The AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want You to Make the List Longer, But You Cannot Make It All Your Own
AI has a lot of problems. It helps itself to the work of others, regurgitating what it absorbs in a game of multidimensional Mad Libs and omitting all attribution, resulting in widespread outrage and litigation. It makes CEOs white, puts people in ethnic outfits, and has a tendency to imagine women with light-colored eyes. Its architects sometimes seem to be part of a death cult that semi-worships a Cthulu-like future AI god, and they focus great energies on supplicating to this immense imaginary demon (thrilling! terrifying!) instead of integrating with the culture at hand (boring, and you get yelled at). Even the more thoughtful AI geniuses seem OK with the idea that an artificial general intelligence is right around the corner, despite 75 years of failed precedent—the purest form of getting high on your own supply.
So I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I can’t. I love them too much. I am drawn back over and over, for hours, to learn and interact with them. I have them draw pictures and summarize things for me. Where I work, we’ve built them into our code. I’m in the bag. Not my first hypocrisy rodeo.
Whenever the new big tech thing has a big brain melting, I repeat to myself, “It’s just software.” Word processing was going to make it too easy to write novels, Photoshop looked like it would let us erase history, Bitcoin was going to replace money, and now AI is going to ruin society, but … it’s just software. A lot of models can fit on a thumb drive with some room left over for the entire season of Game of thrones or Microsoft Office. They’re interdimensional ZIP files, glitchy JPEGs, but for all of human knowledge. It is possible that they serve large portions. (Not always. Sometimes I ask the AI to make a list and it gives up. I think you can do it. “You can make the list longer.” And it does! What a terrible interface!)
Are These Big Bad Guys Evil, Evil, or Bad? The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Wrong and the Innocent
As with most people on Earth, shame is a part of my life, installed at a young age and frequently updated with shame service packs. A child expecting their parents to laugh and clap doesn’t understand the theory that it’s shame. That’s an oversimplification, but given all the jokes I’ve told that have landed flat, it sure rings true. Social media is seen as a machine that creates shame. We all go out there with our funny one-liners and cool pictures, but if you don’t like them we feel bad. A healthy person goes, “Ah well, didn’t land. Felt weird. Time to move on.”
But when you meet shameless people they can sometimes seem like miracles. They have a superpower: the ability to be loathed, to be wrong, and yet to keep going. We obsess over them—our divas, our pop stars, our former presidents, our political grifters, and of course our tech industry CEOs. We know them by their first names and nicknames, not because they are our friends but because the weight of their personalities and influence has allowed them to claim their own domain names in the collective cognitive register.
Are these shameless people evil, or wrong, or bad? Sure. Whatever you want. Mostly, though, they’re just big, by their own, shameless design. They contain multitudes, and we debate those multitudes. Do they deserve their fame, their billions, their Electoral College victory? They don’t care if we want them to go away. Not even a single second. They will stay forever. They will be dead before they feel remorse.
Artificial Intelligence and the London march: Where we are coming from, how we can go forward, and how we are going to find a solution
On a side street outside the headquarters of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology in the center of London on Monday, 20 or so protesters are getting their chants in order.
Oliver Chamberlain protests at the London march because he is so concerned about the future, but he doesn’t think companies will pause their artificial intelligence research. He feels more confident in the situation if there is a lot of regulation on artificial intelligence.
The Summit didn’t lead to meaningful regulations, according to Joep Meindertsma. The attendees at the conference agreed to the “Bletchley Declaration,” but that agreement doesn’t mean much, Meindertsma says. The first step is only a small one, and we need binding international treaties in order to move forward.
The Montreal Protocol, a global agreement concluded in 1987 that saw the phase out of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, has banned technology internationally before. “We’ve got treaties that ban blinding laser weapons. I’m pretty optimistic that there is a way in which we can pause.”
