We're so lucky that AI was so unreliable right out of the box. Imagine the damage they could have done if they had started off straight and added the slant later. Now these things are going to be taken offline for legal liability reasons, if nothing else. You can't just have a machine that spits out slanderous material with a "whoopsie" disclaimer -- such a machine would immediately be abused to plant lies and hide behind the algorithm.
Google absolutely needs to be broken up. The dominant search engine cannot also be a major AI creator of information. The conflicts of interest of having these two functions in the same company are enormous and unavoidable. We must have search engines that function fully independently from information generators. If not, truth truly dies.
Being in the business I’m in, I am in the position of influencing all of my circle’s technology choices because I’m the one they come to for help with it. There are many others like me, the “computer guy” of the family, and we’re the reason why those people who really don’t care which products they use are using the ones they are. When a formerly quality product turns to absolute shit like Google search and really any of their offerings have, we’re the ones that notice first. Not all notice at once, but it builds, and before long we’re configuring our circle’s computers/phones/tablets to use something else. Myself, I’m currently favoring Brave Search. Google is on its decline and is too arrogant to realize it yet.
Totally agree. Vanilla Google search is practically useless at this point. I also use Brave and duck duck go, but I will say one way to get around Google is to use Google scholar (depending on what you are researching). You get completely different results that are typically far more serious.
I use brave as well, but it often just really does not do the job. There are often sites I know exist, I find them on other search engines, and can pull them up love, but Brave does not even find them. Frustrating.
Agreed Gentlemen. The willingness of "big techs" leadership to get in bed with America's weaponized bureaucratic surveillance apparatus precludes any claims of free enterprise or free markets. They've consistently caused harm and will only continue to do so. They are anti-American at every crossroads.
Likewise we need immediate transparency on American tax dollars being used to fund faux social service organizations that in fact are politically weaponized fronts for NGO abusers and the criminal financiers they front for.
And, as Alvin Lee said, it's time to "tax the rich and feed the poor 'till there are no rich no more." There is no capitalism or communism. "Ism's" are dear as doornails. The capitalist's and communist's killed them. There is the Republic, the Constitution and the free citizen. The rest is psyop. Hannah Arendt, a first hand survivor of fascist totalitarianism pointed out, that at the first moment free speech on any topic is forbidden, you are inside a tyranny.
MOFA you absolutely right.! Break it up.. too much under one roof.. should have been done years ago.. no integrity on Covid vaccine data, Big Pharma/Govt... stopped using Google 4 yrs ago ..
And it's not helpful when Larry Page calls Elon Musk a "specist" because he was concerned enough to want to have safeguards against AI using its new powers against humans.
Essentially, Larry Page welcomes the rise of SkyNet.
It will not matter if the information is distorted before action is taken. It may already be too late. At this point hard copies truly matter. Anything digital is subject to revision.
I hope you are right but people are just running with this crap. In the industry I am involved with, real estate (I don't sell it that is why I put it that way), AI is the latest craze. I warn folks, "you'd better check that stuff!" They think it is the greatest thing because it allows lazy people to be even lazier.
An article just came out this week on 404media about all the "AI" generated food pictures on delivery apps for fake "ghost kitchen" restaurants. Both hilarious and maddening. There was a picture of a seafood pasta dish that had Lovecraftian creatures atop there pasta.
I'm starting a collection of the bizarre AI generated pictures for online ads. So far there's a four toed black foot with an extra toenail on one toe advertising some kind of foot fungus cure. That ad also included a six fingered hand. Another ad featured a tiny adult sleeping on the floor in a dog bed.
It would just be a funny, surreal, "Get a load of this weird computer shit" type thing, but what beggars belief is that we are meant to take it seriously.
This reminded me of John Sayles's interesting 1984 film "The Brother from Another Planet". Joe Morton stars as an escaped extraterrestrial slave who lands on Earth and is being chased by two "white" aliens who want to return him to their planet. Morton's character resembles a black human except for his three-toed feet.
This is classic midwit behavior and I hope that the market will weed them all out for their middling mediocre output and they'll all end up with nice jobs in fast food. It is not a given though; the question is how much any given market is going to be willing to trade quality for quantity.
What happens when some AI generated description is shown to be false, and the selling agent is on the hook for either not disclosing something, or providing bad information about a property?
Depends on how deep your pockets are when it comes time to hire a lawyer to take it to court. Pretty much Business as Usual but with an added twist for proving who was 'responsible' for the lack of disclosure.
I was mostly thinking about it from the employment side. If I had someone working for me who routinely used a method such as this, I would can them in a second, if only for the liability it puts the on the firm.
SimComm: We must pay for our racist, omniphobic past, regardless of color, genetic makeup or whatever; forget the collateral damage. All narrative must be shaped and guided forward in that direction, so that we may heal, and our betters can run the show, ad infinitum.
Bringing lawyers into this 💩show now is just what is NOT needed. Our grandkids—in their old age—will be watching the resulting festivities reach the 29-member U.S. Supreme Court at the turn of the next century
You may be right but only if the legal profession is already so compromised as to be complicit. Traditionally lawyers are the go-to guys to address grievance. Covid had a dastardly impact on the profession though. Lots of hive mind now.
Witnessing the complete capture of the judicial system for the purpose of taking down a national political candidate has been shocking. I write this as a retired attorney who practiced 25 years.
Ethics. Rule of law? To be observed and practiced by "officers of the court?"
Yesterday here in Illinois a Cook County --- did I say, "county" --- judge ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be on the primary ballot; the voting for which started here last week.
Citing the Colorado Court decision in her opinion, a heretofore novel approach to application of constitutional law having its historical roots in the Civil War, and despite the fact that our state Board of Elections unanimously, Dem and Repub, ruled in Trump's favor (on jurisdictional grounds).
Did I mention that the judge has been on the bench less than three years, and less than two years ago she was assigned to traffic and misdemeanor court? At least that is what I found on the internet in a press release about her judicial appointment, issued by --- the Cook County Democrats.
So the union of "the law" and the corrupt machine, physical and political, has already begun.
What on earth are you talking about? Truth is truth, and historical fact is just that. Causing harm is not part of this----the stupid "safety" obsessions of the Progressives is so far down the path, it's beyond ridiculous.
To my understanding they did start off straight, and only added the slant at the beta testing stage, after their AI generated politically incorrect (but likely accurate) viewpoints and essays on all kinds of topics upon which truth is no longer allowed. This was an embarrassment to the Gatekeepers of All Knowledge and had to be corrected at once. That they over-corrected is hardly a surprise.
"Liability, shmiablity -- no-one is liable for anything these days as far as I can tell."
That's not quite true; it's worse than that.
We live under a regime that has perfected the technique of bifurcating power from responsibility - something that rightly ought to be impossible - and rolling shit downhill.
This IS the definitive problem, though - from the successful grocery-stores and restaurants where I live that get shut down for no reason other than out-of-town property owners losing interest, to the genocide in Gaza, -THE- PROBLEM right now is a tiny group of privileged imbeciles who've been taught there are NO consequences for their actions.
100% Intended. Imagine being able to filter reality through an AI model that is slanted to favor the current ruling elites preferences. That is whats happening.
Agree. My kid does math on compueter and calculator. Know what my kid can't do . . . MATH! Our reliance on Technology is making us stupid. Time to step back and stop making programmers rich.
So, hugely profitable company releases a terrible product, takes a huge unexpected drop in share value, and people who shorted them clean up to the tune of millions. Then, hugely profitable company says "Oops! My bad!" releases the real product, and put options clean up? That sounds . . . unfortunately plausible. Let's see what happens next. (Awaiting the "oops.")
This is a feature, not a bug. And it was a successful proof of concept.
The AI generated photos only prove how detached from real life the designers are.
This is but the tip of total information dominance. They don’t care about screwing up the photos, they are going to see how fast they can make us forget it.
"The AI generated photos only prove how detached from real life the designers are. "
I think you are missing all the flaws AI image (and text, and etc) generation reveals in the AI themselves. The AI literally has no attachment to reality or understanding of it or anything else whatsoever because LLMs work through next-token prediction and statistical probability.
There is an LLM problem, this is not the result of wokeism or any culture war topic anyone wants to blame it on. They would be producing libel and making up nonsense while telling you it with confidence, and drawing six-fingered people and four-legged ants, no matter who was training them or who controlled these companies.
So if you want to actually solve this, you need to do something about companies making these chatbots and offering their services, it's what they are making and offering and not who is offering it that matters. LLMs are going nowhere, they will never lead to strong AI, it's impossible. They are just fabrication meme machines useful for propaganda and displacing some very tiny markets, not much else. Ban them entirely, IMO, as any money put toward them is being misdirected from good AI research based on hype, marketing, and deceptions.
This would be true if the product of a company was what stock value was based on. That's not been the case for 50 years or more. These companies sell synergy first and services second and way in last place is product quality.
If AI needs to be fact-checked, then it's productivity-enhancing value is greatly reduced.
It is only a matter of time before it gets something wrong that costs people real money, and then the lawyers will tie it down like Gulliver, similar to what the government did to IBM and AT&T in the 1980s.
The potential (and likely) defamation lawsuits ought to put these living-in-a-dreamworld techies on a fast track to the world the rest of us inhabit---and pronto. Watch their valuations if this becomes 'a thing.'...
And such exquisite timing as the stock market is already heading to a melt-up, our 'overlords' hyper-spend us with funny money into the next milestone ($35 trillion;) the adults in the room BRICS nations' motto has become "The best defense is a good offense" while ever-faster ditching the failing $USD.
All this as they try to distract us from our clear and present economic demise by increasingly reckless and feckless war incitement with actual most dangerous nation states. And dangerous only because of U.S.-Western leadership's psychotic and egotistically-driven gross conceit of its 1/10th of One Percent.
It appears their only recourse is adding more fuel to the fire. The inevitable corruption of democracy and its sister concept 'republic' are not only something we are bearing witness to, we are only now beginning to feel it as well. The forecast? Expect pain and lots of it.
Sure google’s product is obviously unreliable right out of the box, but it’s only one of many AI offerings. They’re pushing this crap for medical diagnoses and other actual serious uses. I’m grateful that Gemini is such a caricature, because even the magical thinkers might notice that it’s not magic, but there’s still AI being used in so many places already – fact check or “misinformation“ monitoring, anybody? – I’m not sure we can put the genie back in the bottle.
The sheer amount of internet "content" that's "created" by bots and then replicated unrelentingly, thereby giving it credence and visiblity, multiplying like the infamous Tribbles...
It's all unstoppable at this point barring Matt's rock-tying-and-oceans solution.
They may be taken offline but only for optics in the short term. The point of all of this, everything that's happening, is to overwhelm systems such that the powerful and fantastically wealthy are insulated against the result of their own machinations. Victims like Matt must either waste all of their time and resources defending themselves or be turned into villains. AI can do this at scale, to all of us, instantaneously. The enemies of the plutocracy include every person who has ever read a Matt Taibbi article. I'd bet the FBI has a list of us and is just waiting for the perfect time to Smirnov us for the crime of "lying."
Agree with you SC on the one hand but I don't know if this so-called genie will be put back in the bottle satisfactorily. It is way to easy to change shit on the run. I do not believe that anything good will come out of this. I foresee a future where the ever lazy among us will rush to a phenomenon that makes "reading, writing and arithmetic" obsolete. Like the Wolf said in Little Red Riding Hood ... "the better to eat you, my Dear!"
All of AI has a dehumanizing and de-evolutionary effect. After a few generations of relying on it the consciousness of the majority will resemble that of a single cell life form.
So this is now becoming the "public face" of AI. It's out in the open for all to see. Ever wonder what's going on "behind the curtain" where it's NOT open for all to see, and how long it's been there? Sort of makes "trust but verify" difficult, when the tool you use to confirm attribution is itself of questionable reliability...or worse, being used to deliberately manipulate the target audience.
I’m a classicist who does research on ancient Greece and Rome. Sometimes, for fun, I ask ChatGPT a classics question. What’s terrifying is that it will never admit it doesn’t know something, it’ll just make up answers that sound right.
Once I asked ChatGPT the etymology of a Spanish word my brother heard in Mexico, because I was curious if the word came from Latin. ChatGPT gave me a Latin root word. I looked that word up in my Latin dictionary, and it wasn’t there. I asked ChatGPT what Latin texts that word appears in, and it named a work by Cicero, and WROTE A FAKE QUOTE IN GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT LATIN THAT SOUNDS SORT OF LIKE CICERO that incorporates this nonexistent Latin word that it made up to answer a question about the etymology of a Spanish word which, I independently learned, is uncertain. It would rather make shit up than say it doesn’t know.
I’ve done a number of other attempts at using the thing for basic research lookup tasks, like “what’s the Ancient Greek text where this anecdote appears,” and it’s impossible, because it’s constantly inventing plausible sounding bullshit and passing it off as the truth. It’s a very impressive tool, AI, but we have to understand what it is and what it isn’t.
Yep. Current AI is little more than a probability engine based on vast amounts of input. No matter what you ask, it's just choosing words and putting them in order based on statistics. It's like a more advanced version of the predictive keyboard on your phone, guessing what word you'll type next.
Except it’s garbage in, garbage out. If Google only hires blue haired, tatted up gender flexers who speak Woke to “train” AI, guess the result from a narrow brand of “mommies.”
No, it will be garbage out no matter what you give it or who trains it because of how LLMs work. They are fundamentally flawed and fundamentally suck, and hallucinations are unsolvable. They have no understanding at all of anything. It doesn't matter what data you give them, who trains them, they will be vulnerable to the same errors.
Blaming the garbage out problem on "blue haired, tatted up gender flexxers" may be popular, but it's also inaccurate, frankly dumb to do, and shows a complete lack of understanding of what's going on, making it counterproductive to actually stopping this besides.
Over the top rhetoric aside, both of you are correct to some degree. There will always be something like RHLF to serve the "safety" requirements of the product, and that does involve a very small, culturally insulated group of out-of-touch people reinforcing whatever they think "safety" is. But as you say, they will be applying all of this bias on top of a system that has no relation to factuality or even an internal truth model - just a probability distribution over the next token.
I was thinking about that when the Reddit bit was announced - utilizing a source that will make it exponentially worse (objectively) but "better" in that it will help confirm all the biases in a nice big echo chamber. Perfect!
We're so lucky that AI was so unreliable right out of the box. Imagine the damage they could have done if they had started off straight and added the slant later. Now these things are going to be taken offline for legal liability reasons, if nothing else. You can't just have a machine that spits out slanderous material with a "whoopsie" disclaimer -- such a machine would immediately be abused to plant lies and hide behind the algorithm.
Google absolutely needs to be broken up. The dominant search engine cannot also be a major AI creator of information. The conflicts of interest of having these two functions in the same company are enormous and unavoidable. We must have search engines that function fully independently from information generators. If not, truth truly dies.
I just want to say, nice nom de guerre - and EXCELLENT point!!!
After this article, I'm thinking of changing it to "Make Taibbi Factual Again, Google!"
That'll be the day.
I told him same thing months back! I think he's got the best handle on the Internet. No one's in 2nd place.
Plus it abbreviates to MOFA, which is kinda badass. 🙂
I'm not sure I'd go *that* far - especially where the latter is concerned.
I suppose one person's badass is another person's shower-accessory. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being in the business I’m in, I am in the position of influencing all of my circle’s technology choices because I’m the one they come to for help with it. There are many others like me, the “computer guy” of the family, and we’re the reason why those people who really don’t care which products they use are using the ones they are. When a formerly quality product turns to absolute shit like Google search and really any of their offerings have, we’re the ones that notice first. Not all notice at once, but it builds, and before long we’re configuring our circle’s computers/phones/tablets to use something else. Myself, I’m currently favoring Brave Search. Google is on its decline and is too arrogant to realize it yet.
Totally agree. Vanilla Google search is practically useless at this point. I also use Brave and duck duck go, but I will say one way to get around Google is to use Google scholar (depending on what you are researching). You get completely different results that are typically far more serious.
Good point. But how do you assure that if the populace abandons Google, the misdeeds will not surface in the replacement?
You can’t. If and when it happens again, you move on. It’s both a benefit and a curse in some ways.
I use brave as well, but it often just really does not do the job. There are often sites I know exist, I find them on other search engines, and can pull them up love, but Brave does not even find them. Frustrating.
Agreed Gentlemen. The willingness of "big techs" leadership to get in bed with America's weaponized bureaucratic surveillance apparatus precludes any claims of free enterprise or free markets. They've consistently caused harm and will only continue to do so. They are anti-American at every crossroads.
Likewise we need immediate transparency on American tax dollars being used to fund faux social service organizations that in fact are politically weaponized fronts for NGO abusers and the criminal financiers they front for.
And, as Alvin Lee said, it's time to "tax the rich and feed the poor 'till there are no rich no more." There is no capitalism or communism. "Ism's" are dear as doornails. The capitalist's and communist's killed them. There is the Republic, the Constitution and the free citizen. The rest is psyop. Hannah Arendt, a first hand survivor of fascist totalitarianism pointed out, that at the first moment free speech on any topic is forbidden, you are inside a tyranny.
(As always!! Thank you Matt and team!!)
10 Years After…one of the most underrated electric blues bands of all time.
MOFA you absolutely right.! Break it up.. too much under one roof.. should have been done years ago.. no integrity on Covid vaccine data, Big Pharma/Govt... stopped using Google 4 yrs ago ..
How can you avoid it?
For Internet access I only have my phone, and I'm stuck with Google running the show.
And it's not helpful when Larry Page calls Elon Musk a "specist" because he was concerned enough to want to have safeguards against AI using its new powers against humans.
Essentially, Larry Page welcomes the rise of SkyNet.
It will not matter if the information is distorted before action is taken. It may already be too late. At this point hard copies truly matter. Anything digital is subject to revision.
I hope you are right but people are just running with this crap. In the industry I am involved with, real estate (I don't sell it that is why I put it that way), AI is the latest craze. I warn folks, "you'd better check that stuff!" They think it is the greatest thing because it allows lazy people to be even lazier.
An article just came out this week on 404media about all the "AI" generated food pictures on delivery apps for fake "ghost kitchen" restaurants. Both hilarious and maddening. There was a picture of a seafood pasta dish that had Lovecraftian creatures atop there pasta.
I'm starting a collection of the bizarre AI generated pictures for online ads. So far there's a four toed black foot with an extra toenail on one toe advertising some kind of foot fungus cure. That ad also included a six fingered hand. Another ad featured a tiny adult sleeping on the floor in a dog bed.
Photoshop was bad enough. This is several degrees of magnitude worse methinks.
It would just be a funny, surreal, "Get a load of this weird computer shit" type thing, but what beggars belief is that we are meant to take it seriously.
"So far there's a four toed black foot ..."
This reminded me of John Sayles's interesting 1984 film "The Brother from Another Planet". Joe Morton stars as an escaped extraterrestrial slave who lands on Earth and is being chased by two "white" aliens who want to return him to their planet. Morton's character resembles a black human except for his three-toed feet.
A classic.
I saw that ad with the adult in the dog bed! My God i had forgotten about it until reading your post!
You should see what it generated for my husband when he asked for an image of a good steak.
"Eat ze bugs, suckah!"
I’d like to see that!
Based on some repartee I have had lately I am concerned for the fate of independent thought.
This is classic midwit behavior and I hope that the market will weed them all out for their middling mediocre output and they'll all end up with nice jobs in fast food. It is not a given though; the question is how much any given market is going to be willing to trade quality for quantity.
That is why the United States is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave: we aren't free because we aren't brave.
We are lazy and cowardly. And the thought that Americans want to be even lazier makes me shudder.
What happens when some AI generated description is shown to be false, and the selling agent is on the hook for either not disclosing something, or providing bad information about a property?
Depends on how deep your pockets are when it comes time to hire a lawyer to take it to court. Pretty much Business as Usual but with an added twist for proving who was 'responsible' for the lack of disclosure.
I was mostly thinking about it from the employment side. If I had someone working for me who routinely used a method such as this, I would can them in a second, if only for the liability it puts the on the firm.
SimComm: We must pay for our racist, omniphobic past, regardless of color, genetic makeup or whatever; forget the collateral damage. All narrative must be shaped and guided forward in that direction, so that we may heal, and our betters can run the show, ad infinitum.
Sarcasm's all I got right now. What a shitshow.
The way to stop this is with a long series of defamation lawsuits.
I was hoping Elon might sue after they compared him to Hitler.
Sullivan
Right after Google claims to be a publisher and 1st Amendment protected
Bringing lawyers into this 💩show now is just what is NOT needed. Our grandkids—in their old age—will be watching the resulting festivities reach the 29-member U.S. Supreme Court at the turn of the next century
You may be right but only if the legal profession is already so compromised as to be complicit. Traditionally lawyers are the go-to guys to address grievance. Covid had a dastardly impact on the profession though. Lots of hive mind now.
Witnessing the complete capture of the judicial system for the purpose of taking down a national political candidate has been shocking. I write this as a retired attorney who practiced 25 years.
Ethics. Rule of law? To be observed and practiced by "officers of the court?"
Yesterday here in Illinois a Cook County --- did I say, "county" --- judge ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be on the primary ballot; the voting for which started here last week.
Citing the Colorado Court decision in her opinion, a heretofore novel approach to application of constitutional law having its historical roots in the Civil War, and despite the fact that our state Board of Elections unanimously, Dem and Repub, ruled in Trump's favor (on jurisdictional grounds).
Did I mention that the judge has been on the bench less than three years, and less than two years ago she was assigned to traffic and misdemeanor court? At least that is what I found on the internet in a press release about her judicial appointment, issued by --- the Cook County Democrats.
So the union of "the law" and the corrupt machine, physical and political, has already begun.
Is Reid Hoffman going to pay for our legal fees? Good-fucking luck.
Jon Lovitz’ lying SNL character should be the face of AI. All AI responses should end with “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
How can you make a case that showing African-American Congresspeople in the 1800s has caused harm?
What on earth are you talking about? Truth is truth, and historical fact is just that. Causing harm is not part of this----the stupid "safety" obsessions of the Progressives is so far down the path, it's beyond ridiculous.
So in other words "Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil" is to be the rule going forward?
The last two, yes, for we the people. The reverse is the first is the go-to for the elites of the future.
To my understanding they did start off straight, and only added the slant at the beta testing stage, after their AI generated politically incorrect (but likely accurate) viewpoints and essays on all kinds of topics upon which truth is no longer allowed. This was an embarrassment to the Gatekeepers of All Knowledge and had to be corrected at once. That they over-corrected is hardly a surprise.
Interesting. Any cite for that?
I'd google it but am fearful of an inaccurate result.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/08/openai-chatgpt-ai-bias-ethics/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/18/politics/ai-chatgpt-racist-what-matters/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/ai-chatbots-disinformation.html
Really? Sounds plausible, but would like to know if it’s actually true.
See above ^^^
What makes you so sure that this isn't exactly what was intended?
Politicians already lie bald-faced. Why would we think that the complicit tech arena isn't joining the charge?
Liability, shmiablity -- no-one is liable for anything these days as far as I can tell.
"Liability, shmiablity -- no-one is liable for anything these days as far as I can tell."
That's not quite true; it's worse than that.
We live under a regime that has perfected the technique of bifurcating power from responsibility - something that rightly ought to be impossible - and rolling shit downhill.
This IS the definitive problem, though - from the successful grocery-stores and restaurants where I live that get shut down for no reason other than out-of-town property owners losing interest, to the genocide in Gaza, -THE- PROBLEM right now is a tiny group of privileged imbeciles who've been taught there are NO consequences for their actions.
This must be solved. Drop the hammer.
Astute observation.
100% Intended. Imagine being able to filter reality through an AI model that is slanted to favor the current ruling elites preferences. That is whats happening.
Sounds like the beginning of Social Scoring to me.
And nobody trusts politicians for exactly that reason. Ditto the media.
Add the medical community and you have a trifecta.
Add education for the the superfecta.
Agree. My kid does math on compueter and calculator. Know what my kid can't do . . . MATH! Our reliance on Technology is making us stupid. Time to step back and stop making programmers rich.
If that is the case, then Nvidia and Google are massive short candidates.
So, hugely profitable company releases a terrible product, takes a huge unexpected drop in share value, and people who shorted them clean up to the tune of millions. Then, hugely profitable company says "Oops! My bad!" releases the real product, and put options clean up? That sounds . . . unfortunately plausible. Let's see what happens next. (Awaiting the "oops.")
This is a feature, not a bug. And it was a successful proof of concept.
The AI generated photos only prove how detached from real life the designers are.
This is but the tip of total information dominance. They don’t care about screwing up the photos, they are going to see how fast they can make us forget it.
They will not stop.
"The AI generated photos only prove how detached from real life the designers are. "
I think you are missing all the flaws AI image (and text, and etc) generation reveals in the AI themselves. The AI literally has no attachment to reality or understanding of it or anything else whatsoever because LLMs work through next-token prediction and statistical probability.
There is an LLM problem, this is not the result of wokeism or any culture war topic anyone wants to blame it on. They would be producing libel and making up nonsense while telling you it with confidence, and drawing six-fingered people and four-legged ants, no matter who was training them or who controlled these companies.
So if you want to actually solve this, you need to do something about companies making these chatbots and offering their services, it's what they are making and offering and not who is offering it that matters. LLMs are going nowhere, they will never lead to strong AI, it's impossible. They are just fabrication meme machines useful for propaganda and displacing some very tiny markets, not much else. Ban them entirely, IMO, as any money put toward them is being misdirected from good AI research based on hype, marketing, and deceptions.
Garbage In, garbage out.
… useful for propaganda…”
Precisely my point. Exceedingly useful…
Oop Ack!
This would be true if the product of a company was what stock value was based on. That's not been the case for 50 years or more. These companies sell synergy first and services second and way in last place is product quality.
If AI needs to be fact-checked, then it's productivity-enhancing value is greatly reduced.
It is only a matter of time before it gets something wrong that costs people real money, and then the lawyers will tie it down like Gulliver, similar to what the government did to IBM and AT&T in the 1980s.
Good idea. But I am sure Nancy Pelosi got it first :-)
And massive jerks.
The potential (and likely) defamation lawsuits ought to put these living-in-a-dreamworld techies on a fast track to the world the rest of us inhabit---and pronto. Watch their valuations if this becomes 'a thing.'...
And such exquisite timing as the stock market is already heading to a melt-up, our 'overlords' hyper-spend us with funny money into the next milestone ($35 trillion;) the adults in the room BRICS nations' motto has become "The best defense is a good offense" while ever-faster ditching the failing $USD.
All this as they try to distract us from our clear and present economic demise by increasingly reckless and feckless war incitement with actual most dangerous nation states. And dangerous only because of U.S.-Western leadership's psychotic and egotistically-driven gross conceit of its 1/10th of One Percent.
It appears their only recourse is adding more fuel to the fire. The inevitable corruption of democracy and its sister concept 'republic' are not only something we are bearing witness to, we are only now beginning to feel it as well. The forecast? Expect pain and lots of it.
God, I wish.
Maybe it’s like a serial killer intentionally leaving clues behind, essentially saying “Stop me before I kill again.”
this is lawsuit city!
unreal. I hope Matt has called his lawyer.
Sure google’s product is obviously unreliable right out of the box, but it’s only one of many AI offerings. They’re pushing this crap for medical diagnoses and other actual serious uses. I’m grateful that Gemini is such a caricature, because even the magical thinkers might notice that it’s not magic, but there’s still AI being used in so many places already – fact check or “misinformation“ monitoring, anybody? – I’m not sure we can put the genie back in the bottle.
The sheer amount of internet "content" that's "created" by bots and then replicated unrelentingly, thereby giving it credence and visiblity, multiplying like the infamous Tribbles...
It's all unstoppable at this point barring Matt's rock-tying-and-oceans solution.
Can we get #BreakupGoogle trending?
DOJ's Antitrust Division already uses it as a lever to coerce Google into manipulating its algorithms to support favored narratives.
They may be taken offline but only for optics in the short term. The point of all of this, everything that's happening, is to overwhelm systems such that the powerful and fantastically wealthy are insulated against the result of their own machinations. Victims like Matt must either waste all of their time and resources defending themselves or be turned into villains. AI can do this at scale, to all of us, instantaneously. The enemies of the plutocracy include every person who has ever read a Matt Taibbi article. I'd bet the FBI has a list of us and is just waiting for the perfect time to Smirnov us for the crime of "lying."
The days of "You can't just..." might now be a thing of the past.
Unless you mean, "You can't just out-lawyer Google."
Agree with you SC on the one hand but I don't know if this so-called genie will be put back in the bottle satisfactorily. It is way to easy to change shit on the run. I do not believe that anything good will come out of this. I foresee a future where the ever lazy among us will rush to a phenomenon that makes "reading, writing and arithmetic" obsolete. Like the Wolf said in Little Red Riding Hood ... "the better to eat you, my Dear!"
I see the loss of original thought Which means no new ideas.
All of AI has a dehumanizing and de-evolutionary effect. After a few generations of relying on it the consciousness of the majority will resemble that of a single cell life form.
Positivity from SimCom, and it's not even Monday!
So this is now becoming the "public face" of AI. It's out in the open for all to see. Ever wonder what's going on "behind the curtain" where it's NOT open for all to see, and how long it's been there? Sort of makes "trust but verify" difficult, when the tool you use to confirm attribution is itself of questionable reliability...or worse, being used to deliberately manipulate the target audience.
I’m a classicist who does research on ancient Greece and Rome. Sometimes, for fun, I ask ChatGPT a classics question. What’s terrifying is that it will never admit it doesn’t know something, it’ll just make up answers that sound right.
Once I asked ChatGPT the etymology of a Spanish word my brother heard in Mexico, because I was curious if the word came from Latin. ChatGPT gave me a Latin root word. I looked that word up in my Latin dictionary, and it wasn’t there. I asked ChatGPT what Latin texts that word appears in, and it named a work by Cicero, and WROTE A FAKE QUOTE IN GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT LATIN THAT SOUNDS SORT OF LIKE CICERO that incorporates this nonexistent Latin word that it made up to answer a question about the etymology of a Spanish word which, I independently learned, is uncertain. It would rather make shit up than say it doesn’t know.
I’ve done a number of other attempts at using the thing for basic research lookup tasks, like “what’s the Ancient Greek text where this anecdote appears,” and it’s impossible, because it’s constantly inventing plausible sounding bullshit and passing it off as the truth. It’s a very impressive tool, AI, but we have to understand what it is and what it isn’t.
Truth be told, the more I know about AI, the less impressed I am. It is the most overhyped new technology since virtual reality.
Yep. Current AI is little more than a probability engine based on vast amounts of input. No matter what you ask, it's just choosing words and putting them in order based on statistics. It's like a more advanced version of the predictive keyboard on your phone, guessing what word you'll type next.
Except it’s garbage in, garbage out. If Google only hires blue haired, tatted up gender flexers who speak Woke to “train” AI, guess the result from a narrow brand of “mommies.”
No, it will be garbage out no matter what you give it or who trains it because of how LLMs work. They are fundamentally flawed and fundamentally suck, and hallucinations are unsolvable. They have no understanding at all of anything. It doesn't matter what data you give them, who trains them, they will be vulnerable to the same errors.
Blaming the garbage out problem on "blue haired, tatted up gender flexxers" may be popular, but it's also inaccurate, frankly dumb to do, and shows a complete lack of understanding of what's going on, making it counterproductive to actually stopping this besides.
Over the top rhetoric aside, both of you are correct to some degree. There will always be something like RHLF to serve the "safety" requirements of the product, and that does involve a very small, culturally insulated group of out-of-touch people reinforcing whatever they think "safety" is. But as you say, they will be applying all of this bias on top of a system that has no relation to factuality or even an internal truth model - just a probability distribution over the next token.
Acronym correction: RLHF - "reinforcement learning with human feedback"
Just wait until it gets all that sweet, sweet Reddit data.
I was thinking about that when the Reddit bit was announced - utilizing a source that will make it exponentially worse (objectively) but "better" in that it will help confirm all the biases in a nice big echo chamber. Perfect!