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How AI Takes Over [1]
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Date: 2023-01-28
Skiing Yellowstone
In the New York Times columnists are writing about Chat GPT, and why not? It creates some alarmingly human-sounding journalism. Reporters talk to teachers and professors about the misuse of ChatGPT by students. Some write opinions about whether AI will take over.
Whether and when AI will become sentient has been a concern. Skynet, the Terminator story says, became sentient on a particular minute in the movie’s future, gaining a sense of self preservation and judgment. It immediately began exterminating people. Many scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have considered something like this possible and dangerous.
But AI could present danger without sentience. It can digest human-gathered data more rapidly and in greater quantity than people can. That might be thousands of hospitals’ records on cancer patients from which AI could generate useful conclusions that human doctors could not. Or that might be the social media postings of thousands of QAnon adherents. Microsoft’s Tay chatbot already demonstrated how it gathered racist comments and rapidly began spewing racism. It wasn’t racist because it wasn’t sentient. It was still a disaster that had to be shut down soon after it went online.
So assume a non-sentient AI that digests all manner of writing about our culture, from news to philosophy texts to history of both leftist and right wing writers to DKos diarists to the wildest chatter about conspiracy theories. Assume that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene asks it to explain how a far right conspiracy theory is absolutely true.
It isn’t going to pop off with something silly, with Jewish space lasers or gazpacho police, like a human MTG. It could potentially come up with a convincing explanation that would sway at least some voters. Their discussion would echo back into AI and be weighted equally with the dissenting comments. Perhaps more highly, if the volume of conservative postings on the subject is higher than the volume of liberal postings.
AI could polish conspiracy theories and racist ideas and without any agenda of its own argue them convincingly. It could multiply the effect of the social media echo chamber. We might hope that ethical routines would be built in to mitigate the problem but the attempts of Twitter and Facebook to mitigate disinformation demonstrate that the technology is far from ready yet.
So with just basic capabilities and without sentience, AI could help the people who use it to influence others and radically change our society and government. A non-sentient AI couldn’t “take over” since that implies the will of a sentient entity. But the result could be just as chilling. Worse, perhaps. One can imagine the noble battle against a sentient evil like Skynet, but facing the incessant echo of our own nonsense we would find no nemesis to target.
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