I'm feeling the need to do a social media detox, including Beehaw. Pro-AI techbros are getting me down.
Shockingly, keeping Instagram active. My feed there is nothing but frogs, greyhounds, and art from local artists, and detoxing from stuff that is improving my mood rather than making it worse seems unnecessary.
The other thing that needs to die is hoovering up all data to train AIs without the consent and compensation to the owners of the data. Most of the more frivolous uses of AI would disappear at that point, because they would be non-viable financially.
The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can't steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.
But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.
No amount of "we can train AIs on AI-generated content" is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI's don't have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that's how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look "right" on a first glance.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
I honestly don't get why so many people are so reckless and impatient on the roads. I've seen some people being really fucking stupid around cyclists and motorcyclists. One incident haunts me, because I know someone would have been severely injured, maybe killed, if I hadn't been quick enough to get out of the way of an impatient person overtaking in a stupid place.
And it's just like... why? Just leave home a few minutes earlier!
I did not know the exact wording of this guidance, but this is basically the strategy I use. I've always figured that because I prepare for my journeys, I am never in such a rush that I need to put someone else's life at risk in order to pass them quicker - it's not like it's going to make a difference to my day if I arrive at my destination 2 minutes later, but it'll make a huge difference to someone else's day if I rush past a cyclist when it's not safe.
Yeah, I think you could be right there, actually. My instinct on this from the start is that it would prevent the grieving process from completing properly. There's a thing called the gestalt cycle of experience where there's a normal, natural mechanism for a person going through a new experience, whether it's good and bad, and a lot of unhealthy behaviour patterns stem from a part of that cycle being interrupted - you need to go through the cycle for everything that happens in your life, reaching closure so that you're ready for the next experience to begin (most basic explanation), and when that doesn't happen properly, it creates unhealthy patterns that influence everything that happens after that.
Now I suppose, theoretically, there's a possibility that being able to talk to an AI replication of a loved one might give someone a chance to say things they couldn't say before the person died, which could aid in gaining closure... but we already have methods for doing that, like talking to a photo of them or to their grave, or writing them a letter, etc. Because the AI still creates the sense of the person still being "there", it seems more likely to prevent closure - because that concrete ending is blurred.
Also, your username seems really fitting for this conversation. :)
Nope, I'm just not giving the benefit of the doubt to the techbro who responded to a dying man's farewell posts online with "hey, come use my untested AI tool!"
I absolutely, 100% agree with you. Nothing I have seen about the development of AI so far has suggested that the vast majority of its uses are grotesque. The few edge cases where it is useful and helpful don't outweigh the massive harm it's doing.
Given the husband is likely going to die in a few weeks, and the wife is likely already grieving for the man she is shortly going to lose, I think that still places both of them into the "vulnerable" category, and the owner of this technology approached them while they were in this vulnerable state. So yes, I have concerns, and the fact that the owner is allegedly a friend of the family (which just means they were the first vulnerable couple he had easy access to, in order to experiment on) doesn't change the fact that there are valid concerns about the exploitation of grief.
With the way AI techbros have been behaving so far, I'm not willing to give any of them the benefit of the doubt about claims of wanting to help rather than make money - such as using a vulnerable couple to experiment on while making a "proof of concept" that can be used to sell this to other vulnerable people.
I also suspect, based on the accuracy of AIs we have seen so far, that their interpretation of the deceased's personality would not be very accurate, and would likely hallucinate memories or facts about the person, or make them "say" things they never would have said when they were alive. At best it would be very Uncanny Valley, and at worst would be very, very upsetting for the bereaved person.