What’s wrong with me? I no longer have the urge to check when someone on the internet mentions an AI getting things wrong; you know, hallucinating (offering demonstrably false statements as facts).
An increasing number of reports of such behaviour appear to be completely fabricated either for the lolz or as another reason to not use AI, but some are verifiable.
It’s undeniable that AIs or large language models (LLMs) are an increasing part of modern life, and whether one personally participates in the hype/bubble/de-skilling of not. But I’ve concluded that it’s pointless to fact-check posts. Why?
Other than using an AI how else is there to find out whether someone is making something up?
Humans don’t want to hear things that upset their worldview. We saw it writ large at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re seeing it with the rise of populist, far-right politicians. We should be checking stuff the little people in our phones or on our computer and TV screens are saying, and yet we don’t.
Why? Despite the decades-old dream of artificial intelligence giving us time to do things that enrich our lives, it’s not really come to pass has it. But it really can’t be far away now, right?
All the media chatter is of knowledge transfer, of chatbots supplanting interactions between humans, of ‘coming here and stealing our jobs…’ of the billions spent by the billionaires on the data centres required to keep AI running… and of the billions written off by the billionaires as each technology hits an evolutionary dead end.
It looks to me like Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ motto won out over Google’s ‘do no evil’. And it’s boundless.
There’s not much yet of the increasing cost of AI to business as the subsidies start to become economically unviable for the AI peddlers, and there’s not much yet of the cost to humanity.
The cost of the AI ‘arms races’, like the cost of climate change and the cost of COVID denial, is an inconvenient truth that ordinary humans don’t want to confront.
And then there’s this, an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ (Goodreads link and a link to one of The Planetary Society’s videos of Dr Sagan):
“From this distant vantage point [that of ‘an alien scientist newly arrived at the outskirts of our solar system’ where Voyager 1 took the photograph], the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
This should make us all think. And yet…