A lot of bad thinking about AI flows from inappropriately anthropomorphizing AI systems. Examples:

(1) The Copyright Office's stance that you can't copyright AI-generated work flows from the mistaken idea that an AI is in some sense a person and can therefore be the author of a work. Actually Midjourney is a tool like photoshop and the human user is the author in both cases.

(2) People think "agents" are the future of AI, and they envision a future with a ton of virtual people running around the Internet running errands for us. But in most cases people are going to want systems that do exactly what they're told and have no goals of their own.

(3) "Stochastic parrot" thinkers are concerned that if we acknowledge that LLMs have human-like intelligence, that will devalue human agency. I think this is wrong and people will (and should) continue prioritizing people over machines no matter how smart the machines get.

(4) Relatedly X-riskers assume that human-level intelligence will inevitably lead to human-level ambition and a human-like survival instinct, which will drive them to try to kill us. I think it won't be hard to train models that have no goals beyond the narrow ones we give them.

@binarybits "...continue prioritizing people over machines no matter how smart the machines get." Really wondering how do you support this claim

On a different but related topic: I hypothesize "cultural molasses": AI training is definitionally on historical data, therefore AI will be less likely to generate something unique, unlike that which came before. It will be best at mimicking prior works. I further hypothesize cultural molasses has been going on prior to the LLM craze, thanks to previous generation AI and low value content flooding books, video, music and websites.

@binarybits Can you provide an example of a ‘stochastic parrot thinker’ with that concern? What you’re describing seems to have no relation to the stochastic parrot concerns I’ve seen like:

@binarybits I already am beginning to value my interactions with Bard over those I have with a huge number of internet personalities.

@binarybits Nice thread. But not sure about this one. Some (most?) "stochastic parrot" thinkers just think that predicting the next word based on probabilistic patterns in a training set doesn't count as understanding.

@binarybits Ah, summer child. Corporations are not people, but sort of a machine by itself. It makes perfect sense that as soon as opportunity presents, humans are ditched in favor of digital counterparts. That is obvious.

@binarybits I hate the stochastic parrot argument though, becaues I think we are all stochastic parrots and should get off the high horse.

@binarybits What if human startups are default dead becaues AI CEOs are just better :) ? But with AGI all cards are onthe table again anyways. Who knows what will be born from that chaos unless we soehow co-evolve as efficient cyborgs.

@binarybits False. Companies will quickly fire all human employees if they can be replaced with AI.