@nini @littlealex
Ok. You paint a definite picture. Let me point out a few things. First it is well known that good writers invent, and that great writers steal. I forget who said that. I may have said it myself. The point is that language itself is a matter of words being passed around, and that we do appropriate each other's "work", in the sense of reusing the language of others.

I do not know how many Elvis Presley portraits I have seen, but I do not know that I have ever seen one by an artist who sal Elvis. We share a cultural set of references, ideas, ways to talk about things. All of these were inventions, once upon a the time.

Folk music is filled with the form.

Cutting to the chase: my view is that we should focus on the culprits themselves, rather than the tools that they use. These tools were largely appropriated from the public domain, you may or may not already know. The pursuit of natural language processing, or of understanding grammar itself, has been going on for a long, long, time. We inherit a legacy of our forebears. In the integration of global culture, we inherit this more widely.

Altman named the company "Open AI" to take a ride on the communarian theme of "open", like open source. But there is plenty of open work being done on LLMs by the open source community.

The mathematicians among us will appreciate the importance in not investing time in category errors when discussing the pros and cons of everything that is implied by the nebulous "AI".

The first mistake is to imagine that the chatbot is conscious. Starting from there will require patience. But getting beyond that, the real helpful understanding is to know what a "transformer" prediction does essentially, in its "training".

What is being built is a map of "vectors, in a high-dimensional vector space. The dimensionality is so high, in fact, that it is unabtainable. So the reduce it: vectors within reduced dimensionality vector spaces. This is why the quotations coming from this type of LLM are not quotations, but synthetic products of a generative process. They are informed by the mappings, but the mappings never reach a true conclusion.

There are whole other layers that are called "AI", and it refers to adaptive reasoning. Reasoning here, refers to algorithms, invented by programmers, if you dig deep enough, down to the last turtle.

All of this is simply a machine amplification of a natural process of discovering something. What ARE those patterns with which we describe the human condition? I will testify that I have felt comforted to know that certain people back in history phrased ideas in ways that are close to my own, and which I understand implicitly.

Last point: knowing what it is, what it is not, is the key to interacting with it. The real culprits are those intending to use these tools to harm others. My view is that we should focus more on the culprits themselves, and consider less that the evil resides within the tool.

@http_error_418 @littlealex

You are absolutely correct. It was a slip of usage of language on my part. Once everyone understands your point, then it abbreviates things to put it like that.

I notice, very much, that "AI" is being sold as the illusion of what it is, rather than its real nature.

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As I see it, this is fraud. A lot of people will get their brains fried over this, unfortunately.

This level of fraud is occurring more and more in different realms, like in democratic governance.

If nothing else, it offers to those who see it an index on the health of the society.

Corruption builds the power of the corrupt. This is a re-entrant function. It will reach a level where something will break. Corruption at the top cannot reform itself. It must be dealt with my forces of integrity at lower levels, unless they have already been purged.