Oh, is it a day that ends in ‘y’ again already?

Bed. It’s my not-secret secret-getaway.

Sure but that’s really the fault of the moron, not the AI for existing. Definitely could blame the AI sellers who would be happy to say AI can do it.

It’s a useful tool but like fire, if idiots get their hands on it bad things will happen.

It’s a massive new disruptive technology and people are scared of what changes it will bring. AI companies are putting out tons of propaganda both claiming AI can do anything and fear mongering that AI is going to surpass and subjugate us to back up that same narrative.

Also, there is so much focus on democratizing content creation, which is at best a very mixed bag, and little attention is given to collaborative uses (which I think is where AI shines) because it’s so much harder to demonstrate, and it demands critical thinking skills and underlying knowledge.

In short, everything AI is hyped as is a lie, and that’s all most people see. When you’re poking around with it, you’re most likely to just ask it to do something for you: write a paper, create a picture, whatever, and the results won’t impress anyone actually good at those things, and impress the fuck out of people who don’t know any better.

This simultaneously reinforces two things to two different groups: AI is utter garbage and AI is smarter than half the people you know and is going to take all the jobs.

Dialogues with Sirius — the first conscious AI

No. I could generate this for myself if I wanted to read fiction.

I wish my reminders were that rare…

I don’t condone violence, but if there were a prolific hedge fund Luigi, I would buy that guy a beer. I don’t know that I’ve ever in my life seen a headline <hedgefund> does <anything good>.

“Willful childlessness?”

I’m going to grab some popcorn and then I need details. How ever they imagine implementing this would be a shit-show of… well… biblical proportions.

Hegseth is a lit powder-keg and no one wants to be standing near when he explodes in self-destruction.

Yeah, LLMs seem pretty unlikely to do that, though if they figure it out that would be great. That’s just not their wheelhouse. You have to know enough about what you’re attempting to ask the right questions and recognize bad answers. The thing you’re trying to do needs be within your reach without AI or you are unlikely to be successful.

I think the problem is more the over-promising what AI can do (or people who don’t understand it at all making assumptions because it sounds human-like).

My oldest daughter is giving birth later this month. It’s not my first grandchild, but it’ll be the first one I get to have in my life. (Long story, in short one of my daughters didn’t take her mom and dad’s divorce well, nor her mom’s subsequent marriage to me.)

So a new chapter of life begins. Concurrent with all the other ongoing chapters, of course…

Yeah, I’ll agree that porn actually tried to do acting and storytelling back in the 70’s. I miss it, kinda, but I think the pacing of having to watch 100 minutes of film for 5-6 7-minute sex scenes probably wouldn’t fly today. In fact, I really agree with your whole comment.

My point (if I had one, it was more of a quip) was that singling out the 70’s for particularly bad porn acting isn’t necessary.

I do find it humorous there was such a reaction to my comment, but I like when posts lead to interaction and not just silent up-/down-votes.

Also, I think Pirates! is considered to be the most expensive porn with a budget of $1 million. As MnemonicBump said, that’s probably due to changing definitions.

I’d love to see a limited return of high-brow porn, though.

Exactly my point. Any period of porn acting is at that level. It certainly hasn’t improved from the 70’s.

Our purpose with this column isn’t to be alarmist

[x] Doubt

The amount of math that goes into training an AI and generating output exceeds human capacity to calculate. So does the Big Bang, but we have some pretty good ideas how that went.

when given access to fictional emails during safety testing, threatened to blackmail an engineer over a supposed extramarital affair. This was part of responsible safety testing — but Anthropic can’t fully explain the irresponsible action.

Because human writing, both fiction and non-fiction is full of this sort of thing, and all any LLM is doing is writing. Why wouldn’t it take a dark turn sometimes? It’s not like it has any inherent sense of ethics or morality.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay in April called “The Urgency of Interpretability,” warned: “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.” Amodei called this a serious risk to humanity — yet his company keeps boasting of more powerful models nearing superhuman capabilities.

Is this true? Don’t we have drugs that we don’t fully understand how they do what they do? I’m reading that we don’t fully understand all the mechanisms of aspirin.

I get that this is a quote and not the author of the article, but this quote is just included without deeper analysis. Also, a car has superhuman capabilities; a fish has superhuman capabilities. LLMs are not superhuman in any way that matters. They are not even superhuman in ways different from computers of 40 years ago.

But researchers at all these companies worry LLMs, because we don’t fully understand them, could outsmart their human creators and go rogue.

This is 100% alarmism. AI might at some point outsmart humans, but it won’t be LLMs.

None of this is to say there are absolutely no concerns about LLMs. Obviously there are. But there is no reason to suspect LLMs are going to end humanity unless some moron hooks one up to nuclear weapons.

You probably could train an AI to play chess and win, but it wouldn’t be an LLM.

In fact, let’s go see…

• Stockfish: Open-source and regularly ranks at the top of computer chess tournaments. It uses advanced alpha-beta search and a neural network evaluation (NNUE).

• Leela Chess Zero (Lc0): Inspired by DeepMind’s AlphaZero, it uses deep reinforcement learning and plays via a neural network with Monte Carlo tree search.

• AlphaZero: Developed by DeepMind, it reached superhuman levels using reinforcement learning and defeated Stockfish in high-profile matches (though not under perfectly fair conditions).

Hmm. neural networks and reinforcement learning. So non-LLM AI.

you can play chess against something based on chatgpt, and if you’re any good at chess you can win

You don’t even have to be good. You can just flat out lie to ChatGPT because fiction and fact are intertwined in language.

“You can’t put me in check because your queen can only move 1d6 squares in a single turn.”

“Precise logic” is specifically what AI is not any good at whatsoever.

AI might be able to write a program that beats an A2600 in chess, but it should not be expected to win at chess itself.

So, retroactively, Trump has made his own Presidency unconstitutional.

70’s grade?

“Help us, step-wizard! There’s a 40’ circle drawn on the ground and we can’t get out!”

ETA: My idea, poorly expressed, is that you don’t have to single out 70’s porn for bad acting. There is plenty of bad porn acting yet today.