You are allowed to comment if you absolutely hate AI, or love it. If you think it is overrated or underrated, ok (although I think it's too early to say what the consensus even is to know whether it is overrate/underrated). But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don't need to hear from you right now :soviet-heart:
Let the discussion begin:
So it's clear there's this big alignment debate going on rn. Regardless where you stand, isn't it fucked that there's a cabal of the biggest freaks money has ever produced debating the future of humanity with zero input from normal society?
Even if it isn't humanity's future they think it is. There's probably like 100 people in the world paid to work on alignment. How can you not develop a megalomania complex?
What kind of chatter are you hearing about AI?
I very occasional hear people irl obliquely mention AI. A cashier said like 'oh that AI stuff, that's pretty scary'. That's about it.
Now the blogs I follow have been basically colonized by AI news. These aren't even strictly technology blogs. I started following David Brin for UFO takes, I started following Erik Hoel for neuroscience takes. Literally everyone I follow has published takes on AI and zero of them dismiss it out of hand.
Sorry this will get long.
I basically feel like we are in another version of the post nuclear age except only insiders know it. After the first A-bomb, everyone knew the world was different starting the very next day. Now only designated take-havers are aware of this new reality.
Or regular folks are aware of it but they're so disempowered from having a say that they only engage with the realization online like I'm doing now. Medicare for all is Bernie's thing. The border is Trump's. Even if nothing will ever be done about healthcare, the fact that Bernie talks about it justifies you thinking about it. AI isn't any politician's thing.
I'd put the odds of a nuclear war around 1% a year. I'd say there's a 1% chance AI can be as world-ending as that. That's such a low number that it doesn't feel like "AI doomerism". But 1% multiplied by however much we value civilization is still a godalmighty risk.
When I've heard this site talk about it, it's usually in the context of "holy shit this AI art is garbage compared to real art? Where's the love, where's the soul?" If it was 1945 and we nuked a city, would you be concerned with trying to figure out what postmodernism would look like?
Usually when I've gotten to the end of my post I delete it.
I recently received an email from a higher up in the huge multinational corporation I work for's IT department prohibiting employees from using ChatGPT for work related purposes, citing copyright, security, fraud and abuse concerns. Granted, said company is more in the "multinational industrial capital" realm than the "multinational finance capital" realm, and based in the "international community," not in the US.
Based on this, I'm positing that the entirety of the bourgeoisie is not wholly in on with the AI trend, just US techbro and finance capital.
Only the highest echelons of finance capital gain longterm from it. For every other part of capital it has potential for short-term gains, but long-term makes every firm fungible and dependant on providers like OpenAI. This is terrifying to any capitalist who understands it.
And in forbidding it tacitly acknowledged that their employees would have found it useful for their work.
My dad is independently trying to figure out how he can use chatgpt to work for him. He's like "haha I'm going to stick it to the man". Like dude, if you saw it they saw it too.
I can understand not using ChatGPT for various reasons, but even taking nanoGPT and throwing a web interface on top and letting internal users ask stuff like "how likely is ____?" and letting it write and run a query instead of them figuring out some query language has been time-saving for me.