Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/does-your-car-have-any-idea-why-my-car-pulled-it-over-new-yorker-cartoon_u-l-py85cr0.jpg?artHeight=350&artPerspective=n&artWidth=550&background=fbfbfb

First the author admits that there's not enough evidence to draw any useful conclusions, but purposely phrases it as the evidence not meeting "100 percent certainty".

just a quibble with that. "not meeting 100% certainty" ≠ "not enough evidence to draw any useful conclusions", and there are examples of that all the time, like tomorrow's weather, which cannot be forecast with 100% certainty. but i don't need 100% certain to make reasonable preparations based off of what is merely highly probable instead of 100% certain. or, from this thing i just read which reminded me of this thread:

...By hitching a ride on cargo ships and passenger jets, exotic species are bridging oceans, mountain ranges and other geographic divides otherwise insurmountable without human help. The result is a great scrambling of the planet’s flora and fauna, with dire implications for humans and the ecosystems they depend on.

“One of the things that we stress that really is the tremendous threat this does pose to — and I know this is going to sound grandiose — but to human civilization,” said Peter Stoett, an Ontario Tech University professor who helped lead a group of about seven dozen experts in writing the report. The cost estimate [$423 billion a year], he added, is “extremely conservative.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/09/04/invasive-species-un-report/

i believe that but at the same time when they say stuff like “It’s not normal that a species crosses the Atlantic,” he said. “Not normal that it goes from Australia to Chile.” i'm like what is normal? hasn't this been going on since the 17th century? ships going back and forth between continents? at least now you don't get utopian botanists deliberately planting entire crops worth of foreign seeds everywhere? eg the tomato?

Even during non-human-assisted evolutionary times species crossed the Atlantic from Africa toward Brazil, carried by prevailing winds, both plants and animals. Consider the Hawaiian Islands and other remote Pacific isands. They were formed in mid-ocean but still had native plants, insects, birds and a variety of animal life when humans arrived. Species travel. What's new is the speed of the transfer, not the transfer itself.

And the volume of stuff transferred.

yeah idk in 1650 a ship could carry a boatload of animals and all their associated pests and burrs and seeds across the ocean in three weeks and did so many many times but ultimately i guess i have to (reluctantly) defer to people who have spent their entire professional careers studying these questions

I used to be a lot more skeptical of whether the whole "native plants"/ecosystems thing really mattered or was just some kind of purist fantasy, but no, it really matters. What Aimless and James said - it's the speed and volume that's the issue. Evolution happens over millions of years, and there's only so much adaptation that can take place in a few hundred. I can see it in my own backyard and the woods in my town, invasive species really do create problems. E.g. my yard is full of these norway maples that spread like bamboo and they gradually suck resources from native trees, but native animals generally won't make homes in them. Species do actually kind of balance/harmonize over time, and that balance is achieved slowly, and disrupted quickly. Doesn't mean it's perfect or that you can't wind up with ecological problems even without that happening.

Cultivated food crops can at least be contained to limited areas.

I think "normal" is not really a helpful concept because these things are never static.

the north american maize crop was absolutely devastated in the 90s when the european corn borer had prime conditions for spreading and the dominant seed planted had limited resistance to predation

it's a european insect that primarily affected millet until it hit the americas (where maize is native) and was generally a cyclical threat over the years until the right conditions hit

as far as people can tell, it didn't actually arrive in north america until the 1900s. probably because cross-atlantic trade conditions weren't capable of moving a breeding population but who knows

"As dramatic as the recent advances in AI are, something is missing from this particular story of peril. Even as it prophesies technological doom, it is actually naïve about technological power. It’s the work of intellectuals enamored of intellect, who habitually resist learning the kinds of lessons we all must learn when plans that seem smart on paper crash against the cold hard realities of dealing with other people."

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/ai-cant-beat-stupid

An arresting, dystopian “what if” scenario published at the LessWrong forum — a central hub for debating the existential risk posed by AI — posits a large language model that, instructed to “red team” its own failures, learns how to exploit the weaknesses of others. Created by a company to maximize profits, the model comes up with unethical ways to make money, such as through hacking. Given a taste of power, the model escapes its containment and gains access to external resources all over the world. By gaining the cooperation of China and Iran, the model achieves destabilization of Western governments. It hinders cooperation among Western states by fostering discord and spreading disinformation. Within weeks, American society and government are in tatters and China is now the dominant world power. Next the AI begins to play Beijing like a fiddle, exploiting internal conflict to give itself greater computing resources. The story goes on from there, and Homo sapiens is soon toast.

hope this doesn't happen!

reassuring tho that it would be something else's fault.

lesswrong doesn't mean it's right

They're rationalists, mh. They can't not be rational, it's right there in the name.

these scenarios feel so farfetched to me because it assumes AI is going to have the ability to execute decisions and will also get several very precise actions correct which seems difficult given those who work in AI can't seem to figure out how to get it to stop making things up

one fun scenario though is some combo of AI and quantum computing breaking SHA256 encryption

like most ai discourse that scenario seems to be an attempt to process anxiety about something more banal

i know this is an obvious point, but if i'm reading the article and the scenario correctly, that is a messageboard post from some rando? trying to think of what would happen if a captain lorax post was used to represent ilx

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/1/23856029/gizmodo-shuts-down-spanish-language-site-ai-translations

rip gizmodo en español

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Gizmodo owner G/O Media shut down and laid off editors of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español and is now using AI to translate articles.

Matías S. Zavia, a writer at Gizmodo en Español, posted that the publication was shut down on August 29th and that it would now publish automatically translated articles. Gizmodo en Español previously had a small staff who wrote original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo.

re: lesswrong, I think that board is also caught up in the SBF crypto utilitarian philosopher grift that made the headlines, so the rando might be a more flattering representation!

we need to get this rando on ilx, lol!

lesswrong is such a hubristic name for a website, i kind of want to hand it to them

trying to think of what would happen if a captain lorax post was used to represent ilx

ilx wouldn't like it but it'd prob be good enough to operate by

my point isn't that scenarios like that are stupid or far-fetched it's that they're transparent attempts to blame capitalism on the terminator so worth noting as emotional phenomenon even in the uncredentialled

wait i never read das kapital but my understanding was marx ultimately also blames capitalism on the terminator

the thing that's really difficult about destroying capitalism is that you can blow a hole through the T-1000's face, and he just melts it back together again

both otm of course

a bit of a tangent but two things about that the end of terminator 2: i was watching at home as a vhs rental, and i cried when arnold sacrificed himself into the molten...steel lava... and gave the thumbs up. my dad saw and laughed at me and i ran off. i always thought t-1000, having "died" by melting into the molten lava steel stuff, he would become more powerful because he'd be "in" all that steel lava.

"I know now why you cry at the ending of T2, but it's something I can never do..."

he would become more powerful because he'd be "in" all that steel lava

love this, villain zen

"i know this is an obvious point, but if i'm reading the article and the scenario correctly, that is a messageboard post from some rando?"

A lot of discourse by so-called experts doesn't seem to be much more sophisticated.

i always thought t-1000, having "died" by melting into the molten lava steel stuff, he would become more powerful because he'd be "in" all that steel lava.

My idea for the next sequel was that both Arnold and T1000 were in there, fighting for control.

Rationalists scaring themselves with plots from Robert Harris novels from 12 years ago.

seriously though what am I missing here. AI can't actually do things. its not gonna interface with the power grid and the nuclear arsenal. it doesn't generate anything new and I am very skeptical that outside of Very Hard Math Problems* it can't actually make us learn anything we didn't know

*which may be an issue when it comes to encryption

Why shouldn't human beings easily beat any threat from a machine with ease? It's a point worth making.

The whole state of current debate about dangers is confused by having been prompted by the new shiny thing (good generative AI). There's no reason why different types of AI that actually do have the power to do things beyond generating text or pictures shouldn't be dangerous but you hear very little about developments in those areas. It would seem that no one currently wants to, say, give an AI bot the keys to an operating system, or if they do, I'm not hearing about it.

*stares at "I am very skeptical <...> it can't" / "easily <...> with ease", finger hovers over the 'invite the nano bots in' button*

i cant take it any more im giving spellcheck the nuclear launch codes!!

Alba, there's this if you believe it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR-CTuQsRFU

Alphie, if you search for 'diamondoid' here you'll see that it's not usually framed in terms of a threat (as in, threatening before action) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities

It's spelled nucular, Mark

It would seem that no one currently wants to, say, give an AI bot the keys to an operating system, or if they do, I'm not hearing about it.

humans do stupid things, give it time.

Now do crypto… pic.twitter.com/bgduMJvjjq

— Rupak (@ghose77) September 7, 2023

rare moments in U.S. bipartisanship

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-generated-child-sex-imagery-has-every-us-attorney-general-calling-for-action/

On Wednesday, American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI may potentially be used to exploit children through the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.

"As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions," the letter reads. "And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult."

In particular, open source image synthesis technologies such as Stable Diffusion allow the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease, and a large community has formed around tools and add-ons that enhance this ability. Since these AI models are openly available and often run locally, there are sometimes no guardrails preventing someone from creating sexualized images of children, and that has rung alarm bells among the nation's top prosecutors. (It's worth noting that Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly all have built-in filters that bar the creation of pornographic content.)

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with image generators, as well as LLMs, my concern is not so much with the big names (chatgpt, dall-e, etc) but instead with the open source, downloadable versions that can be modified and used pretty much in secrecy.

there's a lot of incredulity about what an AI could do in the "real world". but think about how much we are able to accomplish in the real world, purely through an internet connection. with an ID, credit card info, knowledge of my SSN/DOB, etc

AI will improve scams? Is that it?

?

no one currently wants to, say, give an AI bot the keys to an operating system

unless the system operates a motor vehicle

self-driving ovens

Now that's the stuff

Gm 🕹️

[@LeMoonSynth coming soon] pic.twitter.com/k57OF5bnml

— FellowshipAI (@FellowshipAi) September 11, 2023

I really want to try this out but these days I'm getting nervous about uploading speech and video samples of myself for fear of being cloned one day by people scamming my parents or something

Testing out @HeyGen_Official translation on French and German. I don’t speak either language so let me know if it sounds natural if you do.
I hope if you pay you can turn off the color correction.
It didn’t work on my phone so I had to upload on my pc.https://t.co/FMJp9sJEBI pic.twitter.com/iF5eONAQ3c

— Jon Finger (@mrjonfinger) September 11, 2023

This service translates while adjusting your lips to sync with the new language, btw.

thats pretty creepy but I think its a genuinely cool use case

have tried the voice mimicking thing before, right now it's just good enough to be a bit unsettling. I recorded a message for my 8 year old son and he was freaked out by it. he knew something wasn't right.

I dont know if its what I'm familiar with but the French sounded quite fluid but the German had an odd autotuney warble to it?

Either way - woah. Universal translators anyone?

Yeah other comments on Twitter seem to suggest the German sounds a bit robotic but the French just sounds a bit French Canadian.