Image by Yuichiro Chino AI and the disintegrating imagination

paeng

paeng

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"AI and the disintegrating imagination"

It still has its flaws, but ChatGPT can already produce essays of the standard of a competent undergrad, invent plausible characters and scripts, explain a complex subject in simple terms using vivid metaphors, write code, confect outrage and, er, brag about pumpkins. All from a prompt of just a few words. Where it doesn’t quite yet work, a human can simply edit and tweak the generated content in a matter of seconds.

Clearly, this has huge implications for more or less any task involving words. It’s not so much that AI will end up taking every writing or teaching job on the planet (though it might well snaffle up a few). It’s that it’ll very quickly become common practice for humans to use AI to skip the vast majority of the writing (and research) process — allowing us, effectively, to stop having to think.
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"ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace."

  • ChatGPT is only a few months old and already causing waves in the business world.
  • Experts say ChatGPT and related AI could threaten some jobs, particularly white-collar ones.
  • Insider compiled a list of 10 jobs this technology could replace, according to experts.
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"ChatGPT may doom high school English classes like mine. Maybe that’s not so bad"

Many of my high school students admit that they have already started using ChatGPT to take history notes, solve complex math problems and analyze French poetry. In a recent essay in "The Atlantic," Daniel Herman describes how the artificial intelligence chatbot threatens high school English classes. Feed the bot any prompt, and it is remarkably good at producing clear, coherent and insightful pieces of literary analysis.

After 25 years of teaching high school, I know that I am not going to persuade my students not to cheat. They’ve already tried to convince me that asking ChatGPT to write their college essays for them is no different than using Grammarly to correct their dangling modifiers. Even my most conscientious students have confessed that they would use the bot, which launched three weeks ago, for any assignment that felt like busy work.
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"The End of High-School English"

The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.
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ChatGPT could make these jobs obsolete: ‘The wolf is at the door’

“AI is replacing the white-collar workers. I don’t think anyone can stop that,” said Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the department of computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

“This is not crying wolf,” Shi told The Post. “The wolf is at the door.”
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"AI ChatGPT is helping CEOs think. Will it also take your job?"

AI text generator ChatGPT, released to the public late last year, is so sophisticated that it has already demonstrated its ability to write coherent essays, generate sound legal documents and otherwise interact with humans in a convincingly conversational manner.

One CEO even treats the tool from parent company OpenAI like a perennially available member of his executive team.
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"‘I want to be human.’ My intense, unnerving chat with Microsoft’s AI chatbot"
 
The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down | Time

To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
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Thank you for the ongoing links. Like everyone, I'm following the current flow of AI-related news, and some of the items you've called attention to here have ranked among the most illuminating.
 
paeng said:
Author! Author! AI? Book industry finds self in a bind | Inquirer News
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British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the fair that recently someone asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.
“And what came out was pure garbage,” said the “Midnight’s Children” writer, to laughter from the audience. “Anybody who has ever read 300 words of mine would immediately recognize that it could not possibly be by me.”
“So far I’m not that alarmed,” he added, during a rare public appearance since a near-fatal stabbing attack last year in the United States.

Jennifer Becker, a German author and academic, echoed Rushdie’s sentiments, telling a panel discussion that the results when it comes to AI writing fiction “are still not that great.”
“There is a lot of potential to use it—to use it collaboratively,” she said. “But I still don’t see the point where we really hand over the writing work to AI completely autonomously.”
“That wouldn’t make for an interesting book,” she added.

"So far I'm not alarmed..."

People citing current capabilities or timelines are missing the point entirely. These are initial iterations that will only improve.

“That wouldn’t make for an interesting book, ..."

What happens when you have embodied AI that can experience the world and beyond far more extensively than any human being? And embodiment also brings existential risk. Ponder on that, because it will.

This reminds me of Roy Batty's monologue at the end of Blade Runner.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

Would that make for an interesting book?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU&t=115s
 
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