Welp, today I just got my first email from an AI company offering to train a ChatGPT-based language model on my books to help me with search and writing.
I told them if they did so I'd sue and that I hoped their business model was criminalized. ("Die in a fire" was merely implied.)
First of many, first of many: the bottom-feeding grifters have arrived.
You almost wish the Necronomicon was real and in the public domain... Imagine the possibilities:
Great news, Boss, our largest LLM has now achieved general sentience!!
Wow that's great!
But wait, there is more! Since we trained it on public domain sources, it has also achieved trans-dimesional awareness! It can communicate across space and time!
That is AMAZING! Wait, what is it doing right now?
Invoking an entity named Shub-Niggurath! Ain't that great?
If we ever do awaken one of the ancients, they're gonna rock up, salivating at devouring our souls, then hit some two factor authentication or a CAPTCHA ("Select all of the pictures that contain pictures of R'lyeh") and just fuck right back off to the unthinking depths. Soul's aint worth this horseshit.
@ParadeGrotesque@cstross Cue the hit new sitcom "Cthulu and Dorg" about a depressed unemployed elder god struggling with relevancy in a mythos skeptical present day, whose life is turned upside down when on the recommendation of his (its?) therapist, he rescues a talking puppy.
Spend some time poking around a site like e621. Then remember that people have at least tried to make any physically possible sex toy this would inspire. (e.g. A giant dragon's head/throat for vore play.)
@tezoatlipoca@ParadeGrotesque@cstross I would, in all fairness, trust the necronomicon far more in the hands of the archivists and librarians I know than pretty much anyone else.
I'm really enjoying this thread and all the comments.
Aside from all the Laundry Files goodness(??) of training an LLM on the Necronomnicon , my first thought went the other way.
Take the sleazy marketing pitch, and shove it in an Accelerondo-like sentient program. Go as meta as you like. A story about an author training their own LLM on their own work to co-author with their digital ghost. But it gets bought by a sentient software corporation entity and takes on a life of its own.
@pseudonym This might work if you posit actual artificial intelligence. (What we've got now that's being sold as such isn't intelligent—it's just autocorrect on steroids—which is what makes the current hype bubble so societally dangerous.)
I'm honestly more curious about what it implies about human intelligence, that "spicy auto complete" can do such a good job of mimicry of our speech and writing patterns.
It's actually less interesting to think about "intelligent machines" than it is to think about how mechanistic most of our communications are.
@pseudonym@cstross I read a study about the effect things like Gmail's canned responses and other next word suggestions are having on our communication -- they're ironing out variation and narrowing the ranges of words and phrases we use (at least in writing; can't recall if it looked at speech or not).
@pseudonym@cstross yeah, passing a Turing test isn't all that impressive, it turns out, and yet: lots of people kind of struggle at it. Like a driving exam for being a person...
@cstross@The_Turtle_Moves@pseudonym
Turns out Chess wasn't a demo of AI and works without it.
Turns out "Turing Test" is test of human gullibility. Read reactions to 1960s Eliza, later Racter, Parry ALICE etc.
Most so called AI is really specialist databases and pattern matching. AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks are all marketing terms.
We've not got a good definition of Intelligence. IQ tests don't measure it.
"Turing Machine" was brilliant work, but he hadn't a clue about intelligence.
Machine Learning refers to the broader set of techniques that includes (and is predominantly composed of) Neural Networks. Neural Networks is where we started building artificial intelligence by making software behave like a very rudimentary version of a brain.
The line with Machine Learning vs just basic heuristics is: when it becomes too complicated and "black box" for even experts to prove what exactly is happening.
It's also important to remind yourself: being able to explain how a conclusion was reached in no way disproves intelligence.
@shiri@pseudonym@cstross@The_Turtle_Moves
A SW/HW neural net is nothing like a biological brain. It's a data-flow process with data at the nodes.
The machine doesn't learn. It's given data.
One of the fundamental problems with the conversation around intelligence and the like is that the conversation goes nowhere unless we first acknowledge that we are essentially machines ourselves (just biological), and much of the process of developing AI is just trying to mimic the mechanisms that operate us, albeit crudely.
We call it a neural net because it's inspired by how neurons process and transfer information in our brains, so each of those data nodes is essentially a crude imitation of a neuron, plus a few iterations of development after we got it working in the first place to make it work better.
@shiri@pseudonym@cstross@The_Turtle_Moves
We don't know how a brain works.
Current AI does not mimic any biological process.
It's called a neural net for marketing reasons.
@raymccarthy@shiri@pseudonym@The_Turtle_Moves No, it's called a neural network because that's how they thought brains worked in the 1950s when they were first developed (see perceptrons, Minsky, et al). It's the "AI" tag that's marketing.
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