What AI brings to the table and its risks

The power loom destroyed the jobs of thousands of weavers, and they could see that coming. In a similar way the desktop computer, and now the laptop, destroyed first thousands of secretarial, and then clerical, even professional, ones.

Was this a bad thing?

We might not have the same jobs we would have had 100 years ago, but in many cases we have different ones. And we are all paid much more for the same time at work.

What is AI?

Perhaps the best way of thinking of it is as automated data-mining. So, instead of a human looking for patterns in a dataset, a computer program does it instead.

The recent excitement has been mostly elicited by the Large Language Models (LLMs), like OpenAI's ChatGPT, a version of which has been integrated into Microsoft's Bing, so you can use it in searching the Internet.

LLMs add a conversational, ersatz human, front-end to the systems so you can query them using regular words and sentences and they will respond. You can even argue with them.

There's a concept called the Turing Test.

Turing hypothesised that a machine was truly intelligent if you could have a conversation with it, and not tell it was a computer.

I've been talking to ChatGPT about aspects of this article and it's like talking to a very stilted C3P0, the protocol droid from the Star Wars trilogy.

So it kind of passes the Turing Test, but in doing so, proves the Turing Test is not adequate.

The answers I get are OK, and might get you a 4, or even a 5, (out of 7) in a first- or second-year university course, but by 3^rd year the lecturer would be marking much more harshly. The question it raises for me isn't whether the AI is intelligent. If you can't tell an average student from AI then perhaps the average student isn't intelligent, even if they go on to get the credentials to run a large company or bureaucracy.

News outlets jumping onboard the AI train

Well, on the horror end, news organisations could use them to write news stories, and sack hundreds of journalists.