They switched from worshiping Elon Musk to worshiping ChatGPT. There are literally people commenting ChatGPT responses to prompt posts asking for real opinions, and then getting super defensive when they get downvoted and people point out that they didn't come here to read shit from AI.
I said it at the time when chatGPT came along, and I'll say it now and keep saying it until or unless the android army is built which executes me:
ChatGPT kinda sucks shit. AI is NO WHERE NEAR what we all (used to?) understand AI to be ie fully sentient, human-equal or better, autonomous, thinking, beings.
I know the Elons and shit have tried (perhaps successfully) to change the meaning of AI to shit like chatGPT. But, no, I reject that then, now, and forever. Perhaps people have some "real" argument for different types and stages of AI and my only preemptive response to them is basically "keep your industry specific terminology inside your specific industries." The outside world, normal people, understand AI to be Data from Star Trek or the Terminator. Not a fucking glorified Wikipedia prompt. I think this does need to be straight forwardly stated and their statements rejected because... Frankly, they're full of shit and it's annoying.
I was gonna say, "Remember when scientists thought testing a nuclear bomb might start a chain reaction enflaming the whole atmosphere and then did it anyway?" But then I looked it up and I guess they actually did calculations and figured out it wouldn't before they did the test.
I don't know if Reddit was always like this but all /r/ subreddits feel extremely astroturfed. /r/liverpoolfc for example feels like it is run by the teams PR division. There are a handful of criticcal posts sprinkled in so redditors can continue to delude themselves into believing they are free thinking individuals.
Also this superintelligent thing was doing well on some fifth grade level tests according to Reuter's anonymous source which got OpenAI geniuses worried about AI apocalypse.
The half serious jokes about sentient AI, made by dumb animals on reddit are no closer to the mark than an attempt to piss on the sun. AI can't be advancing at a pace greater than we think, unless we think it's not advancing at all. There is no god damn AI. It's a language model that uses a stochastic calculation to print out the next word each time. It barely holds on to a few variables at a time, it's got no grasp on anything, no comprehension, let alone a promise of sentience.
There are plenty of stuff and people that get to me, but few are as good at it as idiot tech bros, their delusions and their extremely warped perspective.
I think it should be noted, that some of the members on the board of OpenAI are literally just techno-priests doing actual techno-evangelism, their job literally depends on this new god and the upcoming techno-rapture being perceived as at least a plausible item of faith. I mean it probably works as any other marketing strategy, but this is all in the context of Microsoft becoming the single largest company stakeholder on OpenAI, likely they don't want their money to go to waste paying a bunch of useless cultists so they started yanking Sam Altman's chain. The OpenAI board reacted to the possibility of Microsoft making budget calls, and outed Altman and Microsoft swiftly reacted by formally hiring Altman and doubling down. Obviously most employees are going to side with Microsoft since they're currently paying the bills. You're going to see people strongly encouraged to walk out from the OpenAI board in the upcoming weeks or months, and they'll go down screaming crap about the computer hypergod. You see these aren't even marketing lines that they're repeating acritically, it's what's some dude desperately latching onto their useless 6 figure job is screaming.
The saddest part of all is that it looks like they really are wishing for real life to imitate a futuristic sci-fi movie. They might not come out and say, "I really hope AI in the real world turns out to be just like in a sci-fi/horror movie" but that's what it seems like they're unconsciously wishing for. It's just like a lot of other media phenomena, such as real news reporting on zombie apocalypse preparedness or UFOs. They may phrase it as "expectation" but that's very adjacent to "hopeful."
Redditors straight up quote marketing material in their posts to defend stuff, it's maddening. I was questioning a gamer on Reddit about something in a video game, and in response they straight up quoted something from the game's official website. Critical thinking and media literacy are dead online I swear.
He may be a sucker but at least he is engaging with the topic. The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called "artificial intelligence" here on hexbear is just as frustrating as any of the bazinga takes on . No material analysis, no good faith discussion, no strategy to liberate these tools in service of the proletariat - just the occasional dunk post and an endless stream of the same snide remarks from the usuals.
The hexbear party line toward LLMs and similar technologies is straight up reactionary. If we don't look for ways to utilize, subvert and counter these technologies while they're still in their infancy then these dorks are going to be the only ones who know how to use them. And if we don't interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.
Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.
Whenever the tech industry needs a boost some new bullshit comes up. Crypto, self driving and now AI, which is literally called AI for marketing purposes, but is basically an advanced algorithm.
I mean that seriously, because sentience and sapience requires a sense of self, after all. Could these AI ever change anything about themselves, such as their own names, and the pronouns used to refer to them? I think until we ever get an AI that chooses of its own accord to change its Self in that way, we won't ever have true sentient AI.
And of course, knowing the types of Bazinga Brains who champion AI becoming sentient, they'd probably program out an AI's ability to self-identify, which would make the idea of a sentient AI moot
I gotta admit. Before llm were common I used to call bazinga brain types "glorified markov chains" because that's what most of them are. But now with chatgpt I can't call them "glorified chat-gpt" because it truly is better at coming up with bullshit than they do, and it really can almost write better CRUD code than most of these bazinga brains. That's why I think they're so obsessed with this stuff.
As we all know, many idol-worshiping peoples have encountered gnomes and through worshiping and offering tribute to these gnomes, these gnomes become the hosts for powerful dark gods who reward their followers generously but are known to be fickle and demanding.
Silicon Valley is infamous for it's bizzare polycules and their ottoman haramesque power struggles. Somehow, Sam Altman offended Aella_Girl's polycule who happened to control the board of open AI.
Aella_girl is openly in sexual concourse with a series of garden gnomes who she likely worships and has married as it is known that gnomes usually demand a wife or your first born child.
She likely used the powers of this dark god to remove Sam Altman from the board but likely failed to meet it's escalating demands or otherwise disappointed this entity and as a result failed to remove him. It is known that when disappoints a gnome or stops worshiping it that one's fortunes will fall into a rapid decline so if this happens to her then we know what likely happened. Either that or Sam Altman is also in contact with a dark entity of some sort.
As Marxists, we must carefully investigate all technological advance, especially those in computation, and of cybernetics we must be most curious of all.
Computation is at most the symbolic record of the movement of a thought through time. The best an AI can ever do is recording and playing back the process-of-thinking to us, and in the case of large-language-models, this computation produces works that will always pale in comparison to the minds it was trained upon. In spite of any psychic qualities that may be assigned to the electron, our silicon genius can never actually be a Sibelius or a Riemann.
Those fundamental limitations of computers, however, will matter little: the consistent history of the misuse of new computer technologies, by the capitalist powers, for controlling individuals and populations, confirms for us that the repression and social deterioration that we collectively experience will reach unbearable heights in the days to come.
I am once again returning to this thread (for god knows why probably because I am somewhat unhinged) to question whether one of these LLMs have done something or performed an action without user input. A very strong opinion, but I feel like LLMs are useful at this point to cut corners to solve bullshit problems. Honestly, I am kinda compelled to write a Godamn essay synthesizing material from Graeber with the current information coming out of tech bro hell because I feel like there’s a lot there.
Even in my own job, my company is using GPT. To do what you might ask? Send emails, create reminders about emails, schedule meetings, respond to client requests that require the intervention of a living human who might have something on their desktop that needs to be shown to the client/edited accordingly. Or create some kind of meeting summary. Again, great. What’s the meeting about? Why can’t we just restructure this conversation in relation to to what end?
We should all become rightfully intrigued when these “AI” begin acting on their own accord, but right now, they’re being controlled by people with an inhumane agenda, antithetical to the human experience. I guess this is just the case and point why the humanities shouldn’t have been gutted in the west-you can’t answer any of these questions with a formula that won’t end in some form of light eugenics. What happens when it does act by itself and you use it for your bs work? Awesome job! You just reinvented slavery! 🥰
Functionally of course, none of this matters if it’s “AGI” or not when it’s a power grab of extreme levels by the bourgeois. Whether they admit it or not, humans will still be needed to do their “work” (it’s certainly not labor) and they will slowly use “AI” as a justification to reduce wages, benefits and what have you.