When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?
It’s a fucking Chinese Room, Real AI is not possible. We don’t know what makes humans think, so of course we can’t make machines do it.
You forgot the ever important asterisk of “yet”.
Artificial General Intelligence (“Real AI”) is all but guaranteed to be possible. Because that’s what humans are. Get a deep enough understanding of humans, and you will be able to replicate what makes us think.
Barring that, there are other avenues for AGI. LLMs aren’t one of them, to be clear.
I actually don’t think a fully artificial human like mind will ever be built outside of novelty purely because we ventured down the path of binary computing.
Great for mass calculation but horrible for the kinds of complex pattern recognitions that the human mind excels at.
The singularity point isn’t going to be the matrix or skynet or AM, it’s going to be the first quantum device successfully implanted and integrated into a human mind as a high speed calculation sidegrade “Third Hemisphere.”
Someone capable of seamlessly balancing between human pattern recognition abilities and emotional intelligence while also capable of performing near instant multiplication of matrices of 100 entries of length in 15 dimensions.
is all but guaranteed to be possible
It’s more correct to say it “is not provably impossible.”
I don’t think the Chinese room is a good analogy for this. The Chinese room has a conscious person at the center. A better analogy might be a book with a phrase-to-number conversion table, a couple number-to-number conversion tables, and finally a number-to-word conversion table. That would probably capture transformer’s rigid and unthinking associations better.
