>My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power.

So, this is potentially a crackpot theory, but hear me out. I've noticed that a lot of the hype runners, posts claiming their businesses are optimizing this with chatgpt, or they've replaced most of their coding with chatgpt outputs have been generally accounts here that were created in 2021 or later. While before the last couple of months, you should generally assume good faith on HN and elsewhere, the fact is mass astroturfing now is very much possible on HN and elsewhere with chatGPT, and why wouldn't OpenAI want to hype their product and get as many users on board? They certainly could and would not be noticeable. You don't need nefarious political goals if you're just trying to sell something. You just need to create enough hype and illusion to grow your product. SV companies have done it before, and now it's automated, to a degree.

One explanation (beyond basic confirmation bias) is that a lot of people joined the crypto wave and knew the orange site was the place where tech people hung out, and a lot of those types ditched crypto and are riding the AI wave, but I really cannot be sure anymore.

I kind of feel you, everything seems really hyped, more than it should be. I mean I still don't even have any idea what ChatGPTs actual use case is besides look super impressive. It seems like it can do a bunch of stuff, sometimes really well, other times spectacularly bad. It's not an a true AGI, but it's kind of marketed like one.

I think we're all completely baffled by it? I mean the thing can talk right? So we're all fired?

As per usual everyone else keeps coming up with the ideas that when I hear, I think, "damn, seems obvious, wish I had thought of that." Sometimes it's because it's a good idea, sometimes because it's an idea that will probably get funding, which makes it a good idea :P

Examples:

1. Ingesting a shitload of unread emails after you come back from vacation, then telling you briefly what important things you missed

2. The same idea but for slack

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

4. Generating "individual" lesson plans based on student needs (I've heard 5 different pitches around this, majority for language learning)

5. student tutor chatbot

There's some other ideas that were too stupid (or more probably, too innovative for dumb old me to comprehend) to remember.

At the very least it has people thinking and being imaginative, which I think is pretty cool. I like getting into political debates with the thing.

To be honest, at least for 1 and 2, they seem like issues that shouldn't be happening, you're working at a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email (I guess? I don't have this problem), so rather than maybe have that addressed, which is what we did where I work, we'll just continue bad habits because of the bot?

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

Using it for teaching and lesson planning? Really ? I mean I know it might be considered mostly right but I'm not sure if I'd be using it unless I had a very good grasp on the subject matter, is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Not trying to tell you it's not worth using, but it seems funny to have a model trained and running that's cost billions of dollars to be used for a lot of random tasks. It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

> a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email

That describes most large companies.

While I agree it’s an obvious use case, the first startup to reliably extract the signal from the noise of daily communication at big organizations will make huge piles of money.

And whoever can do the same for Europeans while pretending to comply with GDPR, and probably a bunch of other related smaller markets. China without accidentally mentioning 1989 or cartoon bears. And so on.

> is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Absolutely not without a teacher there anyway, which basically defeats the purpose.

For older students, I think it's a relatively nice alternative to Wikipedia. I asked it some complicated questions about some obscure bits of political theory and it put me onto some authors that were I not already such a freak, I probably wouldn't have known.

> Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

This wasn't really a product, just someone at a hardware startup I was doing some work for improving their workflow. It's not really a good long term solution I think, each supplier has a relatively standard format, so eventually you just tweak your API intake to handle the various formats. I actually never looked at the intake code, maybe it just grabs by keywords, who knows, point is, overkill to bring in chat GPT. Probably quite tedious to manage the emails, it sounded like a one off experiment to avoid the boredom of tweaking email greppers. Chat GPT was 100% accurate in transforming the data though, over probably a set of less than 100 emails.

> It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

I mean we probably won't hear about the really good ideas until those ideas hit funding rounds, right? I'm always careful to be arrogant about this kind of things because I don't want a famous dropbox comment attributed to my name, lol.

All good points, cheers for the discussion.

I tried GPT4 yesterday to write a relatively small python ML/data analysis CLI tool. It makes the development much faster, sure, very impressive, yes - but it makes dumb mistakes as well (such as writing True where it should be False etc). The tricky bits I had to write myself. The code it generates is suboptimal - the quality really feels like a representation of an average github profile.

It is really nice to let it write down all the boilerplate, I was more productive than ever, but,at least in this iteration, I doubt it will take our jobs away. So yeah, the hype is somewhat overrated.

Boilerplate is a pretty good approximation of the noise in the signal to noise sense. It reminds me of a demo where eclipse would write some tens of lines of java and then fold them away so you don't have to look at them.

If the effect of this tech is largely to generate language cruft that didn't strictly need to exist in the first place it'll do wonders for people's tolerance of said cruft.

Moderately interesting from a language design perspective.

> My solution comes from Stephenson and Doctorow: distribute the technology freely. The sooner everyone has access to the incredible propagandic power of these technologies, the sooner we can develop counter measures.

I find this still a bit naive: if you take this to weapons for instance, you do not develop better/faster counter measures; you actually increase the risk for everyone, because the first (careless or not) to make a mistake (or a voluntary act) spoils everything for everyone.

I find it quite telling that the same argument happens from within the US: it would be so simple and more obvious to _avoid_ or mitigate risk (and... death really) by putting strict limitations and regulations on top of "dangerous stuff". But somehow, against evidence, there are still some to advocate loudly for said dangerous stuff to be deployed to everyone.

AI is not a weapon, but will be definitely used and weaponized by a lot. And even before that, we already are all collectively struggling with misinformation and manipulation.

I don't think this is comparable. Physical weapons can't be used as protection; you can only use them for counter attacks.

AI on the other hand side can be used for protection—because it's not a weapon per se.

A gun can itself be used to block a bullet, or to shoot down an incoming bullet, but they're both near-impossible to pull off. It's much easier to use the gun to shoot the attacker before they shoot you, or even better by its mere presence deter the attack in the first place.

This makes economic sense: it's expensive to armor every vulnerability and cheap to exploit just one.

I don't see a reason that AI would be different from guns or missiles in this regard: offense (or the MAD threat of it) is the best defense.

Your (oblique) comparison to gun control is interesting... but practically, controlling a technology which is just a special kind of number-crunching is vastly harder than controlling a technology which must be forged from steel in a special factory.

This was discussed in another place, the "then shouldn't everyone have nukes?" argument https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35159757

I don't stand anywhere too concretely on the issue yet, all I know is that AI is dangerous in a different way than guns or nukes, and therefore should probably be treated different. There's just something different about software, maybe because no matter what at the end of the day, if it wants to actually kill someone, it has to interface with the real world, and so my idea of "just stop anybody that ever tries to build nukes" might be good enough? That, plus, hardening critical infrastructure against network attack (or just airgapping it... or making it analog!)

I'm wondering how much this has been written about already, if anybody has some more in depth musings on the subject I'd be interested. I have yet to read Kurzweil, maybe he's covered it.

I'm interested in your observation that this is mostly coming from the USA: though I was born and raised in America, typically I align strongly against American values, though I can't deny that they form the basis of my subconscious. My belief though is that this ideology comes from a combination of reading people like Doctorow, and reading Karl Marx, who argued in favor of an armed proletariat that should resist any efforts by anyone to disarm them. In conversations with anarchists in Greece as well as all sorts of folks at places like Defcon, I've come to understand that the distribution of the means for resistance is a generally good thing, and this is where my belief stems that this technology should be freely available.

I don't know how well that applies to the USA though which obviously has a horrifying gun violence epidemic. Something weird is going on there though, other countries with a proliferation of guns (though not to that level...) don't have the same issues.

Thanks for the other discussion!

> if it wants to actually kill someone, it has to interface with the real world

And researchers already tested for GPT-4 to be put online. That is already being interfaced with the real world, through the minds of anybody the AI may talk to/be made to talk to (see how social networks can be used to manipulate towards a very real outcome, if only from doxxing to "cancelling" to peoples' Spring revolts). Shaping people's minds is a powerful thing. And that's the most likely use case to me at this point, but who knows what it will be in the end.

Once online, we could easily envision that an AI may act on some purpose[1] shop, put orders, ships stuff with instructions and incentives to real people, or even be plugged into some real-world APIs.

[1] not purpose in the sense "is it conscious or not". It does not matter if it's conscious or not, if it's AGI or not. What matters is if/that it may function in a systematic and working way following an impulse/stimuli.

It may not even be about killing or destruction really, but it could be about shaping some society policies or self-understanding, which would have consequences down the line too.

Distributing power in society is a good thing, as long as its usage stays at an individual human scale.

When the first mover advantage has the potential to deeply harm people or society (fire weapons, nukes, cars, AI that redefines what truth looks/sounds like or that can act in a non-deterministic way based on a per-construction biased-dataset, in a fraction of a second), there's a responsibility that has to come with it, and there's a custom to set rules to control who has access to it, for what purpose, to train them and to have a social/political control over them.

> My solution comes from Stephenson and Doctorow: distribute the technology freely.

Just a reminder: That's the core of the GNU Free Software philosophy, invented by Richard Stallman for the exact reasons stated above.

The main difference is that Stallman is absolutely terrible at promoting that philosophy.

Doctorow (not too familiar with Stephenson) has IMO done far more to sell people on the goals of freely accessible technology by actually showing off examples of this stuff going awry and ways humans have managed to work around it and what the solutions could be (while leaving the actual solution up to the reader as to what best fits them).

Stallman/the FSF on the other hand has spend the past 2 decades complaining about shit nobody cares about (GNU/Linux is and will always be the dumbest hill to die on), rethoric that mostly exists to promote the GNU projects nonsense (anyone remember their "ethical git servers", which conspicuously only approved Savannah as a "GNU seal of approval", and only because they couldn't get gitlab to load with librejs) or writing stuff that just... doesn't reach the masses because it relies on a lot of charged language.

Doctorow presents the same broad stroke points that led to GNU Free Software, but actually knows how to explain them in a way that reaches out to people. Stallman preaches to the choir.

> The main difference is that Stallman is absolutely terrible at promoting that philosophy.

Depends on the audience, I guess…

It's indeed almost impossible to reach most people with logical arguments. The only way to reach the masses is though emotions.

GNU fails in this point, sure, as their argumentation is pure logic, and not a marketing psy-op.

> […] shit nobody cares about […] dumbest hill to die on […] GNU projects nonsense […] charged language […]

As always one can see from statements like those that the ideas and the logic behind are indeed too subtle for some people.

Even that are, of course, the exact same ideas people like Doctorow refer to and promote.

I don't agree with the tone of your OP, I think we need "weirdos" like Stallman to be the vanguard of these ideologies, whereas people like Doctorow can be, idk, maybe "translators" for the rest of the world to understand the ideology better. Some would say that's the whole job of a writer, which is a big part of Doctorow's schtick, being a good writer (not just all his activism).

> The only way to reach the masses is though emotions.

Here's where my however comes in: this is a dangerous mistake I think people like us often make. Maybe because we grew up watching Spock, but I think we tend to be judgemental towards Pathos, and judge Logos to be the only "valid" form of rhetoric. But, it's all rhetoric. Logos, Pathos, Ethos, they're all equally "valid" in that they're all at least equal in their ability to do what rhetoric does, convince people of your point of view. In fact, I think Logos is a really ineffective rhetorical strategy, because humans are extremely irrational.

Far better to combine your Logos with a Pathos strategy, that is to say leverage your knowledge of human cognitive fallacies and tendencies to construct a good Pathos argument (or combination of all three) to win people to your position.

Stallman is a pure Logos guy, through and through. Doctorow, on the other hands, writes up emotional stories, creating characters you can relate to, generates their worlds and fills it with some of the same problems we have (or will have) and shows how they can overcome those problems with the strategies Stallman preaches about. It's very effective, just look at Doctorow's career and the changes the EFF has wrought.

Somewhere buried in the LessWrong beginner's wiki or whatever they call it is a really good article on how people like us (and people drawn to LessWrong) make this mistake about emotion all the time, we think being rational is to be like Mr Spock, but even in the show he was wrong all the time, his rigid rationality got him into trouble, and a more emotional and instinctual understanding was necessary. In the article that I can't find, it's argued that it's actual irrational to reject emotions, because emotions are a core part of being human and a completely valid driver of determining why you should do certain things, what you like doing, what your values are, etc. I mean, what else could be the driver, other than some kind of sterile utilitarianism? And even that would eventually require making decisions about what you value the utility of, which I'm not sure how you do without emotion. (whatever preserves the most human life - ok, why preserve human life? who cares? etc. I don't see how you escape it)

I don't really even need to make that point though to argue in favor of not worshiping the almighty god of logic and reason, at the end of the day, being purely rational and logical and making these arguments just doesn't work, and Pathos does. If you want "your side" to win, you gotta just use Pathos as well.