AI is not the problem. We are

The Liturgist said:

Which is why ChatGPT and other responsible providers include a warning label.

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The Liturgist said:

By the way, one can protect against inaccurate information to a large extent through careful use of the prompt. People don’t understand the real capability of these systems is that they represent the ultimate macro processor or text-transformation utility, as if one can speak the word and animate all of the text processing utilities of the UNIX system like m4, grep, less, sed, awk, et cetera.

Also the errors tend to relate primarily to questions posed in natural language not checked against external data, for example, with a web search, and never relate to the output of questions processed by the built-in programming language.

So whereas on the one hand I have made the point that if people refer to AI as a reliable source for information in their posts they are making an appeal to unqualified authority, but on the other hand, AI can be a source for information that is as potentially reliable as any other web search, with additional processing capabilities.

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RDKirk said:

You mean like the California warning labels that mark nearly everything as cancer-causing...to the point that people simply ignore them?

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RDKirk said:

This is pretty much like a gun owner attempting to explain proper marksmanship training and gun handling to people who buy guns but still expect them to be magic wands that somehow just make bad guys fall down.

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Jerry N. said:

AI is running out of good data. Except for biological data that can be used for creating new and better medications, and some forensic studies, and similar studies in electronics and such, AI can’t exceed human knowledge. Researchers warn we could run out of data to train AI by 2026. What then?.

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Jerry N. said:

wish there was some type of marker on images and videos so I know it was generated by AI. I often view harmless videos that I find interesting. I show them to my wife, and she can often spot that they were AI generated. It is deflating, and I wish there was a required water mark or something.

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The Liturgist said:

In ChatGPT the warning label is right under the prompt and is the only warning on the page, and is by no means “buried”, so absolutely not. Additionally the model will advise you about that, and also provide guidance on how to improve reliability.

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The Liturgist said:

The incompetence of some end users, while an unceasing pain to professionals, is intractable, and is not a legitimate basis for limiting or suppressing innovation. Thankfully no one was around to tell the people on ARPANet in the 1970s to stop their development work because it was too hard to use.*

* Actually on this point the relative lack of concern for end users seen in the early years of computing, which did not translate to intentional hostility but rather towards designs optimized for facilitating work to be accomplished swiftly with training, was probably to our advantage. It is regrettable that the hardware required to implement a neural network of virtual perceptron filters of the sort that form the basis for LLM-type AIs would require a few more decades to mature.

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RDKirk said:

Where did I say "buried?" Who are you quoting?

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I'd say the "incompetence" of most end users.

Like a revolver, AI generators like ChatGPT are ridiculously easy to use poorly.

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The Liturgist said:

God can absolutely rescue people through something of AI; that I have no doubt. Additionally, the major models (chatGPT, Google DeepMind, Microsoft CoPilot et cetera) are not going to intentionally help the end user do something which could be harmful; they have safeguards to prevent this.

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The Liturgist said:

I don’t see that that’s a problem; that merely means that AI systems will have completed annexing all accessible human knowledge. That being said I believe an estimate of 2026 for this figure is hopelessly unrealistic as there remains so much good data sitting in library shelves and in ancient, well-curated manuscripts that has not been provided to AI systems.

OpenAI last updated their training data in 2024 by the way, but this hasn’t stopped them from releasing a major version upgrade (chatGPT 5) and a new graphics processing engine and other details.

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Jerry N. said:

Wouldn’t AI be using text and images generated by Al for modeling? It would be a loop or like Xeroxing a Xerox over and over again.

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The Liturgist said:

A sufficiently good AI can identify its output as well as the output of competing AIs, which reduces the risk of this. Furthermore, there are numerous sources of information in the form of analog data repositories such as great libraries of manuscripts, artwork, et cetera which have not been depleted yet.

Indeed there are several types of media on which current AI is not yet sufficiently powerful to be trained, for example, films and video games. ChatGPT may know the script and the content of popular films, but it has not yet been possible to actually have it watch an entire film or experience the film qualitatively. Obviously training AI on more advanced types of media is extremely desirable on the long run, and also integrating diverse types of training data and converging the systems so a single AI is handling image processing, text processing, audio processing, and so on, so when one uses the voice interface for example for an AI like chatGPT, one is actually talking to the AI.

The final frontier will be overcoming the current limitation on training the system separately from deployment, so that the system can learn from end users in the same way it presently learns from training data, and thus better adapt itself to meet the needs of end users. This will require significantly more powerful hardware than anything we have available at the present and so we have to hope Moore’s Law holds up in some form or another long enough for us to get to a sufficient computational density as to enable a truly dynamic real time AI, which could serve as an AGI.

There is also the issue of pushing out AI to end users in a manner more controllable by end users. I would really like to see open source AI pushed to the end user.

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Jerry N. said:

How can this be avoided if AI is trained on random texts?

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