L4sBotJames Cameron on AI: "I warned you guys in 1984 and you didn't listen"
orphiebabyIt’s getting old telling people this, but… the AI that we have? Isn’t even really AI. It’s certainly not anything like in the movies. It’s just pattern-recognition algorithms. It doesn’t know or understand anything and it has no context. It can’t tell the difference between truth or a lie, and it doesn’t know what a finger is— it just paints amalgamations of things it’s already seen.
I’m not saying there’s nothing to be afraid of concerning today’s “AI”, but it’s not comparable to movie/book AI.
jeffwStrong AI vs weak AI.
We’re a far cry from real AI
Immersive_MatthewI really think the only thing to be concerned of is human bad actors with AI and not AI. AI alignment will be significantly easier than human alignment as we are for sure not aligned and it is not even our nature to be aligned.
I’ve had this same thought for decades now ever since I first heard of ai takeover scifi stuff as a kid. Bots just preform set functions. People in control of bots can create mayhem.
Sounds like you described a baby.
Yeah, I think there’s a little bit more to consciousness and learning than that. Today’s AI doesn’t even recognize objects, it just paints patterns.
pelespiritI just listened to 2 different takes on AI by true experts and it’s way more than what you’re saying. If the AI doesn’t have good goals programmed in, we’re fucked.It’s also being controlled by huge corporations that decide what those goals are. Judging from the past, this is not good.
You seem to have completely missed the point of my post.
Could you explain to me how?
explain to me
It isn’t AI. It’s just a digital parrot. It just paints up text or images based on things it already saw. It has no understanding, knowledge, or context. Therefore it doesn’t matter how much data you feed it, it won’t be able to put together a poem that doesn’t sound hokey, or digital art where characters don’t have seven fingers or three feet. It doesn’t even understand what objects are and therefore how many of them there should be.
This technology will not be able to guide a robot to “think” and take actions accordingly. It’s just not the right technology— it’s not actually AI.
Right, so the goals programmed into what the AI does is what colors all of the output and has unintended consequences. At least according to Max Tengmark smartless.com/…/mit-professor-max-tegmark-live-in…
If the AI doesn’t have good goals programmed in, we’re fucked
When they built a new building at my college they decided to to use “AI” (back when SunOS ruled the world) to determine the most efficient route for the elevator to take.
The parameter they gave it to measure was “how long does each wait to get to their floor”. So it optimized for that and found it could get it down to 0 by never letting anyone get on, so they never got to their floor, so their wait time was unset (which = 0).
They tweaked the parameters to ensure everyone got to their floor and as far as I can tell it worked well. I never had to wait much for an elevator.
If the AI doesn’t have good goals programmed in, we’re fucked.It’s also being controlled by huge corporations that decide what those goals are.
That’s valid, but it has nothing to do with general intelligent machines.
SpaniardAn AI can’t be controlled by corporations, an AI will control corporations.
SynchromeI think it will come… Right now the weak AI is highly compartmentalized (one produces text, another produces language, another scans videos, etc.). What would happen if these different parts could be integrated, and then given a robotic body with sensors? What if its “session” could run indefinitely? Isn’t this what we are, in essence?
Not much, because it turns out there’s more to AI than a hypothetical sum of what we already created.
You don’t think the technology will not improve?
It’s not about improvement, it’s about actual AI being completely different technology.
Not the guy you were referring to, but it’s not so much “improve” as “another paradigm shift is still needed”.
A “robotic body with sensors” has already been around since 1999. But no matter how many sensors, no matter how lifelike and no matter how many machine learning algorithms/LLMs are thrown in, it is still not capable of independent thought. Anything that goes wrong is still due to human error in setting parameters.
To get to a Terminator level intelligence, we need the machine to be capable of independent thought. Comparing independent thought to our current generative AI technology is like comparing a jet plane to a horse drawn carriage - you can call it “advancement”, yes, but there are many intermediate steps that need to happen. Just like an internal combustion engine is the linkage between horse-drawn carriages and planes, some form of independent thought is the link between generative AI and actual intelligent machines.
That’s not what they said.
What people are calling “AI” today is not AI in the sense of how laypeople understand it. Personally I hate the use of the term in this context and think it would have been much better to stick with Machine Learning (often just ML). Regardless, the point is that you cannot get from these system to what you think of as AI. To get there it would require new, different systems. Or changing these systems so thoroughly as to make them unrecognizable from their origins.
If you put e.g. ChatGPT into a robotic body with sensors… you’d get nothing. It has no concept of a body. No concept of controlling the body. No concept of operating outside of the constraints within which it already operates. You could debate if it has some inhuman concept of language, but that debate is about as far as you can go.
To put it another way: what happens if you connect the algorithms controlling a video game NPC to a robotic body? Absolutely nothing. Same deal here.
That type of reductionism isn’t really helpful. You can describe the human brain to also just be pattern recognition algorithms. But doing that many times, at different levels, apparently gets you functional brains.
wizardbeardBut his statement isn’t reductionism.
Mate, a bad actor could put today’s LLM, face recognition softwares and functionality into an armed drone, show it a picture of Sara Connor and tell it to go hunting and it would be able to handle the rest. We are just about there. Call it what you want.
That sure sounds nice in your head.
LLM stands for Large Language Model. I don’t see how a model to process text is going to match faces out in the field. And either that drone is flying chest-hight, it better recognize people’s hair patterns (balding Sarah Connors beware or wear hats!).
True but that doesn’t keep it from screwing a lot of things up.
I’m not saying there’s nothing to be afraid of concerning today’s “AI”, but it’s not comparable to movie/book AI.
Yes, sure
Yes, sure. I meant things like employment, quality of output
That applies to… literally every invention in the world. Cars, automatic doors, rulers, calculators, you name it…
With a crucial difference - inventors of all those knew how the invention worked. Inventors of current AIs do NOT know the actual mechanism how it works. Hence, output is unpredictable.
Lol could you provide a source where the people behind these LLMs say they don’t know how it works?
Did they program it with their eyes closed?
Yes I can. example
“Whether you like it or not is irrelevant.”
That’s a very hostile take.
I just think it’s wild they wouldn’t know how it works when they’re the ones who created it. How do you program something that you don’t understand?! It’s crazy.
It is, sorry. It was a Reaction to the downvotes. But at this point I’m a bit allergic to the “it’s the same as every other invention” argument. It’s not, precisely for this reason. It’s a bit like “climate is always changing” - yes, but not within decades or centuries. These details are crucial.
they program it to learn. They can tell you exactly how it learns, but not what it learned (there are some techniques to give some small insights, but not even close to the full picture)
Problem is, how it behaves nepends on how it was programmed and what it learned after being trained. Since what it learned is a black box, we cannot explain their behaviour
THANK YOU. What we have today is amazing, but there’s still a massive gulf to cross before we arrive at artificial general intelligence.
What we have today is the equivalent of a four-year-old given a whole bunch of physics equations and then being told “hey, can you come up with something that looks like this?” It has no understanding besides “I see squiggly shape in A and squiggly shape in B, so I’ll copy squiggly shape onto C”.
The replies annoy me. It’s just the same thing all over again— everything I said seems to have went right over most peoples’ heads.
Not at all.
They just don’t like being told they’re wrong and will attack you instead of learning something.
Regardless of if its true AI or not (I understand its just machine learning) Cameron’s sentiment is still mostly true. The Terminator in the original film wasn’t some digital being with true intelligence, it was just a machine designed with a single goal. There was no reasoning or planning really, just an algorithm that said "get weapons, kill Sarah Connor. It wasn’t far off from an Boston Dynamics robot using machine learning to complete a task.
You don’t understand. Our current AI? Doesn’t know the difference between an object and a painting. Furthermore, everything it perceives is “normal and true”. You give it bad data and suddenly it’s broken. And “giving it bad data” is way easier than it sounds. A “functioning” AI (like a Terminator) requires the ability to “understand” and scrutinize, not just copy what others tell it and combine results.
GAI - General Artificial Intelligence is what most people jump too. And, for those wondering, that’s the beginning of the end game type. That’s the kind that will understand context. The ability to ‘think’ on its own with little to no input from humans. What we have now is basically autocorrect on super steroids.
Dr. DabblesAnd we were warned about Perceptron in the 1950s. Fact of the matter is, this shit is still just a parlor trick and doesn’t count as “intelligence” in any classical sense whatsoever. Guessing the next word in a sentence because hundreds of millions of examples tell it to isn’t really that amazing. Call me when any of these systems actually comprehend the prompts they’re given.
EXACTLY THIS. it’s a really good parrot and anybody who thinks they can fire all their human staff and replace with ChatGPT is in for a world of hurt.
Not if most their staff were pretty shitty parrots and the job is essentially just parroting…
At first blush, this is one of those things that most people assume is true. But one of the problems here is that a human can comprehend what is being asked in, say, a support ticket. So while an LLM might find a useful prompt and then spit out a reply that may pr may not be correct, a human can actually deeply understand what’s being asked, then select an auto-reply from a drop down menu.
Making things worse for the LLM side of things, that person doesn’t consume absolutely insane amounts of power to be trained to reply. Neither do most of the traditional “chatbot” systems that have been around for 20 years or so. Which begs the question, why use an LLM that is as likely to get something wrong as it is to get it right when existing systems have been honed over decades to get it right almost all of the time?
If the work being undertaken is translating text from one language to another, LLMs do an incredible job. Because guessing the next word based on hundreds of millions of samples is a uniquely good way to guess at translations. And that’s good enough almost all of the time. But asking it to write marketing copy for your newest Widget from WidgetCo? That’s going to take extremely skilled prompt writers, and equally skilled reviewers. So in that case the only thing you’re really saving is the amount of wall clock time for a human to type something. Not really a dramatic savings, TBH.
Guessing the next word in a sentence because hundreds of millions of examples tell it to isn’t really that amazing.
The best and most concise explanation (and critique) of LLMs in the known universe.
The real question is how much time do we have before a Roomba goes goes back in time to kill mother of someone who was littering to much?
How do you know it hasn’t already happened?
askatI’m not afraid of Ai, I’m afraid of greedy capitalist mfs who owns the AI.
James Cameron WOULD make this about James Cameron.
CheemsWell duh, it’s James Cameron
So is the new trend going to be people who mentioned AI in the past to start acting like they were Nostradamus when warnings of evil AIs gone rogue has been a trope for a long long time?
I’m sick of hearing from James Cameron. This dude needs to go away. He doesn’t know a damn thing about LLMs. It’s ridiculous how many articles have been written about random celebs’ opinions on AI when none of them know shit about it.
He should stick to making shitty Avatar movies and oversharing submarine implosion details with the news media
ilovecheeseThis is really turning out like the ‘satanic panic’ of the 80’s all over again.
The difference being that there was never much proof for the Satanic panic and that now we have actual robot cop dogs patrolling streets.
ITT: People describing the core component of human consciousness, pattern recognition, as not a big deal because it’s code and not a brain. That’s fine, stick your heads in the sand. Rather than trying to shape the inevitability in a positive fashion for humanity, just leave it to the corpos to take care of it for you 👍
My thoughts exactly
So all you do is create phrases based on things you’ve read in the past and recognizing similar interactions between other people and recreating them? 🤔
No we also transfer generic material to similar looking (but not too similar looking) people and then teach those new people the pattern matching.
My point: Reductionism just isn’t useful when discussing intelligence.
Man… I must be smart as heck to be able to come up with my own thoughts then…
Idk man, I’m pretty sure I can find all of those words in a dictionary.