The thought of my children being put to bed by a machine is horrifying. Then again, perhaps this is better than many kids have. Shudder.
It saddens me to think of the amount of engineering work that went into creating that example while entirely missing the point. These are the moments we are supposed to be working towards to have more of. If we outsource them to an AI company because we are as as overworked and underpaid as ever...what's the point of it all?
We have major priority issues from what I can see. If we want to live our lives more but put an AI to work doing something we tend to claim we place very high in our value hierarchy, we’re effectively inviting death into life. We’re forfeiting something we love. That’s incredibly sad to me.
The first half of the video is demonstrating how the parent can take something as special as a party celebrating a major milestone and automate it into a soulless box-check – while editing some segments to make it look like their own voice.
Definite black mirror vibes.
It's just like reading a "choose your own adventure" book with your child, but it can be much more interactive and you both come up with ideas and have the LLM integrate them.
I know this is rhetorical, but luckily we don't have to speculate. OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it.
This is not me passing judgement on whether said philosophy is right or wrong, but it does exist and it's not hidden.
Do you have evidence for this? I know two people who work at OpenAI and I don't think they have much in common philosophically.
From https://archive.ph/3zSz6.
Of course there is much more evidence - just follow OpenAI employees on Twitter to see for yourself.
No shit? How many people worked on the apollo program and believed that
(i) Getting to the moon is impossible
or
(ii) Landing on the moon is no big deal
It is probably the case that they all believe AGI is possible, because otherwise they would not work at a company whose stated goal is to build an AGI.
if they think instead that they're in the business of creating some kind of ridiculous robot god, that is definitely interesting information about them. because that's no moon.
No Open AI is in the business of creating their vision of Artificial General Intelligence (which they define as that is generally smarter than humans ) and they believe LLMs are a viable path. This has always been the case. It's not some big secret and they have many posts which talk upon their expectations and goals in this space.
https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond
https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment
GPT as a product comes second and it shows. These are the guys that sat on by far the most performant Language Model for 8 months red teaming before even saying anything about it.
that's a project, not a business.
> GPT as a product comes second and it shows
we can agree on that, at least.
I’m genuinely curious about the different political/spiritual views that are growing up around AI. So maybe my question was not so rhetorical.
If you follow a religious tradition like Shinto where even things like rocks can have spirits - the idea of your phone having a certain, limited form of intelligence might already be cool with you.
If you think, much like a camera does most of the work in photography but it's the photographer that takes the credit, that when a person uses AI the output is nobody's work but the user - you might be completely fine with an AI-written wedding speech.
If you think the relentless march of technology can't be stopped and can barely be directed, you might think advanced AIs are coming anyway, and if we don't invent it the Chinese will - you might be fine with pretty much whatever.
If you're extremely trusting of big corporations, who you see as more moral than the government; or you think that censorship is vital to maintain AI safety and stamp out deep fakes; you might think it a great thing for these technologies to be jealously guarded by a handful of huge corporations.
Or hell, maybe you're just a parent who's had their kid want to hear the same Peppa Pig book 90 nights in a row and you've got a hankering for something that would introduce a bit of variety.
Of course these are all things reasonable people could disagree on - but if you didn't like openai's work, would you end up working at openai?
They are trying to make their product sound not as terrifying as it actually is.
At first people will react with horror.
On the other hand, as you say, it's likely better than the alternative. Which would probably be something like an iPad "bedtime story app" that is less humanlike.
This could provide a viable alternative for exhausted parents to just giving a child an iPad with a movie. It may also open up a huge range of educational uses.
One might imagine in 15-20years though that all of the young people sound like audio books when they talk. Which will be weird.
We'll be told by OpenAI and friends is that it shouldn't be a problem, because those were mundane tasks and now, people are free up to do more creative / interesting / meaningful things with their time, let's see about that...
My gut feeling is that it's bad, the only thing I hope can save it all is that people actually don't find meaning in consuming AI generated art and actual artists with a real back story and something real to communicate remain relevant and in demand.
The other day I needed a photo for a website I was working on and I actually purchased a real capture from a local photographer to use because the the authenticity means something to me and the customers...
Edit: Is the plan that we just surrender our aspirations and just buy a subscription to ChatWHATEVER and just consume until the end of human history ?
Most AI art is just generic garbage that you scroll past immediately and doesn't offer you anything.
We're gonna have to do something to stop the biggest crisis in meaning ever that comes out of this eventually though. Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society. Maybe just put someone in an ultra realistic simulation to give them artificial meaning.
Serious question: Why not?
> Eventually no one will be of any economic value to society.
People have value outside of economics — I’m sure you know — and it makes me so sad that we as a society? seem to only care about the money in the end.
Yes of course people have value outside of economics that's why I said economics and not value in general. I think it's quite sad as a society we've moved towards a value system which is basically what is good for the economy is good, and if you earn more money you are better.
In the past most people were religious and that gave them meaning. Religion is in decline now but I think people are just replacing it with worshipping the progression of technology basically. For the last 100 years there's always been a clear direction to move in to progress technology, and we haven't really had to think very hard. That's what AI is going to bring an end to I think and I have no idea what we are going to do.
Fascinating thought. Technology as the new religion is smth I’ll have to think about more.
I recently saw an "AI safety discussion" featuring Gregg Brockman from OpenAI who was referencing Kurzeil. It does seem like the religion has maybe caught on. To what extent Brock believes in it, I'm not sure but I can't help feeling that this belief in modern tech might one day seem like how we thought of the pyramids granting eternal life, or mercury, or any other seemingly incredible thing discovery / phenomena of the time. That is to say, the brain is a fickle beast and is easily amused and is just as easily bored. While we're in the situation we fee we're on the doorstep of immortality, eternal greatness, but maybe we're no where near that.
I'm open minded about it all, but it's hard to deny the parallels between the past beliefs and the present. Maybe this time it is different? Who knows.
If AI can also create images... I don't see how that changes what I enjoy. There are already better painters than I, and more productive painters than I. They make money with it, I don't. This doesn't stop me from painting. Neither will AI that can paint. I'll still do what I enjoy.
Chess has never been more popular, for f's sake!