Comment by push-to-prod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by push-to-prod | Hacker News Reader

From the last paragraph in the article:

"It is too early to say that the new AI class is an inherently antihuman technological paradigm, as social media has proven itself to be.

But it is not too early to suspect that AIs will dwarf social media in their power to disrupt modern life.

If that is so, we had better learn some new and unfamiliar ways of interrogating this technology, and fast. Whatever these entities are — they’re here." -Ari Schulman

People that mistake an large language model (LLM) for anything other than a LLM make some fundamentally broken assumptions.

Are ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc. a fundamental leap in the state of the art when it comes to allowing computer systems to understand what people mean and return something useful based on it? 100%

Is ChatGPT or the like going to become self-aware, compromise other computer systems, etc? No more than your shoe is going to take over your foot.

There's far too many people worried about "AI" that don't have enough context to realize they're fearing a non-sentient tool that has zero agency, and will not for the foreseeable future.

Somebody wake me up when the panic is over.

> Is ChatGPT or the like going to become self-aware, compromise other computer systems, etc? No more than your shoe is going to take over your foot.

Agreed. It's strange though, to be honest I don't see much if any worry about self awareness, i think anyone who knows anything understands that's not the issue. The "issue" if you can call it that is how it will impact society from a labor and content perspective. How much synthetic content will be perceived as true and assumed to be correct simply because we haven't had time to adapt to the fact that the rate of synthetic content is exponential now.

My main concern about this technology is the amount of bullshit that's going to end up on the internet because of it

> How much synthetic content will be perceived as true and assumed to be correct simply because we haven't had time to adapt to the fact that the rate of synthetic content is exponential now.

That will be a problem for sure. But people believe all sorts of easy to debunk things already and that list is ever-expanding, so I don't know if there's any cure for it.

As far as content goes, I think human beings writing out boilerplate anything is something that's not long for this world.

Labor is a trickier one to judge, but I'm not too worried about a large negative impact in the immediate future.

People thought that modern appliances would usher in a new age of leisure, and the truth was that while they removed a lot of drudgery, work expanded to fill the vacuum and the percentage of the week spent laboring didn't significantly decrease.

On a positive note, I think the kind of work people are subject to now is better because of modern appliances, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds true for all the labor problems that can be handled by neural net / LLMs.

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