How to talk to your family about AI
I have a friends and family newsletter that I’ve been writing for a few years now. It’s mostly baby photos and inside family jokes, but occasionally I use it to tell my family about things that are happening in the world that I think are important.
Below is one I sent in July 2020 (baby pictures removed), which I keep thinking back to as the AI revolution continues, with image generators, failed attempts at alignment, ChatGPT and the people breaking it’s safety restraints grabbing my attention most recently.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords
Posted in The Best News, July 19 2020
Today I want to take a quick detour from cute pictures of babies and dogs—don’t worry those are coming—to tell you about some tech news, because I think we may be in the early stages of the most important technological leap of my lifetime.
Since the first computers, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been the stuff of science fiction. Your computer could crunch numbers and move information around at amazing speed, but asking it to do basic things like constructing a sentence or recognizing an image was like asking a frog to do ballet.
That is changing now. Fast. A company called OpenAI has been working on their Generative Pre-Training (GPT) model, with the first paper published in June of 2018. Just two years later, they’ve shipped the latest iteration: GPT-3.
It can answer questions, invent images, write working software, and more. If you have followed this field, this stuff is wildly impressive. But more important is the speed at which the state of the art is advancing. These results would have been inconceivable five years ago. And the difference in quality between GPT-2 (which came out last February) to GPT-3 is like the difference between a cat and a three-year-old.
I’m not going to pretend to be able to predict how this will develop, or when we might have a machine that is, for all intents and purposes, a human being. I don’t think that anyone can predict that right now. All I can do is echo what the smartest people I follow are saying: this stuff is crazy, and it’s happening fast. Pay attention.
And of course, I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords 🙃
So what do you say to your friends and family? As you can see, I don’t really know. I find all I can do is gawk, and try to write down the common sense basics of what’s happening... and when I do it sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
I think we are still in the early innings of biggest technological change of my lifetime; something with the importance of the industrial revolution, or beyond. It’s happening much faster. It’s fun to imagine what will happen, but hard to make predictions with any confidence.
What should one’s family do? Same as the rest of us, I guess:
Buckle up.
I was able to get access to ChatAI this week. It was my first time interacting with one of the GPT-based platforms and it was both amazing and terrifying. I asked it to write a poem about unrequited love in trochaic tetrameter. It not only created a poem, but it made a great poem.
The crushing pain of unrequited love
A heart's desire never met above.
The loneliness that comes from no returns
My heart, it aches and ever yearns
Unrequited love is bittersweet
A love that only I can meet.
A sadness that no one else can feel
My pining for it is quite real.
To hope for love that can't be had
Leaves me ever feeling sad.
A world of one not meant to be
Alone I'm left in my misery.
I also asked it to write a fictional story that included completely unrelated nonsense elements. It wasn’t the greatest story ever, but given my prompts it was coherent. Then, I decided to get philosophical. I asked it to write an essay examining a specific doctrine in theology. It created a persuasive argument and even cited specific verses to support its position. I asked it to come up with a list of exotic sounding names that were still pronounceable because I was curious how it would interpret what pronounceable meant for a computer versus a human. It filled my request with ease. When it comes to things like this, I think AI is amazing.It has the capacity to truly change our society for the better and in amazing ways that we can’t even begin to guess at.
However, AI scares me to death. Companies and governments will be able to use this to build such rich profiles about users or citizens. I’m not sure society is ready for the changes that are just around the corner. I mean we’ve barely adjusted to the idea of the internet and being able to easily communicate with people all around the globe. Social media is a great example of our growing pains in this area. On top of that we are very quickly going to have entire sectors of the economy that will no longer need human labor. AI art generators will soon put illustrators out of work. It seems like programmers could become a needless luxury within the near term.
I’m not sure we’re ready for this, but at the same time I love using it.
Not sure where I heard this but it went something like this, “Twenty years ago, I thought AI-powered robots would be doing all of my chores while I sat back and worked on my art. Instead, now AI is generating the art while I’m still stuck doing chores.”