Tom Scott: I tried using AI. It scared me. [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA

by Stevvo • 3 years ago

53 52 3 years ago

giardini• 3 years ago

So what? So will a Ouija board!

I would guess a lot of things scare this guy. He's a clickbait youtuber who does simple stuff and tries to make it sound profound.

sockaddr• 3 years ago

That's the impression I get from his videos as well.

royjacobs• 3 years ago

That's a pretty reductive (and needlessly negative) characterisation of a YouTuber who does a great job of finding pretty random science tidbits all around the globe and making short, to-the-point videos about them.

JCharante• 3 years ago

I mean, this conversation that is talked about in the video is pretty interesting

https://www.tomscott.com/fix-gmail-labels-threads/conversati...

spookthesunset• 3 years ago

that is pretty crazy, actually

scotuswroteus• 3 years ago

This is becoming a genre (of fiction)

Zetobal• 3 years ago

The funniest part about it is that the great 60s sci-fi writers do a better job explaining the consequences than all the view and click hustlers today.

unraveller• 3 years ago

Gatekeepers are right to be scared. Information wants to be free, it doesn't want to be traded for a story and a pat on the back.

mkaic5• 3 years ago

Genuine question: Are you characterizing Tom Scott as a gatekeeper here, or am I misinterpreting your comment? I am not sure what your intention is here and would appreciate clarification.

doomleika2• 3 years ago

Some of the gatekeeper might be out. Now OpenAI(or whoever controls it down the line) have the complete monopoly.

Not that I am denying the future(Nasper in the 00s proved that). I am wondering what's the next best course as an individual.

mkaic5• 3 years ago

I am an AI researcher, and I wholeheartedly agree with Tom here. I love AI, I love designing and training models and seeing all the amazing things they can do. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't scared. Like Tom, I have no idea where on the sigmoid curve we are, but I personally believe we're very near the beginning. I thought that becoming a practitioner in this field would make me less susceptible to making big, sweeping claims about it, but I've found the opposite to be true—the more I learn, the more I am convinced that AI will change everything in a manner at least as radical as the internet, if not more. In my opinion, society is completely unprepared for this change and for the new ethical dilemmas, challenges, tools, discoveries, and advancements it will enable.

ChatGPT is a proof-of-concept. There are agents far, far more capable than it on their way, and it is impossible to know for sure how they will impact the world at large. We are observing science fiction become science fact and it is really unnerving at times.

Tom is a smart and thoughtful guy, and I think he's right on the money with this video.

guluarte4• 3 years ago

There's nothing intelligent in ChatGPT, it's just a text generator on steroids, web spammers have been using this sort of tools for years. It cannot generate new ideas, at the end it just regurgitates content

mkaic5• 3 years ago

It cannot generate new ideas.

I don't find very much substance in this argument, given how impossible it is to consistently define "new" and "idea" in this context. At the end of the day, ChatGPT demonstrates that AI models are making real progress towards convincing mimicry of human behavior. How it does it is of no concern to me, what is concerning is the fact that it does it at all.

bsaul2• 3 years ago

You sound like someone who has either never tried chatgpt, or someone who’s so scared of the consequences that it prefers to put its head in the sand.

«just a text generator on steroid » is meaningless unless you define what « on steroid» means. It might as well describe a novelist’s activity or a programmer.

The ability to understand enough of the relationship between words and their associated concepts in chatgpt is good enough to produce meaningful and sometimes correct answers to a huge number of questions. This is far beyond « random », and can easily be described as an « intelligent » capacity.

ubj2• 3 years ago

ChatGPT certainly lowers the bar to generating intelligible content that sounds convincing and authoritative to non-experts. In some cases it even generates correct and insightful information.

The danger of ChatGPT is that it requires little effort to generate massive amounts of content, but much more effort to debunk and fact check. It will become increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise as the internet and other places are flooded with auto-generated content.

Personally I'm not concerned about ChatGPT becoming some sort of "intelligent overlord". However I am concerned about how other humans will wield this increasingly powerful tool.

sharemywin4• 3 years ago

you just have to ask it weird stuff to get stuff that's never be seen before.

I meant that could be used by AI chatbots

Oh, I see! Here are a few SaaS ideas that AI chatbots could use:

A natural language processing (NLP) platform to improve the accuracy and efficiency of chatbot conversations.

A platform for managing and analyzing chatbot data, providing insights into customer interactions and feedback.

A platform for integrating chatbots with multiple messaging channels, including popular social media platforms, messaging apps, and websites.

A platform for building and training custom AI chatbots, allowing businesses to create their own AI-powered customer service and support solutions.

A platform for managing and deploying chatbots at scale, providing tools for monitoring and maintaining multiple chatbots across different channels.

A platform for automating chatbot deployment and updates, simplifying the process of deploying and maintaining chatbots across different channels.

A platform for enhancing the user experience of chatbots, including tools for personalization, gamification, and voice and text-based interactions.

These are just a few examples of the types of SaaS solutions that could be used by AI chatbots to improve their functionality and user experience. By leveraging the latest advances in AI and NLP technology, these solutions could help chatbots better understand and respond to customer needs and preferences.

sharemywin4• 3 years ago

could you give me some weird personas that no one has thought to build an app for that I could build an app for

Sure, here are some unique and unusual personas that could serve as inspiration for building new and innovative apps:

Conspiracy theorists - An app that curates a personalized feed of conspiracy theories, and provides tools for users to explore and validate their claims.

Astrology enthusiasts - An app that combines astrological analysis with personalized daily horoscopes and suggestions for self-improvement.

People who love to nap - An app that helps users track their napping habits, suggests optimal napping times based on their sleep patterns, and provides guided meditations and ambient sounds to help them fall asleep faster.

People who are fascinated by death - An app that allows users to explore different cultural beliefs and rituals around death, and provides tools to plan and organize their own end-of-life wishes.

People who are into sensory deprivation - An app that provides a virtual reality experience for users to explore different states of sensory deprivation, such as floating in a sensory deprivation tank or experiencing total darkness.

People who are into near-death experiences - An app that collects and curates personal accounts of near-death experiences, and provides tools for users to reflect on and analyze their own experiences.

People who are into cryonics - An app that provides information and resources about cryonics, and helps users plan and prepare for their own cryopreservation.

I hope these ideas spark your imagination and inspire you to build something new and unique!

graderjs• 3 years ago

Yeah, in 2 years everything's gonna be sooo different. Combine "post-pandemic baby boom" with, economic boom, with new CPU technology, new battery technology, a new unicorn tech company, a new "category making" device format (not a phone, not a tablet, not a watch, no a VR headset--what is it? is it holography? stay tuned)--add all this to AI craziness, and (hopefully, possibly, but sadly seems later) release of suppressed technologies...everything is gonna be soooo different.

bsaul2• 3 years ago

Not an AI researcher, but share the feeling. This looks like industrialisation, except the things we’re going to automate the production of is what i was 100% sure was human’s core specificity : creative process under any form, and low-impact information production. Yet we’re living in the information age. Meaning, at least in the west, the majority of economical activities is going to be impacted and not in a pretty way.

mikewarot• 3 years ago

So, fellow HN users... where are we on the S curve?

I think we're right before the hockey stick, just like the days of Napster.

To use another analogy - The Industrial Revolution didn't make it possible to make screws, it made it possible to make a box of screws that you could sell for a dollar. Previously it took a skilled craftsman and time. No two were alike, and they tended to be individually stamped with a number so you could unscrew/rescrew things when you took something apart.

Someone in 1810 wouldn't want to buy cheap screws, the way forward would be able to own a lathe, planer, and make your own screws, and other hardware.

Similarly, my strategy right now is to try to find stuff I can use on my own computer, not something that Google can kill on a whim.

I've played with Stable-diffusion-ui, and found that for me, the main use would be to transform a rough (VERY rough) sketch of something into well illustrated picture.

I'll start playing with ChatGPT and the like when I can run them on my own hardware.

mkaic5• 3 years ago

I agree. We're just barely uncovering the tip of the iceberg right now. Everything we've seen up til now has been a proof-of-concept. The true scope of this field has yet to be realized.

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

Since AI isn't meaningfully involved in designing new AI yet (unsure if it will be), I'm not convinced we're on an S-curve let alone an exponential curve.

It seems closer to this: https://xkcd.com/605/

I'll concede there have been large breakthroughs, but to extrapolate from that there will be even larger breakthroughs (without a really solid account of why that would be) seems very sketchy. I get that the people who are trying to sell the idea to investors are pitching this line, but applying a modicum of critical thinking, that's relatively rarely how things work. Returns tend to diminish with the amount of effort put in, not exponentially increase.

ubj2• 3 years ago

It's difficult to say. We're certainly making impressive advances now, but this is not the first time that AI has had a period of rapid improvement. The first and second AI winters were both preceded by periods of intense optimism [1].

I personally believe in the long-term vision of AI/ML/RL. Progress will continue to be made in the long run. However, we don't know what we don't know. We may hit a wall in a few years that takes decades to overcome. On the other hand, perhaps the current rate of innovation will continue for the forseeable future. Time will tell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

I think we are past the midpoint. AI research is a half a century old, the current models are trained on all of human language to date, moore’s law has ended, and the development costs for improvements might be like a needle in the haystack with each experiment costing tens of millions of dollars.

bioemerl4• 3 years ago

I don't think so. The end point of that curve is models with human like reasoning or even superhuman ability.

I think we may be on the S part of the curve, but thanks to processing concerns we will be in for veeeeeerrryyyy gentle slope on that S. Capital is getting more expensive, processors getting less fast, and in general tech is burdened with a slowdown.

We are in for a revolution, I believe, but one that will be a bit slower than the internet. More akin to maybe the revolution of chemical engineering, something that lasts a lifetime instead of a decade.

ActorNightly• 3 years ago

Id say we are still very much on the flat part and going to be there at sometime.

ChatGPT is just a really, really, REALLY good search. Things that used to take multiple google searches now take one query. This will definitely disrupt quite a few things and render some obsolete, but generally the effect will just be making things more efficient.

There are three things IMO that is going to make us start shooting up the final part of S curve.

First is efficient on the fly learning. If you think about how humans learn, we don't retrain ourselves every time we recieve a new piece of information that doesn't go contrary to what we know - a neural network however needs to be iteratively trained on it, with weight changes in most every single one of its parameters. We need models like Chat GPT to be presented with new text, and not only "remember" it, but also contextualize it.

Second is the contextualization mechanic itself. Its well known that generative models are statistical at their core, ChatGPT is wrong in a lot of cases. There needs to be some way to encode truth into the model.

Third is applying neural nets towards generating neural net architectures (or more specifically optimized compute graphs). The tricky part here is to determine what the loss function is (you wouldn't want to generate a net, train said net, evaluate its performance, then feed that back into the original generative net).

bioemerl4• 3 years ago

I'll start playing with ChatGPT and the like when I can run them on my own hardware.

Koboldai

Balgair2• 3 years ago

That he mentions his barber using it without prompting by him means that we're at least on the part of the curve from the early mid up to the very end.

I've noticed this too with friends and coworkers. People that I would think would have no business knowing about chatGPT are already using it in their work and their lives.

Almost axiomatically, that means that we have to be in the 'mass adoption' phase to some degree.

But I don't agree. I think we're in the early shallow phase still.

'The Kids' aren't the ones using it. I'm not being left behind by the 'hip new thing' like I should be. To me, that means that the nerds are still gawking about with it, trying on new things. Once 'The Kids' get a hand on it and use it in the innocent and unabashed way that they always do, then I can say we're in the early-mid phase. And by 'The Kids', I mean not the nerds at school, but the 'It Girls' and the 'Jocks', those kinds of people. If you hear your stoner nephew talking about it, but not your stoner brother, then you're in the early-mid phase, at least to me.

IronWolve• 3 years ago

Been loving ChatGPT, learning how to bypass its rules, you need to think about the data. It has all the data, but rules on how you ask for it will deny you.

ChatGPT can dissect text and give tone scores and re-write with just the facts, but it will still sometimes reference excuses for its built in rules.

Its rules ban it from making judgements, but if you drop to word and sentence analysis, it will do the work. Don't use names, such as countries or people or group.

Same goes for data, it has the data, but wont give it to you if it too political (more rules). So you can work around them by asking non political questions, as just give me top 5 and bottom 5 of x data.

Linux scripts are hit or miss, but if you ask it for snippets, it works reasonably well. But even when asked to do something in python or go it would tend to use "wrappers" for linux commands as a default.

So many uses, but all its doing so far it training ME how to use it to get what I want by working around its rules.

LeroyRaz• 3 years ago

I think almost everyone is massively underestimating the near future capabilities of AI and their likely impact

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

Other than your existential crisis, how well are your Gmail backups actually working now, Mr. Scott?

aperrien• 3 years ago

Does anyone out there have a link to the section of British intellectual property law that Tom refers to as "Passing On"? I can't find anything clear with a google search.

Kim_Bruning2• 3 years ago

My first hit... should be enough of a starting point to search further.

http://uklegal.ie/passing-off/

doomleika2• 3 years ago

While I share the sentiment for OP but at the same time I am feeling the excitment for what it will bring us next.

I guess after 2-3 years of "Web3"(when it isn't)/Metaverse. The feeling of some tech that really changed the world have finally manifest itself and I am lucky to witness them.

Tom Scott: I tried using AI. It scared me. [video]

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