If you think we're only our observable behaviors or that is the only relevant thing to you then I don't think it's worth getting into this argument. Consider this excerpt from https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7094#comment-1947377

> Most animals are goal-directed, intentional, sensory-motor agents who grow interior representations of their environments during their lifetime which enables them to successfully navigate their environments. They are responsive to reasons their environments affords for action, because they can reason from their desires and beliefs towards actions.

In addition, animals like people, have complex representational abilities where we can reify the sensory-motor “concepts” which we develop as “abstract concepts” and give them symbolic representations which can then be communicated. We communicate because we have the capacity to form such representations, translate them symbolically, and use those symbols “on the right occasions” when we have the relevant mental states.

(Discrete mathematicians seem to have imparted a magical property to these symbols that *in them* is everything… no, when I use words its to represent my interior states… the words are symptoms, their patterns are coincidental and useful, but not where anything important lies).

In other words, we say “I like ice-cream” because: we are able to like things (desire, preference), we have tasted ice-cream, we have reflected on our preferences (via a capacity for self-modelling and self-directed emotional awareness), and so on. And when we say, “I like ice-cream” it’s *because* all of those things come together in radically complex ways to actually put us in a position to speak truthfully about ourselves. We really do like ice-cream.

This is basically the Turing test, and like the Turing test it undervalues other elements which can allow for differentiation between “real” and “fake” things. For example - if we can determine that a thing that looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, but doesn’t have the biological heritage markers (that we can easily determine) then it won’t be treated as equivalent to a duck. The social desire to differentiate between real and fake exists and is easily implementable.

In other words: if AIs/robots ever become so advanced that they look, walk, and talk like people, I expect there to be a system which easily determines if the subject has a biological origin or not.

This is way down the line, but in a closer future this will probably just look like verifying someone’s real world identity as a part of the social media account creation process. The alternative is that billion dollar corporations like Meta or YouTube just let their platforms become overrun with AI slop. I don’t expect them to sit on their hands and do nothing.

> You are describing the current state of AI as if it were a stable point.

No I’m not, I’m just not assuming that the S curve doesn’t exist. There’s no guarantee that research results in X orders of magnitude of improvement that will result in AI being better at understanding humanity than humans in the 5 to 15 year timeframe. There’s no guarantee that compute will continue to consistently grow in volume and lower in price, and a few geopolitical reasons why it might become rarer and prohibitively expensive for some time. There’s no reason to assume capital will stay as available to further both AI techniques and compute resources should there be any sign that investments might not eventually pay off. There’s also no reason to assume the global regulatory environment will remain amenable to rapid AI development. Maybe the industry threads all these needles, but there’s good reason to predict it’ll prove doesn’t.

They are not using AI correctly to create such models. I'm not sure I want AGI right away or even at all, so I'm keeping my epiphany close for now but in the current field of AI nothing er wany will come of this bc it's not the right way.

As soon as the incredibly obvious, far too obvious realization is had, AI will make huge, tremendous leaps overnight essentially. Til then, these are just machine like software, the best we've ever made but nothing more than that.

How can you both think AI will do a soulless garbage job and that it will displace all the creative people who put their blood sweat and tears into doing art.

If you think it can be 20 times easier to make a movie, then it seems to me that it would be 20 times less impactful to make a creative work, since the market should quickly react to creative success by making a ton of cheap knockoffs of your work until the dead horse is so thoroughly beaten that it's no longer even worth paying an AI to spit out cheap knock-offs

Of course it’s possible I’m wrong. But if we make any sort of projection based on current developments, it would certainly seem that live-streaming AI indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the capabilities of anything out today, and given current expenses and development times, seems to be at least a few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic assumption, especially assuming that live presence or video quality will continue to improve as well (making it harder to fake.)

If you have a projection that says otherwise, I’d be glad to hear it. But if you don’t, then this idea is merely science fiction.

Making predictions about the future that are based on current accelerating developments are how you get people in the 1930s predicting flying cars by 2000.

The cornerstone of genAI hype is "AI for thee, not for me"

it's filled with tech people who are fucking morons thinking that everyone else is really dumb and loves slop and their algorithm will generate infinite content for the masses, making them rich. yet they don't consume it themselves, and aren't smart enough to recognize the cognitive dissonance

anyone who thinks unsupervised AI content is going to replace [insert creative output here] shouldn't be in the HN comment section, they should be using ChatGPT to generate comments they can engage with

instead they're going to get mad about me calling them a fucking moron in this comment. which, like, why get mad, you can go get an LLM to generate a comment that's much nicer and agrees with you

No AAA professionals in the entertainment profession have built a gen AI model up through their own vision that I'm aware of. AAA Nerds build the next version to distract away from flaws of the last and hope the api will get heavy use. I wouldn't expect output to be compelling with that attitude. I expect repulsive or parody clips to continue until some great creatives feel like building their replacements properly.