Okay, panic
This isn’t politics. Or is it?
A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product.
Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times:
As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)
Kevin Roose fretted:
These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
Take a stress pill, Dave
Could the onset of dystopia be like the boiling frogs tale happening under our noses? A significant segment of the U.S. population is prepared to believe a demented former president when he says that, due to alleged rampant flight delays in our “failing nation,”stranded travelers, like the homeless, are erecting tent camps on the concourses.
One imagines a near-future in which friendly jingles from the marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics announce “Your Digital Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.”
Clinically depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, with his Genuine People Personality furnished by Sirius Cybernetics, turned out just a bit too genuine. Yes, hallucinatory AIs are real enough that programmers must advertise that they’ve got the bugs worked out.
Introducing the First Hallucination-Free LLM
Exclusive: Alembic debuts hallucination-free AI for enterprise data analysis and decision support
BMW showed off hallucination-free AI at CES 2024
These boasts aren’t very reassuring.
How do we know we won’t be the first up against the wall when the cyber-revolution comes? Or Project 2025? And Congress hasn’t a clue what to do about them. Members were that close to being up against the wall on Jan. 6 and have done little to prevent a recurrence.
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