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| title | description |
|---|---|
| Thinking machines - some thoughts about large language models | The computers will start thinking, and people will stop. |
Work
There's an exchange early in the classic '80s movie TRON. Some scientists are talking shop:
ALAN: Ever since he got that Master Control Program set up, system's got more bugs than a bait store.
GIBBS: Well, you have to expect some static. Computers are just machines after all, they can't think...
ALAN: They'll start to soon enough.
GIBBS: (wryly) Yes, won't that be grand -- the computers will start thinking, and people will stop.
Gibbs has a point. The modern vision of a utopian future is one where work is relieved, and people are free to pursue leisure, or exercise their creativity with art, writing, and poetry. Setting aside the irony that creative works are the first and most visible applications of this technology -- is that imagined future actually a good one?
When I was a kid, I remember a day going to yard sales with my mom in the family minivan. It was early summer, a hot day. The windows were down, and I complained that if the vehicle has good air conditioning, we should use it. What was the point in getting all hot? "To get used to the warm weather," came the answer. What an injustice! We were sweating back there! Later in life, I took a short trip to Arizona in August. Everyone scurried from building to building. Where the sun was doubled, reflected off of glass skyscrapers, the temperature jump was alarming. It was actually unsafe to spend long stretches outside unprepared. But when I returned to Massachusetts, for the rest of the summer 85 or 90 degrees Fahrenheit felt like nothing.
All that to say, the work that this new technology offers to relieve isn't just about achieving a result. The effort maintains and builds our abilities. Work pushes us to connect to each other for help, or to persevere in doing something difficult. Outsourcing that work eventually means losing the ability to do it yourself.
Empathy
LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT) clearly manifest a type of intelligence. Sure, it's "just" multidimensional vector embeddings. But it does exhibit a type of intelligence. One without empathy. Not being human, it can't have empathy -- and intelligence without empathy is dangerous 1 2.
Because it was built from essentially the whole public internet, LLMs also have a strong connection to The Algorithm. Algorithms that run social media feeds and online advertising are designed to attract human attention, a precious thing. These systems (LLMs as well as social media algorithms) are oriented towards capturing that attention. The seminal LLM paper is even called, "Attention is all you need". A prescient title. AI images have a magnetic quality. The early iterations would let you down if you look closely at fingers or text, but even those images are hard to ignore. So - the intelligence of AI is not like ours. It can't know what it's like to be a human, and if it could be said to want something, it would be attention.
Truth
It also doesn't care about truth. Speaking reductively, an LLM is a document completion engine. You give it text, and it extends it. No amount of pre-training or guard rails will make it truthful, because it is built to be convincing, not accurate. It does often say true things. But that's not the point, it's more of a happy accident. A person who has this kind of indifference towards truth would be considered a con-man or bullshitter3. Untrustworthy.
Warnings
Science fiction is littered with cautionary tales about inhuman intelligence. For that matter, so is myth: genies give people whatever they want, but because people have self-destructive desires (like the desire to avoid work), it goes wrong. In TRON, Infocom has the MCP (Master Control Program), an overgrown chess program that is given access to whatever information it can consume, until its intelligence and capabilities are seemingly endless. The company leadership comes to rely on the program so completely that it becomes their entire interface for understanding and operating the business. There is also the irony that Infocom's success was built on the misuse of intellectual property, much as LLM companies have done 4 5.
I am not wise enough to safely use a genie in a bottle. And I won't outsource my creative efforts to an addictive, bullshitting alien intellect, even if it might save time and effort in the short term.
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AI chatbot pushed teen to kill himself, lawsuit alleges | AP News ↩︎
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Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot ↩︎
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On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt : Harry Frankfurt : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive ↩︎
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AI, Copyright, and the Law: The Ongoing Battle Over Intellectual Property Rights – IP & Technology Law Society ↩︎