If you’ve been online at all for the last few weeks, chances are you’ve come across headlines about the folk/country singer Oliver Anthony, whose song “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral in August. The song, a broad critique of elite power in Washington D.C., (Democrat and Republican) has gained both applause and fierce critique, but for the most part, seems to have deeply resonated with the general American public. Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson recently had Anthony on his podcast, discussing music, entrepreneurship, and virality. One thing is clear about Anthony’s songs: they’re honest, and people are attracted to that. Peterson noted in their conversation that authenticity is a sign of brilliance in artists, and how that sort of honesty Read More ›
Even if panpsychism is true, the subsequent possible claim that “all things are conscious” is still false because it commits a fallacy of division.
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Randomness is a red herring when it comes to serving as an indicator of consciousness.
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If you’re a regular reader of Mind Matters, you’ve probably heard us applaud and discuss the book by computer scientist and professor Robert J. Marks, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will. The book is well worth reading and sheds much needed insights on our current technological moment where AI is either seen as the “greatest thing ever” or the tool that will enslave and destroy humanity, Terminator style. However, if you’re more of an audiobook kind of person, maybe you’ll just want to listen to a new podcast episode in which Dr. Marks discusses the key themes of his book with various hosts. You can listen to the podcast or download it for free here: Why Read More ›
Artificial intelligence that appears to be conscious is a Consciousness Room, an imitation with varying degrees of success.
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The first time I watched Westworld, I remember enjoying it, but upon revisiting the series, my opinion of it has dropped a great deal. There are a variety of problems. First, it’s a bait and switch. It teases the idea of showing how robots can come to life, and it plays with your expectations for most of the series. It even goes as far as to discuss theories like The Bicameral Mind, and The Turing Test. Then, in the last episode, it confirms what the viewer has been slowly growing to suspect. The robots had been coming to life the entire time, and Ford had been wiping their memories. The show says that Ford programmed the robots to experience everything Read More ›
New speech AI technology is able to take just a couple seconds’ worth of audio and extrapolate on it to make complete sentences. Theoretically, scam artists could take a short video from TikTok and use it to impersonate an unsuspecting child. In fact, this has actually happened, and more than once. It’s easy to see how one could use speech AI to “resurrect” those who have passed away. And in fact, this too has already happened. In an essay titled “The Speech of the Dead: Against AI Necromancy,” David Walden writes how in 2020, the nonprofit Change the Ref made a video featuring Joaquin Oliver, who encouraged viewers in the clip to vote for gun control in the presidential election. The Read More ›
For big questions about God, meaning, and religion, AI might not be the best listener or pastor.
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