Artificial Intelligence

We knew this a while ago already. Anyone who has done a Google search in the last year can tell you this.

ye olde dead internet theory

This, more than anything else, is what really worries me about AI. Ignoring all the other myriad worries about AI models such as using peoples' works without consent, the ethics of deepfakes and trivial creation of misinformation, the devastation of creative professions, and the massive carbon footprint, the fundamental truth is that all the creative output of humanity means something. Everything has some form of purpose, some intention behind it, even if that intention is trivial. AI generated material has no such meaning behind it, just what its own probability table says should go next. In other words, this lack of meaning in AI content arises because AI has no understanding of the world around it--It has no ability to perform deductive reasoning. That flaw has untold implications:

• It cannot say "no" of its own volition because it has no understanding of the concept. This results in behavior where if you tell it 'Don't use emojis' or 'Don't call me that name' an LLM will basically ignore the "don't" and its probability table just processes "use emojis" or "use this name" and it starts flooding its responses with the very thing you told it not to do. This flaw is misinterpreted as the LLM "bullying" the user.

• It has no ability to determine right from wrong, or true from false. This is why if there are no guardrails an LLM will happily create CSAM material or disinformation, or cite nonexistent cases in legal briefings, or invent nonexistent functions in code, or any of the myriad of behaviors we collectively refer to as hallucinations. It's also why all the attempts by OpenAI and other companies to fix these issues are fatally flawed--without a foundation of deductive reasoning and the associated understanding, any attempts to prevent this behavior results in a cat-and-mouse game where bad actors find loophole after loophole, solved by more and more patches. I also suspect that these tweaks are gradually degrading the performance of chatbots more and more over time, producing an effect similar to Robocop 2 when OCP overwrites RoboCop's 3 directives with 90+ focus-grouped rules, producing a wholly toothless and ineffective automaton.

• Related to the above, and as discussed in the linked article, LLMs are effectively useless at determining the accuracy of a statement that is outside of its training data. (Hell, I would argue that it's also suspect for the purpose of summarizing text and anything it summarizes should be double checked by a human, at which point you're saving so little time you may as well do it yourself.) This makes the use of AI in scientific review particularly horrifying--while human peer review is far from perfect, it at least has some ability to catch flawed science.

• Finally, AI has no volition of its own, no will. Because LLMs lack deductive reasoning, it cannot act without being directed to do so by a human. It cannot spontaneously decide to write a story, or strike up a conversation, or post to social media, or write a song, or make a video. That spontaneity--that desire to make a statement--is the essence of meaning.

The most telling sign of this flaw is that generative AI has no real null state. When you ask an AI to do something, it will do it, even if the output is completely nonsensical (ignoring the edge cases where you run afoul of the guardrails, and even that is more the LLM saying yes to its safeguard than it is saying no to you). Theoretically, AI is just a tool for human use, and it's on the human using AI to verify the value of the AI's output. In practice, nobody really does this outside of the "prompt engineers" making AI images (I refuse to call it art), because it runs headfirst into the wider problem of it taking too damn long to review by hand.

The end result is that all of the flood of this AI content is meaningless, and overwhelming the output of actual humans making actual statements with intention and meaning behind them. Even the 90% of content humans make that Sturgeon's Law says is worthless has more meaning and value than the dreck AI is flooding the world with.

AI is robbing our collective culture of meaning. It's absorbing all of the stuff we've made, and using it to drown out everything of value, crowding out actual creative human beings and forcing them out of our collective culture. It's destroying the last shreds of shared truth that our culture had remaining. The deluge of AI content is grinding the system we built up over the last century to share new scientific research to a halt, like oil sludge in an automobile engine. It's accelerating an already prevalent problem I've observed of cultural freeze, where new, original material cannot compete with established properties, resulting in pop culture being largely composed of remakes of older material and riffs on existing stories; for, if in a few years, 99% of creative work is AI generated trash, and humans cannot compete against the flood of meaningless dreck and automated, AI-driven content theft, why would anyone make anything new, or pay attention to anything made after 2023?

The worst part of all this is that I cannot fathom a way to fix this, except the invention of AGI and the literal end of the value of human labor. While it would be nice if humanity collectively woke up and realized AI is a dangerous scam, the odds of this are nearly impossible, and there will always be someone who will abuse AI.

There's only two possible outcomes at this point: either the complete collapse of our collective culture under the weight of trash AI content, or the utopia of self-directed, coherent, meaningful AI content.

...Inb4 the AI techbros flood this thread with "nuh-uh" responses.