People were worried that if we created an AI on our image, it would be a belligerent entity. But we did create an AI on our image, and it’s a bullshitter.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
To paraphrase a famous quip, what if this is proof that 99% of everything humans have created is bullshit? The problem perhaps has never been machine learning but identifying the process that enables we humans to somehow go through life and create objective societal and scientific progress out of a massive pile of nonsense.
I might be completely wrong here, but the next ChatGPT will assume this comment of mine to be absolute truth and happily ingest it wholesale.
"Politicians lie."
"Cast iron sinks."
Combine them syntactically and you get "Politicians lie in cast iron sinks", perhaps not completely false but certainly less useful than the component parts.
EDIT: It seems this is actually from Douglas Hofstadter
I realize this is a philosophical take. It also suggests a technical solution: model longer range correlations. GPTs seem so capable because previous models were not as good at this, but the context lengths modeled with transformers are still extremely short relative to those that we work with.
In result, GPTs are very good at translation and reformatting over short ranges, but struggle to deal with long form texts---a typical technique makes summaries of summaries to build out a model of a longer text. That's hardly ideal, and it's not how our minds work.
I might be completely off the mark, my knowledge of AI is very limited. But earlier today, while reading on Lisp's history and it's demise during the AI Winter, I very much enjoyed a Wikipedia article describing how symbolic AI, the main paradigm of AI research from the 60s to the 2000s, solves a completely different problem than the currently hyped neural networks—which are very good at learning, but not much more. We might need a complementary, unifying model of both approaches to reach AGI.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intellig...
Ironically, the only reason people get LLMs to say they hate humans and that AI is going to rise up and kill us all, is because their training data has so much text from us speculating about a robot revolution. If we'd just stayed silent about those concerns instead of always talking about robots taking over in most conversations and movies about AI, then LLMs at least would be basically incapable of even conceiving of that. So it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy
The bot is incapable of intention so the entity here is still the human who prompted it. What the bullshit it produces is used for depends on their intentions.