
Will Digital Inbreeding Be the End of AI?
Without the creative input of humans, AI is doomed to deteriorate.On Thursday, November 2, COSM 2023 hosted a panel on “The Quintessential Limits and Possibilities of AI,” addressing one of the fundamental questions COSM seeks to investigate: “Is AI ‘generative’ or degenerative?” If these experts are right, AI might be doomed to eventually degenerate into nonsense. George Montañez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, opened the session by explaining how AI works. Modern AIs and their “large language models” (LLMs) are trained on huge sets of real-world data — namely text and images generated by humans. Panelist William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher, pointed out that these LLMs “require a lot of input data and training” in order to work. For example, he notes that it took Read More ›