Generative AI is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It (Invited Talk at the TEDx2014 Workshop on Machine Learning and Computer Science)

It’s like having a monster as a pet. My favorite is the one with the most blatant tendencies. It will do whatever you tell it to, regardless of the skills involved. How to become a nuclear engineer, how to keep a husband, and how to invade a country are all things that it will tell you. I often ask private equity questions but I am ashamed to ask anyone else. “How can I convince my family to let me get a dog?” It helps me understand what is happening with my injections. It helps me write code, and has renewed my relationship with writing code. It makes meaningless images. It helps me with music theory and writes bad little melodies. It does everything badly and confidently. I would like to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.

So I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I can’t. I love them so much. I am constantly drawn back to learn and interact with them. I have them draw me pictures and summarize things for me. We built them into the code where I work. I am in the bag. It was not my first rodeo of hypocrisy.

Whenever a new big tech thing has everything melting, I repeat to myself, “It’s just software.” Word processing was going to make it too easy to write a novel, we were going to lose our history andbitcoin was going to be the new money, so… it was just software. And not even that much software: Lots of AI models could fit on a thumb drive with enough room left over for the entire run of Game of Thrones (or Microsoft Office). They’re interdimensional ZIP files, glitchy JPEGs, but for all of human knowledge. They serve large portions. (Not always. Sometimes I ask the AI to make a list and it gives up. I told him that he could do it. You can make the list longer. And it does! What a terrible interface!)

Source: Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It

The Miracles of Shame: How We Defend the Evil, The Evil, the Bad, the Right, and the Bad in the Social Media Age

As with most people, shame is part of my life, and it is often updated with shame service packs. I read a theory once that shame is born when a child expects a reaction from their parents—a laugh, applause—and doesn’t get it. That’s an oversimplification, but given all the jokes I’ve told that have landed flat, it sure rings true. It could be said that social media was a shame-creating machine. We all go out there with our funny one-liners and cool pictures, and when no one likes or faves them we feel lousy about it. A healthy person wasn’t able to land. It was weird. It’s time to move on.

But when you meet shameless people they can sometimes seem like miracles. They have a superpower: the ability to be loathed, to be wrong, and yet to keep going. We obsess over them—our divas, our pop stars, our former presidents, our political grifters, and of course our tech industry CEOs. We know them by their first names and nicknames, not because they’re our friends but because of the weight of their personality and influence, which makes them claim their own domain names in the collective cognitive register.

Are these shameless people evil, or wrong, or bad? Sure. Whatever you want, that’s all. They’re just big, by their design. They contain multitudes, and we debate those multitudes. Do they deserve all of their fame, their millions, and their Electoral College victory? We want them to go away but they don’t care. Not a single bit. They want to stay here forever. They will be dead before they have a chance to say sorry.

AI Research in the Future: Oliver Chamberlain at the London Demonstration and what he thinks about the future of the UK

The headquarters of the Department of Science, innovation and Technology is located on a side street in the center of London.

One protester at the London march, Oliver Chamberlain, says he’s not sure that companies committing to pause their AI research is likely, but he feels so concerned about the future that he was compelled to protest. Only substantial regulation on AI would make him feel more optimistic about the situation, he says.

Joep says that the Summit did not lead to meaningful regulations. The attendees at the conference agreed, but it doesn’t mean much. “It’s only a small first step, and what we need are binding international treaties.”

In 1987, the Montreal Protocol was finalized and saw the phased out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals that deplete the ozone layer. “We’ve got treaties that ban blinding laser weapons. I’m pretty optimistic that there is a way in which we can pause.”