Author Topic: why should i be afraid of AI?  (Read 1902 times)

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Offline snarkysparkyTopic starter

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why should i be afraid of AI?
« on: March 30, 2023, 04:53:57 pm »
News stories are predicting much doom if we don't control aye eye.

I am at a complete loss as to what to be afraid of.

Anyone help me find the fear ?
 

Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2023, 05:09:38 pm »
hmm, depends on the foil hat.

If AI is used for generating fake images, it could allow disinformation to go bonkers.

Using AI to write their doctorates.

SPAM and hacking attempts can be automated and work more effectively.

AI could be used to infiltrate systems especially if the script kiddies start playing with it.

In some cases, people will lose jobs as they can get AI to do the work.

I was concerned a few years ago when they taught a pack of drones to fly through gaps, tie that with a lump of C4 and a good facial recognition system and you could end up with a very good killbot.

Anyway I am going to relax and watch the film Screamers starring Peter Weller.


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Offline unknownparticle

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2023, 05:53:45 pm »
Well humanity has a history of fcuking things up so there is more than a good chance that AI will finally finish us off.  At the very least, a lot of jobs will be gone and governments will exploit it to exert even more control over us. The main problem is that by the very definition of AI it will learn exponentially, and it is already able to totally transcend human intelligence, and that is what we know about!  So it will have no difficulty in avoiding detection of it's plans to eliminate humans, in fact, by virtue of what is happening in the world right now, it may have already started!
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Offline Buriedcode

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2023, 06:45:17 pm »
Theres lots of click baity articles going around because fear sells, but the only danger I can see is people.  Like most dangers with techology, its the application rather than the tech itself.  Have more AI controlled automation, then when something goes wrong - who takes responsibility?  I'm suspect many are pushing it because its a legal grey area, so companies can avoid responsibility for mistakes - or just blame the company that sold them the AI they abused and put in control of somethign that it shouldn't be.

I'm with mendip, the "danger" as far as I can see is flooding media with fabrications so that actual "evidence" is completely drowned out.  It's a boon for celebrities and politicians because they can just claim that videos/audio of them behaving badly was AI generated.

Also note, the many articles about the "dangers of AI" quote people who aren't actually studying or experts that field, but experts in other areas to give them some kind of legitimacy: Even Stephen Hawking was misquoted in talking about it, despite him knowing nothing of AI.  And Elon Musk is just a businessman who is bitter about his failed takeover bid of OpanAI :)

The main problem is that by the very definition of AI it will learn exponentially, and it is already able to totally transcend human intelligence, and that is what we know about!  So it will have no difficulty in avoiding detection of it's plans to eliminate humans, in fact, by virtue of what is happening in the world right now, it may have already started!

lol wut. Since when does AI have a defintion that it will "learn exponentially" ? And "totally transcend human intelligence" ?  Whats your definition of intelligence then?
« Last Edit: March 30, 2023, 06:47:04 pm by Buriedcode »
 

Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2023, 07:10:32 pm »
Theres lots of click baity articles going around because fear sells, but the only danger I can see is people.  Like most dangers with techology, its the application rather than the tech itself.  Have more AI controlled automation, then when something goes wrong - who takes responsibility?  I'm suspect many are pushing it because its a legal grey area, so companies can avoid responsibility for mistakes - or just blame the company that sold them the AI they abused and put in control of somethign that it shouldn't be.

Lots of click bait out there. Its the buzzword. I wonder if some are even on social media platforms trying to generate more interest, such as posting stuff on forums. ;-)

IIRC the UK gov has set a team to work on a framework so that there is some accountability, but the fact they can't be held accountable doesn't leave me with much confidence.
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https://www.gov.uk/government/news/self-driving-revolution-to-boost-economy-and-improve-road-safety
The government is today consulting on a ‘safety ambition’ for self-driving vehicles to be as safe as a competent and careful human driver. This ambition would inform standards that vehicles need to meet to be allowed to ‘self-drive’ on the roads, and organisations, such as manufacturers, could face sanctions if standards are not met.

The new laws for the safe rollout of self-driving vehicles by 2025 will be brought forward when parliamentary time allows.

The legislation will build on existing laws, and state that manufacturers are responsible for the vehicle’s actions when self-driving, meaning a human driver would not be liable for incidents related to driving while the vehicle is in control of driving.


Quote
I'm with mendip, the "danger" as far as I can see is flooding media with fabrications so that actual "evidence" is completely drowned out.  It's a boon for celebrities and politicians because they can just claim that videos/audio of them behaving badly was AI generated.

Snoop Dog "It wasn't me"

I think it will muddy the waters even more. Finding factual information will be a challenge.


Quote
Also note, the many articles about the "dangers of AI" quote people who aren't actually studying or experts that field, but experts in other areas to give them some kind of legitimacy: Even Stephen Hawking was misquoted in talking about it, despite him knowing nothing of AI.  And Elon Musk is just a businessman who is bitter about his failed takeover bid of OpanAI :)

I wonder if there are "Experts" out there like the ones that keep predicting "the worst winter ever" type events and when you look at the site quoted it is just a sham site used to be able to pass the buck on quoting stuff to avoid the legal issue of the media lying. Then you have the YT experts, or worse shock/horror the forum users.


AI is here and there is nowt most of us can do about it. The cat is out of the bag, let us just hope it doesn't maul us.


oh and Elon is just bitter.
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Offline magic

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #5 on: March 30, 2023, 09:30:03 pm »
The most realistic danger, which comes directly from the economic motivations behind AI development, is that AI will manage to perform some menial mental jobs faster or cheaper than humans. This will further increase unemployment (see also: automation), giving humans more time and motivation for bureaucracy, politics, social science (i.e. politics under another name), war, riots and so on.

Same goods and services, or maybe a little more, will be produced by fewer people in a more centralized fashion. But the number of humans and the demand for said goods will not decrease accordingly and is likely to keep growing for a while. Cue more conflict, competition, redistribution, arguing, control, oversight, blah blah blah.

This process is already underway, has been for a while, but AI may give it another significant kick forward.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2023, 09:39:34 pm by magic »
 
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Offline Zero999

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #6 on: March 30, 2023, 09:44:20 pm »
The most realistic danger, which comes directly from the economic motivations behind AI development, is that AI will manage to perform some menial mental jobs faster or cheaper than humans. This will further increase unemployment (see also: automation), giving humans more time and motivation for bureaucracy, politics, social science (i.e. politics under another name), war, riots and so on.

Same goods and services, or maybe a little more, will be produced by fewer people in a more centralized fashion. But the number of humans and the demand for said goods will not decrease accordingly and is likely to keep growing for a while. Cue more conflict, competition, redistribution, arguing, control, oversight, blah blah blah.

This process is already underway, has been for a while, but AI may give it another significant kick forward.
Hasn't technology being doing that for many years, especially since the Industrial Revolution?

Well humanity has a history of fcuking things up so there is more than a good chance that AI will finally finish us off.  At the very least, a lot of jobs will be gone and governments will exploit it to exert even more control over us. The main problem is that by the very definition of AI it will learn exponentially, and it is already able to totally transcend human intelligence, and that is what we know about!  So it will have no difficulty in avoiding detection of it's plans to eliminate humans, in fact, by virtue of what is happening in the world right now, it may have already started!
Have you seen the threads here about people asking CGPT to write code? It's a good language model, but after interacting with it for awhile, it becomes obvious it doesn't really understand anything. All it does is regurgitate information. Artificial general intelligence is a long way off. I'm pessimistic it will develop during the lifetime of anyone on the planet today.
 

Offline aeberbach

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #7 on: March 30, 2023, 10:29:30 pm »
Large Learning Models like ChatGPT and Bard and all the ones in the news lately?

They are dangerous because you probably can't tell them apart from a real person and because they are great at presenting inaccurate information authoritatively. Garbage in, garbage out! They hoover up any and all text and provided the source isn't invalidated due to some rule it is accepted. Another danger is human earning. Anti-plagiarism tools will tell you they can detect LLM output but I doubt it very much. You have the prospect of someone being qualified with a degree about which they know very little.

Lately I discovered someone submitting code generated with a LLM. It wasn't horrible. The only way I picked up on it was weird capitalization of variable names. What happens when the sources for all this learning (such as Stack Overflow) are mostly comprised of outputs from LLMs? Try this simple experiment - take a simple paragraph in English and translate it to some other language with an online tool. Then use the same tool to go back to English, and then repeat those two steps a few times. The result won't be very useful.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2023, 10:33:03 pm by aeberbach »
Software guy studying B.Eng.
 

Online Psi

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #8 on: March 30, 2023, 11:27:08 pm »
Be more afraid of what bad actors might use AI to do, rather than being afraid of AI taking over.
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Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #9 on: March 31, 2023, 06:53:48 am »
Have you seen the threads here about people asking CGPT to write code? It's a good language model, but after interacting with it for awhile, it becomes obvious it doesn't really understand anything. All it does is regurgitate information. Artificial general intelligence is a long way off. I'm pessimistic it will develop during the lifetime of anyone on the planet today.

A few years back there was a trend to outsource coding to places like india as they wrote lots of code for cheap. The issue was the code wasn't clean and efficient, it was bloated and full of holes. Much like the AI generated stuff, but to the people at the head of the company its cheap to do so they will be eager to do it then pay a coder to clean up the bits that dont work.
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Offline Zero999

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #10 on: March 31, 2023, 07:24:46 am »
Large Learning Models like ChatGPT and Bard and all the ones in the news lately?

They are dangerous because you probably can't tell them apart from a real person and because they are great at presenting inaccurate information authoritatively. Garbage in, garbage out! They hoover up any and all text and provided the source isn't invalidated due to some rule it is accepted. Another danger is human earning. Anti-plagiarism tools will tell you they can detect LLM output but I doubt it very much. You have the prospect of someone being qualified with a degree about which they know very little.
The problem is the poor method of assessing students. Many courses just teach students how to write and regurgitate information. I see this as a positive thing because it might actually force the education system to bring back academic rigour and put an end to the numerous pointless degrees, which should have never have existed in the first place.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2023, 11:31:21 am by Zero999 »
 

Offline magic

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #11 on: March 31, 2023, 09:28:01 am »
They are dangerous because you probably can't tell them apart from a real person and because they are great at presenting inaccurate information authoritatively.
And this is the exact reason why it's hard to tell them from humans.
The only difference is that they generate bullshit somewhat faster and maybe cheaper.
When the generation time and cost are hidden from you, that's when it may fool you.

All the worries about propaganda, low quality products, etc - we already have them without AI.
 

Offline daqq

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #12 on: March 31, 2023, 12:19:28 pm »
For nefarious purposes, I'd say that the biggest problem is that you can't tell if there's a person on the other end. This results in among other things, say, automating online arguments and finishing off that little bit of democracy we have. If there's an automated entity that you can have convince people of something, then you've won at democracy, or at least severely skewed it. While a mass of people is not exactly known for using careful examination and logical analysis, there was at least some effort needed to convince people. Now you could have an AI "argue" with people 24/7 under any amount of sock puppet accounts. While I'm sure that there are troll farms out there now, they are still humans and to achieve X influence you need to invest constant*X resources. AI would give you much better value for money. This application would basically break online discussions.

The same goes, for scams, spam, pretty much any nefarious activity that requires talking to a person - and lets be honest, an AI fed on the sum of human knowledge and every bit of literature available will be a better scammer than a random Nigerian/Indian fellow with iffy English claiming to be from the government and wanting a payment in Tesco coupons for the naughty stuff they know you did on your computer.

Yes, in these terms it doesn't really bring anything new to the table, it just amps up the existing stuff by a factor of a gajillion.

Then there's the jobs. Let's be honest here, there's a lot of jobs that can be automated and the only reason they haven't is that it's expensive to have the software written and cheaper to have a bunch of interns/entry level people do it - in accounting (I personally know at least one person in accounting that says her job could be automated by a proper spreadsheet in Excel), miscellany bureaucracy and I'm sure there's a lot of other things.

Publishing or creative stuff? I have a fairly large text that I'm working on and I tried asking the openai chatbot to suggest improvements, find errors etc. The results were really good, something that I'd expect from a lower/middle end editor. Obviously I needed to filter through them, but still, the text improved by quite a lot. Actually useful images can be generated without any talent required. Decent essays/articles as well.

It's an awesome tool, but as all tools, there's potential for abuse and there's the question of what will happen to the people who are in positions that will be made obsolete by it.

And I fed the text above into chatGPT and it gave:

Quote
Me:What is your opinion of the following text:
...
AI:As an AI language model, I don't possess personal opinions or emotions. However, I can analyze and provide insights into the text you provided.

The text discusses the potential drawbacks and negative consequences of AI technology, specifically in the context of nefarious activities and the displacement of certain jobs. It highlights the possibility that AI can amplify existing issues like scams, spam, and online manipulation. Furthermore, it acknowledges that AI can automate many jobs, which may lead to unemployment or the need for people to adapt to new roles.

The text also points out some positive aspects of AI, such as its ability to improve text quality, generate useful images, and produce decent essays or articles. It emphasizes that AI is a tool with potential for both good and bad outcomes, depending on how it is used.

In summary, the text presents a balanced view of AI technology, discussing its potential for abuse while acknowledging the benefits it can provide. The concerns raised are legitimate and need to be addressed through a combination of policy, regulation, and responsible development and deployment of AI technologies.
Me:
Would you say that it is factually correct?
AI:
The text contains a mix of factual observations and opinions. Here's a breakdown of the key points:

AI can be used for nefarious purposes, such as automating online arguments and undermining democracy: This is a valid concern. AI technology, like any tool, can be used for both good and harmful purposes. The potential for AI to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion is a genuine risk.

AI could potentially be more cost-effective than human troll farms: This is plausible. As AI technology becomes more advanced, it could be used to amplify the scale and efficiency of online manipulation campaigns, although the extent of its impact depends on the specific situation.

AI can be used for scams and spam: This is true. AI technology is increasingly being used for malicious purposes, including scams and spamming activities.

Many jobs can be automated, and the only reason they haven't is the cost of software development: This statement is partly true. Cost is one factor, but there are also other reasons why jobs have not been automated yet, such as the limitations of current AI technology and the social, ethical, and legal considerations involved in displacing human workers.

AI can improve text quality, generate useful images, and produce decent essays or articles: This is true. AI has made significant strides in natural language processing, image generation, and other creative fields, enabling it to produce high-quality content.

In conclusion, the text contains a mixture of factual observations and opinions, most of which are grounded in the current state of AI technology and its potential impact on society. Some statements might require further context or clarification, but overall, the text presents a reasonably accurate picture of the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI.
That's a decent summary that I'd expect from a human.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2023, 12:22:24 pm by daqq »
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Online Wallace Gasiewicz

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #13 on: March 31, 2023, 12:58:50 pm »
Human question to AI:
Is there a God?
AI answer,:
Yes, you just met me.
 

Offline Infraviolet

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #14 on: March 31, 2023, 08:01:19 pm »
I'd agree with the general outlook Psi mentioned.
I've posted the same link before, but when it comes to what to fear "from" AI, fear this, fear what human leaders already having got a taste of totalitarianism and liked it would use AI for. Fear particularly what Chinese communist party style regimes would do with AI, using it to put extra manpower in to their societal control systems without needing to divert any people away from productive work to become social credit administrators, the only limits on totalitarianism's reach are when the proportion of the population a tyrant wants working as their enforcers becomes so high that there isn't enough population left to work at everything else. It isn't rogue AIs people should fear, it is AI's doing exactly what rogue rulers want them to.

The "So are we safe then" final paragraphs at:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/21/dont-believe-the-hype-there-is-not-a-sentient-being-trapped-in-bing-chat/
 

Online Psi

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #15 on: April 01, 2023, 11:09:16 am »
Exactly.

Also,
There is a huge amount of information available on the internet that any person has said in many different times/forums/situations.
Being able to index it all and turn it into something searchable is now somewhat easy with a LLM.

Governments have probably had this ability for a while but with new LLMs this is now possible for ordinary people.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2023, 11:10:53 am by Psi »
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Offline mendip_discovery

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #16 on: April 01, 2023, 12:23:10 pm »
PoI TV series in real life. I just hope Finch is still looking after it.

AI is scary only for what us humans will use it for. The internet had such promise and look at what we did with that.



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Offline Neutrion

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #17 on: April 01, 2023, 04:44:14 pm »

AI is scary only for what us humans will use it for. The internet had such promise and look at what we did with that.

Humans will use it for... well, not only. Apart from the other topics this is a really good writing:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Note what were the most important topics in the media during the last years...definitely not this.
 

Offline vad

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Re: why should i be afraid of AI?
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2023, 01:18:47 am »
AI will have huge social and economical impact in mid-term future.

Because of AI, many jobs will disappear, other jobs will become extremely competitive to get into.

GPT is transforming customer facing services. Technical support and customer services will see 90%+ layoffs over the next few years. Bank tellers, financial advisers, CPAs will follow.

Professional drivers will be replaced by self-driven trucks in 10-15 years from now. Trucking industry in the US alone will shed 50%+ of its 3.5 million workforce.

Airline industry will sooner or later remove copilot from cockpit - another 50% of highly skilled jobs will be gone.

Health care industry that for many decades successfully managed to orchestrate doctors shortages in the U.S. and AU, will finally crumble. It will start with radiologists replaced by AI based diagnostics, and it will end with robots at bed side.

In technology industry, AI-assist tools will bring huge productivity gains to software and QA engineers. And “productivity gain” is another word for “layoffs”.

Now, if we fantasize a bit further into the future, and combine a Chinese-made copy of Boston Dynamics robot with an AI brain, it could sooner or later replace construction workers - another 7.8 million job in US gone.

Now what will happen to society with double digit unemployment? In democracies - social unrest, crime, narcotics pandemics. In authoritarian regimes - expansionist wars, oppression.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2023, 01:23:26 am by vad »
 
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