this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I cannot process this idea of downplaying this technology like this. It does not matter that it's not true intelligence. And why would it?
If it is convincing to most people that information was learned and repeated, that's smarter than like half of all currently living humans. And it is convincing.
Some people found the primitive ELIZA chatbot from 1966 convincing, but I don't think anyone would claim it was true AI. Turing Test notwithstanding, I don't think "convincing people who want to be convinced" should be the minimum test for artificial intelligence. It's just a categorization glitch.
Maybe I'm not stating my point explicitly enough but it actually is that names or goalposts aren't very important. Cultural impact is. I think already the current AI has had a lot more impact than any chatbot from the 60s and we can only expect that to increase. This tech has rendered the turing test obsolete, which kind of speaks volumes.
Calling a cat a dog won't make her start jumping into ponds to fetch sticks for you. And calling a glorified autocomplete "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) doesn't make it smart.
Problem is, words have meanings. Well, they do to actual humans, anyway. And associating the word "intelligence" with these stochastic parrots will encourage nontechnical people to believe LLMs actually are intelligent. That's dangerous—potentially life-threatening. Downplaying the technology is an attempt to prevent this mindset from taking hold. It's about as effective as bailing the ocean with a teaspoon, yes, but some of us see even that as better than doing nothing.
How about taking advice on a medical matter from an LLM? Or asking the appropriate thing to do in a survival situation? Or even seemingly mundane questions like "is it safe to use this [brand name of new model of generator that isn't in the LLM's training data] indoors?" Wrong answers to those questions can kill. If a person thinks the LLM is intelligent, they're more likely to take the bad advice at face value.
If you ask a human about something important that's outside their area of competence, they'll probably refer you to someone they think is knowledgeable. An LLM will happily make something up instead, because it doesn't understand the stakes.
The chance of any given query to an LLM killing someone is, admittedly, extremely low, but given a sufficiently large number of queries, it will happen sooner or later.
Half of the human population is of below-average intelligence. They will be that dumb. Guaranteed. And safeguards generally only get added until after someone notices that a wrong answer is, in fact, wrong, and complains.
In part, I believe someone's going to die because large corporations will only get serious about controlling what their LLMs spew when faced with criminal charges or a lawsuit that might make a significant gouge in their gross income. Untill then, they're going to at best try to patch around the exact prompts that come up in each subsequent media scandal. Which is so easy to get around that some people are likely to do so by accident.
(As for humans making up answers, yes, some of them will, but in my experience it's not all that common—some form of "how would I know?" is a more likely response. Maybe the sample of people I have contact with on a regular basis is statistically skewed. Or maybe it's a Canadian thing.)
Insurance companies are already using AI to make medical decisions. We don't have to speculate about people getting hurt because of AI giving out bad medical advice, it's already happening and multiple companies are being sued over it.
Somehow we went from me saying this technology shouldn't be downplayed to "but it's costing lives already!"
Not really sure how that happened but yeah it's obviously shitty that people are irresponsible shitheads and I think downplaying it or quibbling about whether it's actually AI or not is far from helpful in light of such consequences
Because one trained in a particular way could lead people to think it's intelligent and also give incredibly biased data that confirms the bias of those listening.
It's creating a digital prophet that is only rehashing the biases of the creator.
That makes it dangerous if it's regarded as being above the flaws of us humans. People want something smarter than them to tell them what to do, and giving that designation to a flawed chatbot that simply predicts what's the most coherent word sentence, through the word "intelligent", is not safe or a good representation of what it actually is.