this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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James Cameron on AI: "I warned you guys in 1984 and you didn't listen"::undefined

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[–] [email protected] 136 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (38 children)

It's getting old telling people this, but... the AI that we have right now? 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 a truth and a lie, and it doesn't know what a finger is. It just paints amalgamations of things it's already seen, or throws together things that seem common to it— with no filter nor sense of "that can't be correct".

I'm not saying there's nothing to be afraid of concerning today's "AI", but it's not comparable to movie/book AI.

Edit: 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. If you don't know what today's "AI" is, then please stop assuming about what it is. Your imagination is way more interesting than what we actually have right now. This is why we should have never called what we have now "AI" in the first place— same reason we should never have called things "black holes". You take a misnomer and your imagination goes wild, and none of it is factual.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

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".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I 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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Strong AI vs weak AI.

We’re a far cry from real AI

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Isn't that also referred to as Virtual Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence? What we have now I'd just very well trained VI. It's not AI because it only outputs variations of what's it been trained using algorithms, right? Actual AI would be capable of generating information entirely distinct from any inputs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I dunno, James. Pretty sure Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury had more clear warnings years prior to Terminator.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Maybe harlan ellison too

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

What a pompous statement. Stories of AI causing trouble like this predate him by decades. He's never told an original story, they're all heavily based on old sci-fi stories. And exactly how were people supposed to "listen"? "Jimmy said we shouldn't work on AI, we all need to agree as a species to never do that. Thank you for saving us all Prophet Cameron!"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

First he warned us about ai and nobody listened then he warned the submarine guy and he didn't listen. We have to listen to him about the giant blue hippy aliens or we'll all pay.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

In fact, what is happening now sounds a lot more like Colossus: The Forbin Project (came out in 1970) than The Terminator.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

IIRC the original idea for the Terminator was for it to have the appearance of a regular guy on the street, the horror arising from the fact that anyone around you could actually be an emotionless killer.

They ended up getting a 6 foot Austrian behemoth that could barely speak english. One of the greatest films ever made.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

An evil 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger with guns would be terrifying AF even if it wasn't an AI robot from the future.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is really turning out like the 'satanic panic' of the 80's all over again.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I warned everyone about James Cameron in 1983 and no one listened

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

James Cameron WOULD make this about James Cameron.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Well duh, it's James Cameron

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Here's the thing. The Terminator movies were a warning against government/army AI. Actually slightly before that I guess wargames was too. But, honestly I'm not worried about military AI taking over.

I think if the military setup an AI, they would have multiple ways to kill it off in seconds. I mean, they would be in a more dangerous position to have an AI "gone wild". But not because of the movies, but because of how they work, they would have a lot of systems in place to mitigate disaster. Is it possible to go wrong? Yes. Likely? No.

I'm far more worried about the geeky kid that now has access to open source AI that can be retasked. Someone that doesn't understand the consequences of their actions fully, or at least can't properly quantify the risks they're taking. But, is smart enough to make use of these tools to their own end.

Some of you might still be teenagers, but those that aren't, remember back. Wouldn't you potentially think it'd be cool to create an auto gpt or some form of adversarial AI with an open ended success criteria that are either implicitly dangerous and/or illegal, or are broad enough to mean the AI will see the easiest path to success is to do dangerous and/or illegal things to reach its goal. You know, for fun. Just to see if it would work.

I'm not convinced the AI is quite there yet to be dangerous, or maybe it is. I've honestly not kept close tabs on this. But, when it does reach that level of maturity, a lot of the tools are still open source, they can be modified, any protections removed "for the lols" or "just to see what it can do" and someone without the level of control a government/military entity has could easily lose control of their own AI. That's what scares me, not a Joshua or Skynet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The biggest risk of AI at the moment is the same posed by the Industrial Revolution: Many professions will become obsolete, and it might be used as leverage to impose worse living conditions over those who still have jobs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a real concern. In the long run it will likely backfire. AI needs human input to work. If it starts getting other AI fed as its input, things will start to go bad in a fairly short order. Also, that is another point. Big business is likely another probable source of runaway AI. I trust business use of AI less than anyone else.

There's also a critical mass to unemployment to which revolution is inevitable. There would likely be UBI and an assured standard of living when we get close to that, and you'd be able to try to make extra money from your passion. I don't doubt that corporations will happily dump their employees for AI at a moment's notice once it's proved out. Big business is extremely predictable in that sense. Zero forward planning beyond the current quarter. But I have some optimism that some common sense would prevail from some source, and they'd not just leave 50%+ of the population to die slowly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The army loves a chain of command. I don't see this changing with AI. The army just putting AI in the commander's seat and letting it roll just doesn't sound credible to me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm not afraid of Ai, I'm afraid of greedy capitalist mfs who owns the AI.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

He seems like the average reddit user raises nose

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

scene: a scrap yard, full of torn-up cars

in a flash, a square-looking and muscular man appears

he walks into a bar, and when confronted by an angry biker he punches him in the face and steals his clothes & aviator sunglasses

scene: the square-looking man walks into an office and confronts a scared-looking secretary

Square man: I am heyah to write fuhst drafts of movie scripts and make concept aht!

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