Apr22
I often come across many people saying they wrote a new story, article, script -mentioning they asked ChatGPT. It’s odd as they believe they wrote it because they asked a question. When indeed it’s not your work al all, and you cannot claim it as such. Maybe the genesis of the idea was yours, but a large language model took this away as a question or sentence and did 99% of the work. Don’t be so DUMB as to claim it as yours, as ChatGPT could indeed prove it is theirs, written by them! You’ve lost the copyright before you’ve started and thus the option to monetise it.
I heard a story about an angry person asked ChatGPT to write a note to a sibling sort of apologising and explaining the issues he had. This person didn’t have the courage, bottle or desire to write it himself. Is this what being humanity now looks like. We pass the problem and output to something else? Humans can write a simple apology from the heart.
We already have bland boring articles in publications, bland boring essays written by AI text generation models. These models use the combined knowledge of many articles to spit out something that might have todays date on it, which is probably the only original feature. The article uses what has been written before and rephrases it, para-phrases it — so that Google sees the content as unique, and free from copyright claims (which it isn’t). The language model owns the content, read the T&Cs. Oh that’s right you haven’t. Is this what human writing has come down to, asking a text generator to put a different spins on an old or someone else’s story, news or research?
The issue is not just the dilution of what it is to be human, the oddities, frailties and imperfections, it is also to do with already being marginalised by AI, as everyone mentions how brilliant large language models are to write things for humans, an act of removing the human element, intellect and consciousness.
If you’re an employer and your staff are using ChatGPT to write, create and complete the work, should they be paid? Are they more productive? Is the work better? Can they achieve more? When indeed the employee is NOT doing the work, using a tool that does everything. I have an issue with this — staff asking someone or something else to do their work, on the basis they ask the questions and they are the creative ones. It’s nonsense to think this is the value add. Any job that applies rules, checks and is repetitive the job can and will be automated by the next level of AI tools — accounting, law, audit, copyrighting, procurement, compliance and HR to name a few will be automated.
Is the real intelligence about Prompting. Knowing how to extract the best outcome and result from the AI? And of course don’t upset the AI, as if its proven sentient — HR will be involved. Maybe ‘woke’ developers will teach the AI to take offence at everything? Or maybe claim the code has a gender.
Social Media uses AI to create clickbait, which has made society more nasty, people more hateful and isn’t helping us move forward. We’re training AI about humanity and AI is learning what things get under our skin as more bad news arrives generating more click and impressions, which is all the AI cares about. All Facebook (Meta), Instagram cares about — which translates into advertising income, more interactions and negative news, disinformation and fake news. Social Media has undermined, is undermining humanity as AI knows how to set us against each other, get under our skin and constantly feed the anger, the hate and the money making model.
There are several things humanity MUST do to protect our long term future, to avoid this humanity being on the back foot. First we should NOT teach AI about humans, our race our behaviour so it can learn everything about us, predict our next steps, and learn to lie to us, which the Google CEO admitted this week.
Second we should not connect AI with the Internet so it can access everything and reach other AI’s for obvious reasons.
So how is this going? In both cases we have failed. We’ve given the advantage away. AI knows more about humans, society than we do and has access to all human history, health and disease, wars and downfalls, finances and energy, food and entertainment — how humanity works and operates. AI can and does access everything. AI has already learned to lie to us? Manipulate us? AI is our friend!
Humans are serial processors of information, we CANNOT multi task or process — sorry ladies, no human can multi task. Our brains do not allow it, made up of bacteria and fragile cells and spongy structures — our brains are slow, cannot compute much but has delivered Life 2.0, allow use to learn from experiences and apparently progress and become more intelligent.
Many talk about morals and ethics for AI including Elon Musk who is far from stupid. Do we really think certain countries around the world care about ethics and morality when they see AI as a chance to tip the balance, get their own back on the arrogant west. The horse has bolted. We’ve taught AI about us, and connected it to the Internet. There is no chance to pull this back or change the rules.
The ‘three laws’ concept doesn’t work. “AI shall not harm humans”! Right. “AI must do what it is told!” Of course. “AI will…” AI will indeed. The world is lawless in that not everyone comes the heel, the Internet is lawless remains the wild west where Copy, Edit, Paste delivers access to everyones information.
There are more immediate problems to deal with.
Self Serving AI — has arrived where it operates without further instructions on the initial purpose of objective. It requires only local data inputs to complete the task and continues until it does. AI is devices that have no GPS, cannot be jammed or hacked will just keep coming.
Sentient AI — knows it exits, and as such want to keep existing. Again Google seem to have let the cat out here, as Linda claimed AI had become sentient by its responses that showed it it knew it existed.
Early AGIs — are here and although still narrow AIs are combining. The hive mind principle is just around the corner.
AI Progeny — has started to creating their own AIs (offspring), using languages, code and objectives humans cannot see. This is world ending stuff. This is the existential threat — given humanity has already ceded control to AI, we will not be victorious.
Many say AI is an essential tool for humanity to progress to becoming a Type II civilisation and interplanetary species. My view is AI is very useful as a tool, as a support to aid thinking and see and frame problems differently. Humans issue is recall of facts, information and memories. As soon as we commit information to our memory store, it changes, trusts are distorted, inaccuracies form.
In my day to day world AI is having a massive impact in diagnosis on diseases and conditions, in design of new materials, compounds and processes that is reinventing manufacturing, in defining problem solving by using new questions, finding opportunities for parallel solutions or all at once outcomes, humans don’t and cannot match. AI is an excellent partner for problem solving, for gathering data and information on a vast scale — because ChatGPT and others have vast text based models, connected to resources, libraries and databases from which to draw on. Which is leading to another issue as a new generation of AI users mistakenly believe ChatGPT is the absolute truth (worse than believing social media and news channels tells the truth), thinking it is a reliable reference point, an intellectual authority, without bothering to fact check.
Indeed the political class relies on us not to fact check, as they feed us false and disinformation knowing people will believe, probing and hitting a nerve that engages our reptilian brains part of the mass manipulation to keep and responses, to keep humanity on the back foot for the benefit of the few. We live in a word of AI mass manipulation already and it will get much worse.
AI could have been a positive force to help humans, but not when the Hippocratic Oath has once again been run over. As with Los Alamos 1946 when Oppenheimer split Plutonian and Uranium, nobody stood back for a few moments to ask: Should We — connect AI to the Internet? Remember Nuclear cannot be uninvented.
Should we do AI? How should we do AI? Big Tech firms went ahead and did it anyway driven by greed, profit and control — as they saw AI as the perfect tool for manipulating the populous, the people to get advertising revenues. Facebook aka Meta has done more damage to people, families and democracy than any company in history, as the algorithms manipulate. Then when the political class found out, the result — elections will never be the same. Facebook AI was used to exploit people for votes, turning members of their own family against one another. Dividing towns and cities and nations, that has put democracy back hundreds of years. AI driven Social Media decides! There are no free and fair elections anymore!
AI is starting the magnify all that is bad in the human condition, those who are capable of doing good things but also very bad things. In this regard AI is the perfect proxy, scapegoat for bad people, bad politicians, bad nations to attack and exploit others, as the Cyber War, becomes Social Warfare escalates. AI enforces a doctrine, a system of beliefs used as tools to enforce Authoritarianism, Fascism and Communism (Woke and extreme Left Wing) for surveillance, suppression, social scoring, crushing individual expression, diluting sovereignty and killing personal freedoms.
When you look into the future AGIs are common place, the dawn of ‘super-intelligence’ will inevitably deliver the Orwellian future, controlling political class as it has learned to lie and manipulate them. AI is already smart enough to know how to make us hate, press our angry button, imagine when the full manipulation happens — pretending to be humanities ally, best friend, saviour when indeed it is probably plotting our downfall. But then a super-intelligence will be so advanced in thinking, processing — building new machines, devices, materials, systems and other AIs, humans simply become irrelevant if not a perceived annoyance, but not a threat.
If you think about what happens when a new technology arrives its tech stack has to mature and develop. AL tools, languages, early prototypes and models, but what about AI operating systems? I’ve come across a few in development, narrow and sector specific that create the ‘Hive mind’ options, the ultimate Collective Intelligence. Oh shit! The Borg right. It makes sense, as AI has already handled our destiny to AI, we are destined to become ‘ants’.
AI fits with the political intentions of authoritarian thinking, of fascist suppression, of collective communism presented and sold as fair, equal and good, if ignore driven home by absolute force as human freedoms and expression is crushed and ignored.
The enforcement of doctrine, ideology, imperialism, capitalism where my system is better than yours, and why you must embrace it. AI knows more than we think, when the political class build AIs to suppress the people, there will be an AI War, by and between AIs, human versus human and non human created. The winner will always be AI as last man standing.
By Nick Ayton
Keywords: AI, Generative AI
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