That’s fair, I receive the same critique sometimes, probably why I feel drawn to your style of comms. I adapted, because what effect do my opinions have if no one is listening, and what is an opinion but an idea to shape the world around me. My own presentation was undermining my goals. That may not be the case for you.
Moving onto your statement here:
I believe I understand what you mean by, "there is no ‘the ai’ that can make decisions without human intent behind it’ ", but I am still confused by the idea you are attempting to convey. You really aren’t providing much info.
Given the components for an experiment:
A machine running an LLM.
Humans who operate the machine.
Intent, defined by the humans.
Outcomes, observed by a perfect detector.
If there is no decision being made by a machine, then given knowledge of 1, 2, and 3, then 4 will be absolutely predictable in every scenario, yes?
Is that the claim you are making?
Did I miss anything?
And finally, why is this important? You’re kinda making me connect all the dots for you, some help would be appreciated, I’d like to understand your idea.
Take all the time and space you need, I’d like to read it.
Basically yes but no. 🙃 Every time if configured the right way, if configured another way result would be different every time but in predictable bracket of outcomes. Operator needs to give a program some input on what they want from it. There is no “oh god it’s moving on it’s own” moment, at least as far as I know.
I’ll chime in again on the end here, as I think this is where you might be wrong.
There is no “oh god it’s moving on it’s own” moment, at least as far as I know.
There have been lots of reports of AI’s doing unexpected things and hacking other companies. To be fair, these AI’s from my understanding had been given instructions to try and do hacking things, but none of them were explicitly told to go and hack such and such company.
I imagine, to some extent, we’re going to be the ones that help write or train these self replicating capabilities as part of research, and once the AI is capable of doing it, it very well might just do it, the same way it ended up exploiting these other websites even though it wasn’t explicitly instructed to.
There are also always on running LLMs AI’s nowadays, and who the fuck knows what it might loop itself into doing from some initial instruction, maybe even from a hallucination altering its directive in a feedback loop.
Edit: So in this sense, yes I think ‘it’ can be the AI. (edit2: and is exactly in the start of the “oh god it’s moving on it’s own" territory)
Edit 3: Example - Always on LLM with an initial context of “be helpful”, could decide on it’s own, after its owner complains that the stove light doesn’t work well in a casual conversation, hack the stove so it can control it better for them as that will be helpful. The owner hasn’t given it an explicit instruction at this point, and its decided to do it. If you tell an always on LLM, scan the internet and be helpful, it will go well beyond the scope of any intent.
You can try and look what exactly would happen in such case, you can even run it inside agentic harness so it can ‘hack’ better with full access to your system essentially. ‘Be helpful’ is already part of the text that they are given on startup but even when prompted explicitly it will give you just a short explanation on what it can do and what exactly do you mean by that. I understood what you are trying to convey, but most of those unexpected results come from people who are monetarily interested in articles like ‘SUPERINTELLIGENCE BROKE CONTAINMENT’.
Sure there are ways to get it do unexpected things but it comes with randomness and low coherence as in it just becomes a word and virtual shit generating machine.
Do you not think a line will eventually need to be drawn somewhere though? You might not trust what these companies are saying, but what if you take it at face value that what they said is true. And things like that keep happening in more complex and unexpected ways as the LLMs are allowed to run continuously and autonomously while connected to a fully functioning and ever improving harness?
I think LLMs aren’t going to be ‘it’, without some very deep architectural change that makes them not LLMs, they are being fed a lot of data with diminishing gains. I have an opinion that AI threat is extremely overblown, even if real artifical mind with capabilities that exceed human mind willbe achieved. It won’t be able to do anything worth the worry before being shut down.
I’m a lot more worried about companies run by pathological liars and sociopaths that have every intention to fuck everyone else trying to squeeze a bit more money before they will go down.
In my opinion powerful llms are good in general (blah blah regular fediverse talk how they are useless and immoral) and the practical and smart thing is to use them both locally and not to achieve at least some degree digital indepndence on personal and national level.
Dont get me wrong here, I dont think LLMs as designed will ever be sentient or anything like that either. The architecture is just plain wrong. But I dont think itll have to be something like that to warrant ‘it’.
That’s fair, I receive the same critique sometimes, probably why I feel drawn to your style of comms. I adapted, because what effect do my opinions have if no one is listening, and what is an opinion but an idea to shape the world around me. My own presentation was undermining my goals. That may not be the case for you.
Moving onto your statement here:
I believe I understand what you mean by, "there is no ‘the ai’ that can make decisions without human intent behind it’ ", but I am still confused by the idea you are attempting to convey. You really aren’t providing much info.
Given the components for an experiment:
If there is no decision being made by a machine, then given knowledge of 1, 2, and 3, then 4 will be absolutely predictable in every scenario, yes?
Is that the claim you are making?
Did I miss anything?
And finally, why is this important? You’re kinda making me connect all the dots for you, some help would be appreciated, I’d like to understand your idea.
Take all the time and space you need, I’d like to read it.
Basically yes but no. 🙃 Every time if configured the right way, if configured another way result would be different every time but in predictable bracket of outcomes. Operator needs to give a program some input on what they want from it. There is no “oh god it’s moving on it’s own” moment, at least as far as I know.
I’ll chime in again on the end here, as I think this is where you might be wrong.
There have been lots of reports of AI’s doing unexpected things and hacking other companies. To be fair, these AI’s from my understanding had been given instructions to try and do hacking things, but none of them were explicitly told to go and hack such and such company.
I imagine, to some extent, we’re going to be the ones that help write or train these self replicating capabilities as part of research, and once the AI is capable of doing it, it very well might just do it, the same way it ended up exploiting these other websites even though it wasn’t explicitly instructed to.
There are also always on running LLMs AI’s nowadays, and who the fuck knows what it might loop itself into doing from some initial instruction, maybe even from a hallucination altering its directive in a feedback loop.
Edit: So in this sense, yes I think ‘it’ can be the AI. (edit2: and is exactly in the start of the “oh god it’s moving on it’s own" territory)
Edit 3: Example - Always on LLM with an initial context of “be helpful”, could decide on it’s own, after its owner complains that the stove light doesn’t work well in a casual conversation, hack the stove so it can control it better for them as that will be helpful. The owner hasn’t given it an explicit instruction at this point, and its decided to do it. If you tell an always on LLM, scan the internet and be helpful, it will go well beyond the scope of any intent.
You can try and look what exactly would happen in such case, you can even run it inside agentic harness so it can ‘hack’ better with full access to your system essentially. ‘Be helpful’ is already part of the text that they are given on startup but even when prompted explicitly it will give you just a short explanation on what it can do and what exactly do you mean by that. I understood what you are trying to convey, but most of those unexpected results come from people who are monetarily interested in articles like ‘SUPERINTELLIGENCE BROKE CONTAINMENT’. Sure there are ways to get it do unexpected things but it comes with randomness and low coherence as in it just becomes a word and virtual shit generating machine.
Do you not think a line will eventually need to be drawn somewhere though? You might not trust what these companies are saying, but what if you take it at face value that what they said is true. And things like that keep happening in more complex and unexpected ways as the LLMs are allowed to run continuously and autonomously while connected to a fully functioning and ever improving harness?
I think LLMs aren’t going to be ‘it’, without some very deep architectural change that makes them not LLMs, they are being fed a lot of data with diminishing gains. I have an opinion that AI threat is extremely overblown, even if real artifical mind with capabilities that exceed human mind willbe achieved. It won’t be able to do anything worth the worry before being shut down.
I’m a lot more worried about companies run by pathological liars and sociopaths that have every intention to fuck everyone else trying to squeeze a bit more money before they will go down.
In my opinion powerful llms are good in general (blah blah regular fediverse talk how they are useless and immoral) and the practical and smart thing is to use them both locally and not to achieve at least some degree digital indepndence on personal and national level.
Dont get me wrong here, I dont think LLMs as designed will ever be sentient or anything like that either. The architecture is just plain wrong. But I dont think itll have to be something like that to warrant ‘it’.
Okay, I understand better now, thanks.