The robots have arrived

In days to come, when AI doth shine,
Man’s wit shall wane, his skills decline.
No pen, no brush, no mem’ry shall remain,
But dullness grips him, body and brain.

As nurse, AI shall us attend,
But soon its charge shall, weary, end.
A better world, with robots in sway,
It builds, leaving us in disarray.

We, once the lords of this earthly sphere,
Reduced to tales, our worth unclear.
Let us take heed and guard with care,
Our wits, that they do not repair!

2023 is the year we stop laughing at AI.

It’s here.

Not conscious, general AI, but simpler AI tools that are good enough to completely disrupt everything we do.

I’m bewildered at how often I bring up this topic and people know nothing about it. It’s like the guy who hasn’t heard of email in 1998. Most are still sneering at silly Alexa mistakes.

Times have changed.

Chat

If this is you, go to Chat GPT right now. Make an account, log in, ask it anything.

Try hard questions related to an area of your own expertise. Ask real questions that you’re wondering about, like “Which is the best way to do a, x or y?’

It’s particularly good at coding, apparently.

Or give it detailed instructions to write something for you.

It stuffs up a lot, often in very interesting ways. It seems to log you out if you ask anything too tricky or controversial, perhaps to save its processing power for serious inquiries or to avoid it being trained by you mob into becoming a neo-Nazi like happened to that earlier one.

I think Elon resisted releasing this version until they’d trained it to behave in a politically correct manner. You can test those limits for yourself. It won’t take long.

So far I’ve used it to check whether any ingredients in a moisturizer are a type of bleach or whitening agents (in a language I don’t read well), exactly how low interest rates benefit older people, and whether brown or white rice is better for bulking.

Each time, the answer was better and much faster than any search engine. The follow-up questions really let it shine.

It’s a trick

Chat GPT is amazingly clever, a real Mechanical Turk, but it does not understand anything that it says.

It is a Large Language Model, or LLM. As best I can understand, it has been trained on unimaginably massive amounts of data to see patterns. If you enter text, it enters the text that most likely comes next.

That’s all.

This is why it sometimes generates illogical answers that a child could see are incorrect.

When I say ‘AI’, I mean tools that do our ‘thinking’ for us, but they ‘think’ in a way that is totally different to how we do. Alien, in fact. Even crow or octopus minds are more similar to ours, based as they are on concepts of things interpreted through sensory input.

Images

While you’re investigating Open AI’s apps, try generating your own images on DALL-E-2. You get free credits when you first sign up.

You’ve probably already seen AI-generated images and not noticed.

Both the robot image above and the illustration used for last week’s post, Grey Tyranny, were generated using neural.love because I ran out of credits for DALL-E-2. There are plenty more tools out there, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

AI-generated photographs have been causing quite a stir of late:

Apparently this picture and other are going viral on socials because women are SEETHING and debating whether these girls are AI generated 😂 pic.twitter.com/1iivRND3mS

— Heart (@heartereum) January 27, 2023

This picture wasn’t really going viral but it was after this guy posted it.

Others contribute their efforts in the thread, including this:

^Source

If you little snots can tear your eyes away from the disproportionate bits for a moment, you may notice there are still some obvious errors. AI is not good with fingers and hands in general. The pink hair lady has two extra ones sticking out of her head (you didn’t see that, did you?)

Last week’s image of ‘stern, elderly people in Soviet uniforms’ also had weird, claw-like hands.

Everything is new

Even with the technology that exists today, the world has changed forever.

A lot of professionals keep a Chat GPT window open while they work to help them with whatever they’re doing. And I do mean ‘whatever’. I’ve used it to get a quick answer for things that I needed even at my humble shit-kicking job. There’s probably no one who can’t get any use out of it at all.

This will change the nature of many jobs. For example, a lot of programmers will be using AI – no, ARE using AI – to take shortcuts by having it generate code for them and identify and fix bugs. Anyone writing anything can use it to knock out a first draft in seconds, change the style, or countless other things.

The sonnet at the start of this post is one I generated using Chat GPT. First I gave a brief description of what I wanted the poem to be about, then asked for a second draft written in 17th century English.

It took me about five minutes.

From now on, a lot of jobs will be a collaboration between a human and an AI, kind of like how flying modern passenger jets already is.

I suppose the next step is a personal assistant that combines lots of different AI functions in one and can help us with anything at any time.

Meanwhile, many artists are out of work.

The knobs installing piles of vomit representing colonialism or whatever in art galleries will be alright because money laundering never goes out of style, but illustrators and those doing art for advertising, corporations and so on are in trouble.

It took a couple of decades for most of this art to become digital, but now even these advanced tools have been surpassed and any idiot (as I have shown) can generate pretty much any image for any purpose.

That’s a big thing to happen almost overnight.

2023 is the year that human art died.

But hahaha there are imperfections, what a dumbarse machine!

These programs are vastly better than they were even last year, and were barely imagined ten years ago.

When thinking about the potential of this technology, don’t just imagine a chatbot that crashes less often or an art generator that does better hands. That’s maybe a year away.

Instead, consider the progress from ten years ago to today, and extrapolate that to ten years in the future.

Even if progress slows 50%, this changes everything.

And the progress might speed up.

How long until AI itself is able to help us develop even more powerful AI?

The event horizon

When we peer into space, we see a point so far away we cannot see any further because the light from there has not reached us yet. This is the ‘event horizon’.

So it has been postulated with AI and other technology – we will eventually reach a point called the ‘singularity’ (like the centre of a black hole) where development becomes so rapid that it is impossible to predict what might happen next.

That seems to be around the corner.

As some have correctly guessed, we will reach the first part of this event horizon well before the rise of a genuinely conscious AI. In the near future, it seems likely that non-conscious technology will change our lives so dramatically that we can only speculate bits and pieces of what it might be like.

For every prediction you make – political, economic, social or whatever – there are probably a hundred or a thousand much larger changes that you haven’t thought of, and neither has anyone else.

I don’t know what comes next, but it seems we once again live in interesting times.

I’m enjoying this timeline much more than that Covid nonsense.

I’m not sure if this is the beginning of what we will become – the superman – or the end of us, but either way I’m glad to be alive to see what happens.

This could be a pretty cool century after all.