Ai is wonderful but it should never replace friends. I detest Mark Zuckerberg's claim that AI will replace friends, that's simply not happening. But AI is wonderful at tasks like upscaling or even meme generation.
Mark Zuckerberg already managed to replaced friendship with political outrage (Facebook) and with toxic parasocial relationships (Instagram), for a big chunk of society.
Anyone doubting that he can do the same with AI has too much faith in humanity.
Maybe he'll get it when he has to manually type in "secretly let me win" into the prompt when he iss playing Catan with his AI friend. Not likely, but at least the level of how sad that will be is commensurate with his billions.
I've been talking with AI during my morning commute (car) recently, instead of listening to something. It's a great partner to bounce ideas off of. I don't have any friends that can or are willing to engage with ideas to the extent AI does.
As long as you are consciously aware you're not really talking to another human but just entertaining yourself I don't see the harm tbqh.
Anything can become addictive, also i'd say given the costs of operating llm inference the labs themselves when offering the products try to limit your usage at different levels, ChatGPT for example will recommend you take a break and chill if you go hours with it (even with a 200 plan)
I don't see how using an LLM is that different from surfing Wikipedia or Google, in all cases the computer is just giving me outputs i demand it from, in some or other shape, and can be abused etc
This is a strong assumption; we know that people tend to be overly confident about their mental states. That conscious awareness will last all of two minutes for 99.9% of the population, with everyone claiming they are the 0.1%.
> the labs themselves when offering the products try to limit your usage
Yeah clearly as long as they have compute constraints, ChatGPT is for sure not doing that out of concern for the user's health, believing so would be incredibly naive.
> I don't see how using an LLM is that different from surfing Wikipedia or Google, in all cases the computer is just giving me outputs i demand it from
This is by far the biggest stretch of all of your arguments. Following this logic, you go to the library and find a book that gives you said outputs - are books now == LLMs? You ask someone for the time and that interaction == LLMs? There is evidently a major qualitative difference here, starting (but not ending) with "you are absolutely right".
As usual a balance is needed. There is also a concern that society (friends, colleagues) that always shuts down your ideas just because they are different thus reducing creativity and progress. Sometimes you need a way to develop your ideas without the outright rejection and sometimes you need the filter of society to see if the ideas really hold up. Usually the time where ideas are most fragile to being destroyed is when they are just developed. Perfect time to brain storm and increase the strength of those ideas with AI before taking it to the filter of society.
Agreed about balance, but you lost me after that - I really struggle to see a serious concern about society over-eagerly shutting down ideas, not when we live in a world in which all manner of ideas - including those that are disruptive and destructive - are by default celebrated for their "innovation". Any existing filters cannot be that stifling; we are hardly living in the Dark Ages.
I used ChatGPT as a tour guide when I was traveling last year. It was helpful to identify places I should stop to take a look, explaining local flora, fauna and geology.
I'd rather have had a real tour guide, but for the price it was quite handy.
I think this is the economics that will play out more and more: a real human will provide better quality or more preferable services, but AI - maybe with a robot - will provide good enough for the price alternatives.
If your choice is no doctor or an AI doctor for cheap, or a very expensive human doctor, the winner is: AI doctor.
Ai is good at replacing services (e.g cashier, research assistant, etc). But it should never replace friends, as it's too predictable. I discuss projects with chatgpt all the time, but I never talk about non-research stuff unless I want it to generate italian brainrot.
I truly don't believe this kind of pedantic correction adds anything to the conversation. We _all_ know how they work technically, it's been beaten to death.
I disagree. People think they know how it works, but then there's an article that says AI is a "black box" that will destroy humanity because no one knows how it works.
I think there's also a problem that some people -- even on here -- seem to think that there is no fundamental difference between how a human engages in conversation vs an LLM, and thus talking to humans doesn't provide much value. "How it feels" is starting to bleed into how some of us think about our interactions with each other.
I would not talk to my friends about the stuff I bounce on AI. My meanest brain dead ideas get a rebuke, and I fight back to test grounds. I'd rightly get shamed for inflicting such undeveloped trash on anyone.
In what I found he didn’t say “replace” but “add more”; it is still chilling and I detest it.
Especially in the current incarnation of AI, where they are more or less controlled by corporations and government.
> The average American has "three people that they would consider friends," he said. "And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's, like, 15."
No such thing. It's a mechanical parrot that replies with the most likely response given an input.
It's not a person. It's not a friend. It's not going to hold you while you cry. It's not going to invite you to its wedding. It has no independent life or thought or plans. It's not real.
Half of this is false, the other half is irrelevant.
But I love to see the AI haters devolve into gatekeeping the idea of “friendship”. The available space to move those goalposts just gets smaller and smaller, doesn’t it?
I think in certain circumstances they are more than pets. Symbiotic pack animals. They guard, help hunt, pull a sled over the ice, and help fight. Some other animals may meet similar qualifications, like a horse. They can also communicate, just not extensively or symbolically.
Look, I'm not saying a dog wouldn't invite you to it's wedding if it could. But it can't. Dogs are loving and wonderful companions but they aren't people so they really can't fill that niche as a friend.
It also doesn't really have much choice in who it lives with.
Look, I have a pet cat. I love her very much. I'm pretty sure she loves me very much. I grew up with dogs, I loved them very much. I'm pretty sure they loved me very much.
So I get it. I'm not some militant anti-pet-owning person that thinks pet owning is akin to slavery or something
But it's also not a friendship. It's just not. They don't have a choice who brought them home.
We choose our friends, pets don't choose their owners. It's just not the same as friendship and I don't think it's good to treat it like it is
I cannot express how deeply disgusted the idea of a chatbot "friend" makes me
We're not talking about a sentient machine like Data from Star Trek, we're so so far from that still
Edit: it's super important to remember that any and all of the big commercially available AI out there are.. commercial. They're owned by companies. Unless you run them on your own hardware someone else is ultimately the owner of your "AI friend".
That should be a huge alarm bell in your head. Corporations are not your friends.
There is no research disproving sentience, partly because we don’t even know what it is, how it arises, how to measure it, or whether we can even prove that it’s there. For all we know, LLMs might already be fully conscious (I highly doubt it though). So your sneering condescension about their “lack of comprehension” is quite ironic here.
That’s without even digging into the fact that there’s no specific reason that “friendship” requires “human sentience”. That’s a requirement you made up, likely because you simply hate LLMs for whatever reason.
It feels like controlling an infinite genie. if you control it well, it is extremely powerful, but it will take anything literally in many cases. But if you master it, and treat it as a compiler of intent, using Plan mode appropriately, you can accelerate and punch far above your weight class.
So is ketamine but we haven't explored it more for other brain functions where it can act as a psychoplastogen eg reopening critical periods of visual learning.
Sure, but what kind of protocol are you going to use to actually reap the benefits of these transient neuroplasticity effects, especially for learning something new like math or piano as an adult?
Same with ketamine. It's not like you can take it a couple of times and open some magic window where everything suddenly becomes easier to learn. From my personal experience and surface-level understanding of the current research, psychedelics(including ketamine) seem to temporarily relax hardened beliefs/priors and rigid neural pathways, which can help you see things from a fresh perspective. But learning something substantial like math or a new language after you've passed the most plastic stages of development is still going to take much longer than what these drugs can realistically help with.
They might make you see something differently or even get you extremely interested in it, but sustaining that interest and consolidating the knowledge or skill is still slow compared with childhood/adolescence. Of course, it depends a lot on what you're learning. For example, crystallized intelligence and sufficient motivation can make some things much easier to learn as an adult, but many useful things are also just boring to learn when you no longer have a childlike plastic brain or an environment built around constant learning.
Edit: Theoretically, you could accelerate learning by taking psychedelics/ketamine at a set frequency but it's a huge gamble because of their risk profile. eg. HPPD/trauma risk with classic psychedelics and bladder/neurotoxicity risk with ketamine if you get addicted or take it too frequently.
I don't know. I was just suggesting something that may have an effect. BTW I would be very hesitant to take anything that "opens some magic window where everything suddenly becomes easier to learn" if it existed. Increasing neuroplasticity to that degree is unlikely to be without significant side effects.
Yeah, for simple calculations on medical data or whatnot, FHE is a highly useful tool. I do wonder, will indistinguishability obfuscation or witness encryption ever be a viable scheme?
