AI couldn’t do this a year ago, it required computer hardware that was supercomputer levels of expensive to even create something like this. IMO development was actually held back by crypto and covid-19. Now AI is the #1 focus of the techbros and it isn’t going to slow down. This shit is going to put so many journalists, artists, and even programmers out of work. I don’t know how else to explain this, HUMANITY LITERALLY CREATED AI THIS YEAR. WE MADE FUCKING SKYNET!

You want to talk about technological progress, this shit mogs fusion, it mogs the vaccines, it mogs whatever dumb space colonization shit we did. We made fucking AI! I bet we will have sentient AI in our lifetime. And what are we going to do with this stuff? Porn, lots of porn. Deepfakes of celebrities and politicians sacrificing children to moloch, dead actors staring in new movies, a new album by Tupac, fake war footage, fake everything.

Have you ever heard about how a monkey can write Shakespeare given enough time? We have fucking done that, we pressed random buttons enough times that we ended up with something legible. Now we turn memes into real people.

We need a butlarian jihad or some shit.

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    very dim view that sentient beings are still just stimulus response machines

    is there a materialist alternative to this view? Sentience to me seems to be an emergent property of a very complicated biological machinery, and if that machinery becomes damaged, so does the sentience. But I'm open to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

    • reddit [any,they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean, materially there probably isn't even free will, there's no way to make that suddenly pop out of particles. I just don't bother factoring that into a worldview that actually affects the lives of other people, for the same reason I discard what could very well be biological fact that we are all stimulus response machines. And in fact I agree with you, treating free will and sentience and any other hard to pin down concept as an emergent property is probably the right way to do it - it's like a phase transition.

      My issue with applying those things to any kind of AI running on a von Neumann architecture is really just that I'm not convinced that system, which regardless of what AI nerds will tell you is still a billion times less complex than a nervous system, can ever hit that phase transition. Whether that's a difference in kind or just in scale, I can honestly say I have no idea.

      But more than anything, I think we as a species are so desperate for something like us, we're at a real risk of anthropomorphizing what is 100% just a function spitting out what it was optimized for.

      No idea if any of the above is particularly coherent or even a good argument, and of course this is putting aside all the actual concerns with the AI we have, re: intellectual property and accuracy and labor and everything else. Thanks for reading either way

      • Wheaties [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        But more than anything, I think we as a species are so desperate for something like us, we’re at a real risk of anthropomorphizing what is 100% just a function spitting out what it was optimized for.

        There was a poll a while back that asked people what they thought of and expected from artificial intelligence. Apparently, the majority of people said it would be nice to finally have someone to talk to.

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

        My issue with applying those things to any kind of AI running on a von Neumann architecture is really just that I’m not convinced that system, which regardless of what AI nerds will tell you is still a billion times less complex than a nervous system, can ever hit that phase transition.

        not for a while, certainly, but I think what we have created is already so much more complex than what we would have imagined ourselves to be capable of only a few centuries ago.

        But more than anything, I think we as a species are so desperate for something like us, we’re at a real risk of anthropomorphizing what is 100% just a function spitting out what it was optimized for.

        I think we've already done this with ourselves, and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Humanization is the opposite of dehumanization. I think sufficiently complex material phenomena that show signs of self awareness, pleasure, pain, empathy, and so on, deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and not mistreated or used like an object. Since animals and humans deserve that, so would any emergent artificial intelligence (which I still think is a very very long way off, but possible through several avenues)

        • reddit [any,they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          what we have created is already so much more complex than what we would have imagined ourselves to be capable of only a few centuries ago.

          Centuries, sure. My only quibble here is that it's really not that much more complicated than what we would've thought of 100 years ago. Neural networks have been around in theory since at least the 70s, and all the math behind this is even older. I don't exactly know when gradient descent was invented per se but it's really just an extension of what has basically been done since calculus was discovered. This isn't really meant to shit on people doing ML and AI work because they absolutely are doing complicated work and finding innovative solutions, but I just think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that, at it's core, these programs really are just big matrices. And the only thing that makes them particularly more powerful than what we've known about for decades is scale - it's not any kind of fundamental change in "complexity" in my mind. The engineers are doing great work combining different dedicated AIs and wrapping them up nicely, but to me that's sort of a level outside any kind of real "AI". But who knows, maybe that's the "emergent property" we were dicussing.

          I think we’ve already done this with ourselves, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Humanization is the opposite of dehumanization.

          I do like this point. And if some day there is some AI I am convinced has some kind of genuine feeling in the same way as a real person (including non-human persons, as it were), believe me I will be right there fighting for their rights. I just cannot imagine that will be possible without some new fundamental understanding of what consciousness is, and a fundamentally different architecture for it to arise from, and I'm not willing to say we need to give what is effectively a big math equation a nap. Not that I'm implying that's what you're saying just, it's something I hear from people who I feel aren't really examining this issue critically.

          Thanks for the reply

    • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      there's the term sapience as in homo sapiens, and a bunch of non-human animals for short of that as well.

      some SF writers used sentient life to refer to aliens a long time ago and people just rolled with the term even though they usually mean something more specific than what plants and termites have going on internally.