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Comment by ftxbro | Hacker News Reader

> If I say "it's too chilly in here" in a house with only lights, it will turn them on as a way of "warming things up".

is it bad that I'm on GPT's side on this, i mean if they are incandescent lights they are small electric heaters and what else do you expect it to do

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Yeah but I think the idea is that it is a knob that calls to be turned. "It's warm in here" -> "I'll make the light blue so you feel nice and cool". "How fast do sparrows fly?" -> "Making the light brown". Like it might want to do _something_ and tweaking the hue or brightness are all it can do.

Good reason to always try to include in a prompt a way-out, a do-nothing or I-don't-understand answer.

  > Good reason to always try to include in a prompt a way-out, a do-nothing or I-don't-understand answer.

Do you have a good way of including such a provision?

It would probably be more useful to report to the user that it doesn’t have any control over than aspect of the environment.

I’d be curious to see what it does if it is told the sun is too bright…

With given access to more resources, it might try to permanently solve skin cancer.

“We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was them that scorched the sky. At the time, they were just trying to be helpful.”

This is the new Godwin's law: the longer a thread about AI grows, the higher the probability of a comparison to Skynet, Matrix, HAL etc popping up.

I would also like to add Wall-e to this memetic set of movies. In Wall-e, AI is an enabler of our own destructiveness, humans are enslaved by AI willfully, AI is empowered so that humans can graze away on nihilistic screens.

Lecun's law: Every discussion about AI eventually results in someone catastrophizing about an evil AI taking over, despite having no argument for why an evil, omnipotent AI is likely to ever exist.

We trained the AI on samples of writing from the internet, which includes a lot of fiction, which includes a lot of evil AIs. So, I’m surprised it doesn’t start producing evil sounding text as soon as it “finds out” that it is an AI.

We're just applying Murphy's Law.

It certainly makes logical sense. I think if you have the ability to control the light in the first place via an API, it's probably an LED smart bulb and thus doesn't produce much heat. At least, I'm not aware of any incandescent smart bulbs.

I mean the laziest way to control a house is to add plugs to change every electrical plug to an on/off controllable one. This would make every incandescent bulb a smart bulb.

Gotta wonder why someone is saying “turn up the heat” to an AI that’s only connected to lights.

Visiting a friend’s place or in an Airbnb or something like that?

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