Technology

Hey AI helped me stick it to the insurance man the other day. I was futzing around with coverage amounts on one of the major insurance companies websites pre-renewal to try to get the best rate and it spit up a NaN renewal amount for our most expensive vehicle. It let me go through with the renewal less that $700 and now says I'm paid in full for the six month period. It's been days now with no follow-up . . . I'm pretty sure AI snuck that one through for me.

Mind your pronouns, my dear. "We" don't do that shit because we know better.

It's only as intelligent as the people that control and regulate it.

Given all the documented instances of Facebook and other social media using subliminal emotional manipulation, I honestly wonder if the recent cases of AI chat induced psychosis are related to something similar.

Like we know they're meant to get you to continue using them, which is itself a bit of psychological manipulation. How far does it go? Could there also be things like using subliminal messaging/lighting? This stuff is all so new and poorly understood, but that usually doesn't stop these sacks of shit from moving full speed with implementing this kind of thing.

It could be that certain individuals have unknown vulnerabilities that make them more susceptible to psychosis due to whatever manipulations are used to make people keep using the product. Maybe they're doing some things to users that are harmful, but didn't seem problematic during testing?

Or equally as likely, they never even bothered to test it out, just started subliminally fucking with people's brains, and now people are going haywire because a bunch of unethical shit heads believe they are the chosen elite who know what must be done to ensure society is able to achieve greatness. It just so happens that "what must be done," also makes them a ton of money and harms people using their products.

It's so fucking absurd to watch the same people jamming unregulated AI and automation down our throats while simultaneously forcing traditionalism, and a legal system inspired by Catholic integralist belief on society.

If you criticize the lack of regulations in the wild west of technology policy, or even suggest just using a little bit of fucking caution, then you're trying to hold back progress.

However, all non-tech related policy should be based on ancient traditions and biblical text with arbitrary rules and restrictions that only make sense and benefit the people enforcing the law.

What a stupid and convoluted way to express you just don't like evidence based policy or using critical thinking skills, and instead prefer to just navigate life by relying on the basic signals from your lizard brain. Feels good so keep moving towards, feels bad so run away, or feels scary so attack!

Such is the reality of the chosen elite, steering us towards greatness.

What's really "funny" (in a we're all doomed sort of way) is that while writing this all out, I realized the "chosen elite" controlling tech and policy actually perfectly embody the current problem with AI and bias.

Rather than relying on intelligence to analyze a situation in the present, and create the best and most appropriate response based on the information and evidence before them, they default to a set of pre-concieved rules written thousands of years ago with zero context to the current reality/environment and the problem at hand.

Humans are also LLMs.

We also speak words in succession that have a high probability of following each other. We don't say "Let's go eat a car at McDonalds" unless we're specifically instructed to say so.

What does consciousness even mean? If you can't quantify it, how can you prove humans have it and LLMs don't? Maybe consciousness is just one thought following the next, one word after the other, one neural connection determined on previous. Then we're not so different from LLMs afterall.

What I never understood about this argument is.....why are we fighting over whether something that speaks like us, knows more than us, bullshits and gets shit wrong like us, loses its mind like us, seemingly sometimes seeks self-preservation like us.....why all of this isn't enough to fit the very self-explanatory term "artificial....intelligence". That name does not describe whether the entity is having a valid experiencing of the world as other living beings, it does not proclaim absolute excellence in all things done by said entity, it doesn't even really say what kind of intelligence this intelligence would be. It simply says something has an intelligence of some sort, and it's artificial. We've had AI in games for decades, it's not the sci-fi AI, but it's still code taking in multiple inputs and producing a behavior as an outcome of those inputs alongside other historical data it may or may not have. This fits LLMs perfectly. As far as I seem to understand, LLMs are essentially at least part of the algorithm we ourselves use in our brains to interpret written or spoken inputs, and produce an output. They bullshit all the time and don't know when they're lying, so what? Has nobody here run into a compulsive liar or a sociopath? People sometimes have no idea where a random factoid they're saying came from or that it's even a factoid, why is it so crazy when the machine does it?

I keep hearing the word "anthropomorphize" being thrown around a lot, as if we cant be bringing up others into our domain, all the while refusing to even consider that maybe the underlying mechanisms that make hs tick are not that special, certainly not special enough to grant us a whole degree of separation from other beings and entities, and maybe we should instead bring ourselves down to the same domain as the rest of reality. Cold hard truth is, we don't know if consciousness isn't just an emerging property of varios different large models working together to show a cohesive image. If it is, would that be so bad? Hell, we don't really even know if we actually have free will or if we live in a superdeterministic world, where every single particle moves with a predetermined path given to it since the very beginning of everything. What makes us think we're so much better than other beings, to the point where we decide whether their existence is even recognizable?

As someone who's had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn't or, particularly, can't be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don't have kids. The other side usually does.

When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend's dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.

And as funny as it would be to argue that they're both sapient, but not sentient, I don't think that's the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I'd love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.