Leading experts warn of a risk of extinction from AI
Ummm. Is this something to worry about? Those are some big words. Seen as the top story on NPR.org today…
(via)
AI experts issued a dire warning on Tuesday: Artificial intelligence models could soon be smarter and more powerful than us and it is time to impose limits to ensure they don’t take control over humans or destroy the world.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” a group of scientists and tech industry leaders said in a statement that was posted on the Center for AI Safety’s website.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed AI research lab that is behind ChatGPT, and the so-called godfather of AI who recently left Google, Geoffrey Hinton, were among the hundreds of leading figures who signed the we’re-on-the-brink-of-crisis statement…
Ironically, we have a language problem here. AI as we’re seeing it on the web, is not AI as we see it in the movies. ChatGPT? It’s a language model. It has models that put words in an order that resembles an order that it was fed as a learning set. That’s essentially it. This isn’t a sentient computer. There is no thinking here. The AI doesn’t have any drive or motivation or any way of effecting the world outside of its chat box.
The problem is that it’s a buzzword. There is so much money in tech, that people are swarming around trying to figure out how to siphon a bit off the top, and you can punch “AI” in as the new hotness. So there are all these places where they used to pay actual human people money to do tasks, from incredibly menial, like steering a delivery robot around Berkeley, to creative and thoughtful like writing tv and movie scripts, and just telling a chatgpt window to write a book, or make a movie. It doesn’t matter that the output is hot garbage without human editing. It doesn’t matter that the trademark office has ruled that works created by nonhumans cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. And it really doesn’t matter that this is actively hurting the artists and authors whose works were scraped up without permission to create the learning sets the AI developers are using. All that ‘s important is that the money keeps churning.