A realistic take on AI

AI doesn't exist but it will ruin everything anyway is the most important thing I've seen this month. I strongly suggest you watch it.

AI... The technology itself is good, but now it will be and is being abused. The name "artificial intelligence" is wrong because the thing lacks intelligence; we should probably just say "large neural network".

It translates well (when there is context), it can rewrite existing text well, and it can explain linguistic issues well. In a word, it "languages" well - but it does everything else badly.

Current AI has no experience of reality: it can't see, listen, feel... it can't even calculate, it makes mistakes in very simple arithmetic.

The missing functions should then become subsystems: a specialized visual system, a specialized auditory system, an arithmetic system, etc. But integrating those subsystems into the language subsystem will be a nightmarish task, because it is a black box, meaning no one can understand why and how it works inside. Thus, a neural network that produces images makes mistakes in the number of fingers, written content in outdoors etc. It can be trained, but correcting it and fixing mistakes are very difficult things.

Creative AI efforts are ludicrous. Its jokes are not funny. Its images are completely derivative. Its music is simplistic, ugly and it feels random, like it's going nowhere. This has 2 causes:

1. Because the AI has no experience of the world, it has no worldview, which is a most important component of all art. In other words, AI has nothing to say.
2. The only thing we can do with a neural network is to train it, but no Mozart is the result of training.

Although results are despicable, they will use "AI art" to save costs - they never liked to pay for art. Thus the taste of the general public will become even worse than it already is. Entertainment has always been the art that rejects the responsibilities of art: leave your brain at the door, grab the popcorn, and forget the movie 5 minutes after it's over. Now the responsibilities of art will finally be completely set aside, because the producer has no idea of what it is like to be human.

Current optimism on the future of AI is as erroneous as ever. The AI field has seen very few revolutions. Solving the above problems will require lots of new breakthroughs. Right now people are talking as if the singularity were upon us... In fact, HAL 9000 is nowhere near – decisions made by AI are not pure, ethical and logical; they are even more full of prejudice than human decisions. Understandably, since AI is so stupid right now.

Also, AI will forever be weird, like any baby who could write before it could crawl.

There is an enormous bubble in the valuation of this tech and it will burst just like the previous ones.

Doubt on the previous conclusions arises from the fact that tech giants are spending literally trillions of dollars to overcome these limitations. When that kind of effort is spent, problems tend to be solved! For instance, above I wrote (in April) that AI is bad at math. In July, a couple of models already exist that are good at math.

However, problems also exist that might not be solved by short-term research. For instance, the ludicrous amount of energy required to run AI systems. Or the fact that those companies have already run out of human knowledge that they could steal to use for neural network training.

So on one hand, AI is only getting more powerful, never less. On the other hand, to imagine that the current approach – LLMs on silicon – doesn't have hard limitations... would be silly.

Anyway, as the video pointed out first, AI will still fuck everything up. Video and audio will no longer be proof! An entire series of books can be written about this alone.

Companies already misuse AI to make decisions even while knowing it cannot be trusted to make decisions. For instance, HR departments right now are misusing AI to filter resumés. As a result, now resumés have to undergo a sort of SEO, otherwise they are discarded by misused tech and never reach a human. This is distopic enough for me already, thank you very much. If people will have zero chance of finding a job unless they lie in their CV, then it is a scheme that turns everyone into liars.

Google Translate has definitely made the translation method of Unua Libro obsolete. Now we use Translate instead of Esperanto keys, of course! However, Esperanto will definitely survive AI translation systems because using these is only appropriate in the most formal circumstances. People still want to talk directly to each other, without a translation delay.