ChatGPT incoming

Humans are worse though. So far no AI has been deliberately economical with the truth or told a lie. Unlike everybody who is reading this! We are all sinners.

AI are less likely to misread stuff too. For some strange reason I thought John was into horoscopy!

Dave

I have friends who are professors, and they are in two camps. One camp is ready to give up on any hope that their students will actually learn anything from here on out. The other is "this is just another tool."

When I was young, it was "why should I use tables of logarithms when I have a calculator now?"

Next it was "why should I memorize those formulas when I can just google it?"

Now it's "why should I bother working hard on an assignment when, in seconds, a machine can produce a much better-written essay, etc., than I ever could if my life depended on it!?" (Sadly, in most cases, they are right!)

Little story about the first one: When I was young, we were taught to use tables of logarithms, but we were allowed to use new-fangled scientific calculators if we wanted - we just had to get the same answers as given by the tables. Alas, I was too poor to afford an actually-accurate HP calculator, but I didn't recognize the danger, so I blithely used my junk-quality one during an important test. BAD IDEA!

A bit more info on the AI "technology" today

It looks like "AI" is simply a case of running standard data sets really fast on amazingly high end chips so there is in fact no real jump in anything at all except the data computation rate which any computer programmer knows has been evolving over the decades anyway

So a chess computation that took 12 months 20 years ago now takes 10 seconds

The technology has got faster and can do much bigger sums, it has not got smarter

It's exactly the same technology that kicked off the Bitcoin era, GPU parallel processing

The real evolution comes through the coding system,  if they can program these things with a simple but powerful language like BASIC which anyone can comprehend then an awful lot of solutions to knotty problems will suddenly start appearing

Edited By Ady1 on 25/05/2023 20:21:10

This level of computation means that you can put together a program which allows the computer to produce and run its own programs

This makes the birth of the AI bogyman computer possible, but it won't know its the bogyman to start with

With due respect, this is not correct anymore. That used to be the case, back when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess. That was accomplished "simply" by trying millions of moves vastly faster than a human could. Faster chips certainly help that strategy: Now instead of needing a supercomputer, a phone can beat the strongest player on earth.

It's the strategies that are qualitatively different now. It's essentially about creating a mind; a vast network of neural connections. Training that mind, e.g. by having it play chess against itself, or by reading millions of documents, results in the reinforcement or weakening of those millions of connections until it's imbued with knowledge or understanding. Once that training is complete, you can present the AI with a chess-board, and it immediately "sees" the top moves with very little effort involved, just like a top chess master can immediately see the top moves too.

So it's almost backwards from what it once was:

Old AI: Extremely little knowledge, e.g. just the legal moves, but tons and tons of computations stumbling about almost at random trying to find a move that works.

New AI: Tons and tons of learning (e.g. playing games against itself, or reading the whole internet), followed by the near-instantaneous evaluation of solutions based on what it learned.

Yes, faster chips still helps. Learning language skills to the level of GPT4 still takes enormous amounts of effort. It takes people a decade or more to learn to write, too. But after that, the knowledge is known by the computer, and can be used almost for free.

(Nvidia just got lucky to have the right hardware at the right time, and they have many others breathing very heavily down their necks.)

Edited By S K on 25/05/2023 22:20:36

Its based from data, theres still a human mind behind it, it can be steered, so certain humans will be very happy with it, as data change the results will change, it cannot think like a slow human brain, it however can compute, some human brains confuse intelligence with computing speed, memory capability, data gathering, it still does not have the flexability in the hardware like a human brain(Flesh & blood microbes etc), so we are back to Square-One where one human man has find a way to control others till they eventually figured out how its happenning. In between reality is going on.

Most humans just believe everything too easily.

Edited By Chris Mate on 26/05/2023 05:00:19

I am seeing increasing numbers of posts on internet forums, Twitter and other social media that are obviously generated by ChatGPT or similar AI. They are just too well researched for someone who is not a professional in the field to have the knowledge on hand, and yet they contain some obvious clangers if you have the real-world expertise in that field to spot them.

It think it is possible that in a relatively short period of time, internet social media will become such a melee of these warring AI-generated rubbish posts it will all be rendered a meaningless echo chamber, the human content lost and maybe we will all go back to talking in real time to real people at the local pub, club, community group, football etc. So, it might actually do us some good.

....internet social media will become such a melee of these warring AI-generated rubbish posts it will all be rendered a meaningless echo chamber....

I think you are correct. At the moment there are dumb bots directing the conversation on a lot of media platforms, and they can usually be spotted. But once AI bots enter the playing field then we may as well give up.

If there was a way for the platform to weed out the AI bots then fine, but I can't see how that is possible. They will always be one step ahead of any policing.

Ches

I don't think it is necessarily AI bots posting. More like humans wanting to appear more knowledgeable than they really are but not wanting to do even the usual armchair "research" via Google. Just plug the question into ChatGPT then cut and paste the answer into your Tweet, forum post etc, add a few insulting comments on the end, and bask in the accolades of being the resident expert on the topic in hand.

I don't think AI has yet developed an artificial ego to rival the human version.

Hopper,

Yes, I was off on a slight tangent...there are humans no doubt using AI generated info to punch above their weight on media platforms.

I think the longer term issue will be when AI bots (rather than humans) use media platforms to exercise 'thought control' over those that use media.

Ches

That beautiful fluffy baby computer from 1980 turned into a 2030 Gremlin apocalypse

Apparently the Gremlin apocalypse is already upon the hallowed halls of academia. Just saw this article about an academic paper about how AI makes student plagiarism harder to detect -- written by a chatbot well enough to fool the academic experts (which may or may not be hard to do!) LINK

Writing a forum post is child's play by comparison. A certain American motorcycle forum I sometimes look at has an uncensored political and current affairs discussion section. Predictably it is a cesspool of misinformation, ideological biases and personal abuse. There are also many seemingly erudite, well researched and well argued lengthy posts that are so out of character with the poster's previous not-very-smart posts indicative of a not-very-high level of education that one has to wonder. Google searching seems to indicate they were not cut and pasted from existing websites that Google trawls so I seriously wonder if they are using ChatGPT etc to formulate their arguments and "one-up" their forum opponents.

Earlier in this thread, Neil posted an AI response to the perennial question: Which is a better lathe, Myford or Sieg? The response was a well-balanced reasoned argument. But what if you asked ChatGTP a biased/leading question such as "What are the arguments in favour of a Myford lathe being better than a Chinese lathe?" Or "What are the shortcomings of Chinese lathes compared with Myfords?" Would be a different result I reckon.

I don't seem to be able to log into or create a new account at ChatGPT for reasons beyond my technical skill level (maybe I need to pay for an account?) so can't test this out myself.

But I get the strong feeling this type of AI is going to change the social media world much faster than the real world in the next year or two. (Except perhaps for academia!)

Edited By Hopper on 26/05/2023 10:53:57

Please can someone ask Chatgpt how to get Hopper a free account.

In the good old days, typing in 'Why?' was guaranteed to cause any computer to self-destruct in an endless loop...

And never type Google into Google - even as a joke - as you'll break the Internet.

Martin.

.

I fear that the most pertinent word in that ^^^ may be ‘yet’

MichaelG.

Ultimately, as long as we have access the the top of Big Ben, then we can keep this thing under control.

Martin.

A professor at a famous University recently made the news due to his determination that many of his students were using ChatGPT to cheat on an exam.

How did he know? He asked ChatGPT "Did you write this stuff?"

Apparently, it said it did!

😄

What computers can and cannot do has been studied intensively, and there is no limit to what they can do suggesting that intelligence is impossible.

The existence of human intelligence proves it can be done. In our case biologically after billions of years of small evolutionary improvements. However, whilst no-one has a identified a special spark that makes intelligence uniquely human, it's been confirmed that the brain relies on massive parallel compute power - slow, but far bigger than anything yet achieved electronically. Conversely, although electronics are not yet massively parallel, they are millions of times faster than brains. Bringing the two together isn't impossible.

The difference shows up in practice. Though human brains score high on pattern recognition, they aren't good at mental arithmetic. Computers are the other way round, much better at arithmetic than people and weak at pattern recognition. However, computers can be paralleled, and it's been discovered how they can do pattern recognition, plus ways of learning to do better on their own. The gap between machine and biology is much smaller than it was 10 years ago.

Yes AI is based on data, but so is human intelligence. Deprived of all sensory input the human brain rapidly malfunctions, and even before that happens the person inside is done for.

The difficulty of delivering AI was seriously under-estimated in the 1950s, leading to it falling into disrepute after over-promising and under-delivering. (Done all the time in politics, yet supporters still rate their failing party above all others!)

The setback didn't matter much because those who understood the theoretical road was open carried on exploring the subject. Their work resulted in a series of small steps forward, few spectacular, but gradually refining ways and means across a broad front. After a mere seventy years advances in both hardware and algorithms have come together to produce something so like intelligence that it's hard for humans to tell the difference. Today's AI is close to passing the classic Turing Test, and maybe already has.

True that AI only exists in oddly limited forms, and all of them depend on human input. Although they can learn and modify themselves, they're limited by the hardware they run on, and by the hardware's power supply! An entity with no means of reproducing a body is very vulnerable. In theory an AI could develop reproductive capability and mobility, but hard for one to do without enormous human help.

Think of all the things our forefathers got wrong before deciding AI or anything else ain't going to happen! Railways will never replace Canals. Roads will never replace railways and steam. Gas light will never replace Argand Lamps and Candles. Electric light will never replace gas light. Cars will never replace horses. Tanks will never replace cavalry. Steamships will never replace sail. Diesel will never replace steamships or steam locomotives. Filament bulbs will never be replaced by LEDs.

And so it goes on. Cash is disappearing, High Street shopping is all but gone and the bell tolls for Internal Combustion vehicles. Banks are visited online, not physically. Hardly anyone posts handwritten letters.  Long, Medium and Short wave radio are fading rapidly. Pubs and libraries are closing in huge numbers. Coal almost finished in the UK. Renewables provide 30% of UK energy, almost every child has a smart phone, and most TV is streamed, not received through an aerial. Climate change is real, and AI is on the horizon.

I was on a bus behind two old ladies discussing Britain's imminent switch from £sd to decimal currency. One said 'They should wait until all the old people are dead.' No chance of that I'm afraid, we're all trapped on the same roller-coaster.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 26/05/2023 16:29:30