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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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These things called AI are not conscious, nor are they supposed to be. They're large language models that do text based prediction. They aren't aware of what they're saying, what it means, or the context they exist within. They just recreate patterns that it's seen before. Artificial general intelligence is a totally different thing, and it would have the implications you say. These do not.
With that being said, yes a large part of the issue is that it isn't original. It's trained to create content that you'd expect from Carlin, so really what it's doing is just repeating things. Just listen to the actual Carlin.
Another thing to consider is how this consolidates wealth. Who's getting the money from this? It's just a way to take other people's creative works and capitalize on them without having to pay them. It's purely exploitative as well as in bad taste.
The way I explain it in simplified terms; libraries helped us find books, search engines helped us find documents, LLMs help us find words. I expect LLMs to also provide a similar order of magnitude improvement in knowledge retrieval that we saw from those, which is a huge deal, but they are not on the path to AI consciousness.
That said, they may be an important processing component for assisting a consciousness, just like how in our brains we have different cortexes that primarily assist in processing information subconsciously.
I don't see this stand up as proper AI at all. However, I do see the writing on the wall, and we are definitely attempting to build towards what I referenced, a proper simulation of consciousness. So all the AI projects coming out now feel like stepping stones towards that end.
I thoroughly agree that this happening under a capitalist system is a recipe for shit though. However, we have no way of removing capital from the equation at this time, and like it or not, people are going to be doing more projects exactly like this. As well they will be making money from it because that is literally the only way anything ever gets done when capital is the beginning and end of the discussion. That's more an issue with capitalism than AI personas IMO. This is how things are going to happen, and I feel like we're better off trying to inject morality into the situation than to pretend that it won't happen or that we can stop it from happening. Otherwise, what we're doing is standing around with angry expressions on our faces, doing fuck all while corporation steal our likenesses for profit.
We have to tread carefully from here.