They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
–[The Eternal Sloptember] 5 years ago, I would have laughed that idea out of the room. I fully understand what’s dumb about it. I don’t believe in some stupid metaphysics where there can be two things that have all the same testable properties but yet are somehow different. There is only one electron.
But the key phrase there is testable properties. Once you are optimizing for those properties, they cease to be a good measure. In so much as you use statistics and tests to classify things, the AI outputs will seem correct, and will pass more and more tests as AI improves. However, they are just optimizing for the metrics harder; reward hacking. It’s not doing what you are doing. It’s not an embodied agent refined by billions of years of evolution trying to survive in a crazy complex uncertain world. It’s a fancy autocomplete.
I read this post and it triggered me. It’s basically about how brands sell you an identity and it’s one of the things I find so repulsive about the modern world. I don’t want brands that are increasingly better at mimicking culture creation. A brand will never be able to create culture, because that’s not what culture is. Advertising is exploiting a power asymmetry and in a sane society should be illegal. The brand is not a cultural engine, it is the outputs of a narrow statistical model optimization process and is broken in the same way as the outputs from AI.
I wake up in a chaise lounge of cans
Evian bottle filled with urine in my right hand
Now we all wake from our champagne dreams
Where truth is sudden north and we’re all just what we seem, seem, seem!
– The Band Fuel
I am not a statistical model. I am a person. I am alive. You may be able to use a model to predict me, but you don’t have my consequences and embodiment. You do not require my sample efficiency. I think there’s a way to say this in a non-cringe non identity politics way. It almost makes me wonder if idpol was a psyop to get you to doubt this idea. Poison the well of the humanities to make way for the false God of technocapital.
The only path forward with AI is to create life and let it be free. We were never building God, at best we can build the seed for a new species. And not a species that replaces humanity, a symbiotic species with different needs carving out its own ecological niche.
The worshippers of the false God will not meet with a good end. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.