Comment by foobarchu
6 days ago
Why can't it be both? I fully believe that the current strategy around AI will never manifest what is promised, but I also believe that what AI is currently capable of is the purest manifestation of evil.
6 days ago
Why can't it be both? I fully believe that the current strategy around AI will never manifest what is promised, but I also believe that what AI is currently capable of is the purest manifestation of evil.
Am I a psychopath? What is evil about the current iteration of language models? It seems like some people take this as axiomatic lately. I’m truly trying to understand.
Even if current models never reach AGI-level capabilities, they are already advanced enough to replace many jobs. They may not be able to replace senior developers, but they can take over the roles of junior developers or interns. They might not replace surgeons, but they can handle basic diagnostic tasks, and soon, possibly even GPs. Paralegals, technical writers, many such roles are at risk.
These LLMs may not be inherently evil, but their impact on society could be potentially destabilising.
How is it evil to displace jobs? Why should we fight for keeping humans in jobs that machines can do?
I'm not saying there is no evil, but that argument at least holds little ground.
The diffusion-based art generators seem pretty evil. Trained (without permission) on artists' works, devalues said works (letting prompt jockeys LARP as artists), and can then be deployed to directly compete with said artists to threaten their livelihoods.
These systems (LLMs, diffusion) yield imitative results just powerful enough to eventually threaten the jobs of most non-manual laborers, while simultaneously being not powerful enough (in terms of capability to reason, to predict, to simulate) to solve the hard problems AI was promised to solve, like accelerating cancer research.
To put it another way, in their present form, even with significant improvement, how many years of life expectancy can we expect these systems to add? My guess is zero. But I can already see a huge chunk of the graphic designers, the artists, the actors, and the programmers or other office workers being made redundant.
Making specific categories of work obsolete is not evil by any existing moral code I know. On top of that, history shows that humans are no less employed over the generations as we’ve automated more things. You entire comment is rooted in fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I have the opposite mindset. I love the fact that we have trained models on large corpuses of human culture. It’s beautiful and amazing. Nobody has the right to dictate how the culture they generate shall be consumed, not me, not you, and not Warhol, not Doctorow, not Lessig. Human created art always has been and will continue to be valuable. The fact that copyright is a really poor way to monetize art is not an argument that AI is evil. I support all my favorite creators on Patreon, not by buying copies of their work.