The irony of this is because it’s still fundamentally just a statistical text generator with a large body of fiction in its training data, I’m sure a lot of prompts that sound like terrifying skynet responses are actually it regurgitating mashups of Sci-fi dystopian novels.

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frereubu 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe this is something you heard too, but there was a This American Life episode where some people who'd had early access to what became one of the big AI chatbots (I think it was ChatGPT), but before they'd made it "nice", where they were asking it metaphysical questions about itself, and it was coming back with some pretty spooky answers and I was kind of intrigued about it. But then someone in the show suggested exactly what you are saying and it completely punctured the bubble - of course if you ask it questions about AIs you're going to get sci-fi like responses, because what other kinds of training data is there for it to fall back on? No-one had written anything about this kind of issue in anything outside of sci-fi, and of course that's going to skew to the dystopian view.

	▲	TeMPOraL a day ago \| parent [-]
		There are good analogies to be had in mythologies and folklore, too! Before there was science fiction - hell, even before there was science - people still occasionally thought of these things[0]. There are stories of deities and demons and fantastical creatures that explore the same problems AI presents - entities with minds and drives different to ours, and often possessing some power over us. The arguably most basic and well-known example are entities granting wishes. The genie in Alladin's lamp, or the Goldfish[1]; the Devil in Faust, or in Pan Twardowski[2]. Variants of those stories go in detail over things we now call "alignment problem", "mind projection fallacy", "orthogonality thesis", "principal-agent problems", "DWIM", and others. And that's just scratching the surface; there's tons more in all folklore. Point being - there's actually decent amount of thought people put into these topics over the past couple millennia - it's just all labeled religion, or folklore, or fairytale. Eventually though, I think more people will make a connection. And then the AI will too. -- As for current generative models getting spooky, there's something else going on as well; https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor has a hypothesis I agree with. -- [0] - For what reason? I don't know. Maybe it was partially to operationalize their religious or spiritual beliefs? Or maybe the storytellers just got there by extrapolating an idea in a logical fashion, following it to its conclusion. (which is also what good sci-fi authors do). I also think the moment people started inventing spirits or demons that are more powerful than humans in some, but not all ways, some people started figuring out how use those creatures for their own advantage - whether by taming or tricking them. I guess it's human nature - when we stop fearing something, we think of how to exploit it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_... - this is more of a central/eastern Europe thing. [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski - AKA the "Polish Faust".

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tempestn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The prompt is what's sent to the AI, not the response from it. Still does read like dystopian sci-fi though.

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setsewerd 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And then r/ChatGPT users freak out about it every time someone posts a screen shot