AI-23 - part #4 Reality

It is the nipples that will get us!

I started the first conversations about AI only days after ChatGPT 3 was released. The hype machine was still in low gear. When I turn on my Youtube today, I am drowning in AI propaganda. What I still need to find is a reasonable conversation about it. The closest I got to it was just a few days ago when I was watching an interview with Ruppert Sheldrake on the subject, ending in an impasse.
In the words of the interviewer: “I love the fact that we didn't really come to a conclusion but he certainly opened up the discussion” Well, he may have opened it, but the discussion didn’t really get anywhere.
They booth professed their beliefs and kept firmly hanging on to their original positions. Sheldrake’s formulation is self-organizing vs deterministic systems, which is both broader and more specific than what I was trying to say in the past few posts. Talking about it any more, however, would be a completely different subject.

This post is about the silly and the frightening.

Just take a look at the pictures above.  
What was most interesting in my search for fembot pictures for this post is how quickly the suggestions turned into very explicit, hard -core pornography, mostly the S&M submission kind. There seems to be a strange connection between the phantasies of sexually repressed geeks and robotics.

One must wonder if any of the geeks looking at the picture of this cisgenderly shaped robot on the left ever ponder the function of the high heels, the perfect tits and (mostly) the nipples on it? Solving this puzzle definitely requires more intelligence than I possess. Maybe I should ask someone clearly smarter than I am. Someone like David Shapiro, whose super power is crystal clear elucidation.
Now, seriously, look at him: A semi-coherent, self-declared genius pontificating about the future of the universe. In a Star Trek TNG captain’s uniform.
What you see below, is copied directly from his Youtube profile

My mission is simple: Help create Utopia with AI.
Crystal clear elucidation is my super power.
I use a transdisciplinary approach, synthesizing numerous disciplines including philosophy, history, evolution, coding, sociology, game theory, economics, and automation.
I define "Utopia" as a world where
(1) high standard of living for all humans,
(2) high social mobility for all humans, and
(3) high individual liberty for all humans.

The core of my work is the "heuristic imperatives": -
Reduce suffering in the universe
Increase prosperity in the universe
Increase understanding in the universe

Now compare him with Klaus Schwab in his galactic overlord costume and try to contain your despair. It seems obvious, that this younger version of Klaus Schwab would do anything to become the elder’s minion. And he is just one of the most obvious. The rest of the geeks are not much better.

I wanted to offer you a long list of references, but the list would be endless.  All you need to do is to type “AI” into Youtube search to get that list yourself. As the hype grows, so does the anthropomorphizing silliness.

We could have serious talks, we just don’t. The focus of the hype is emotions with some hope but mostly fear.  The lack of reasonable conversations should be a sign to show that something is fishy about the whole thing.
Why is all the focus on LLMs? Why not on engineering and scientific research?
Why is this (AI) an issue so suddenly?

We can see the linguistic parlor tricks and the kitschy images created by AI.
We can listen to the formulaic pop songs generated.
Maybe it is bad that I cannot tell the generated cliché apart from the original, but what is really bad that I cannot even tell apart one original cliché from another original cliché.

The problem is not generative AI, but the reality it is reflecting. A reality of manipulated language, the reality of heavy political bias, a reality of controlled speech and thought, a reality of increasing mediocrity, a reality that is in denial of reality itself.
Yes, I asked ChatGPT “what is a woman”. You can ask it too. Then probe the answer.

I tried Bing chat as well. I found them both mostly useless. By ‘mostly’, I mean more than 50% of the time. I did find some use for it. When I asked questions about language rules, about the origin of certain expressions or factual details of certain historical events or confirmation of sources of quotes, I got what I needed. I know people who use it for work, to generate certain types of documents. LLMs and Generative AI (in general) is not completely useless. It can be a welcome change to pedestrian search engines results returning an unmanageable amount of information weighted by the algorithms.  

But is that a good thing? Getting the ONE answer? The greatest danger of generative AI is the fact that we may grow reliant on it. That we may start trusting it.

Let me give you an example. I found a video with a catchy title:
The New World Order Is Here: Brace for the Collapse - Peter Zeihan
It stoke my interest because Peter Zeihan isn’t exactly a globalist.
The video came with a warning:

The phrase “New World Order” only appeared in the title. It was not the subject of the conversation. The words were not uttered once in the one-hour interview. The subject was demographics and its foreseeable effects on the world economy. The title is not a lie, but it does not refer to what Youtube/Wikipedia is objecting to.
And that is not even the problem. The problem is that the phrase is spoken of by every single Western leader as a great promise; as a positive necessity. Unless, of course, you want to question it, unless you are critical of it. Then it immediately turns into a conspiracy theory. How do we know? Because the de facto knowledge authority of the Internet, Wikipedia says so. And who is the biggest donor of Wikipedia?

You guessed it right: George Soros.
Next trick question: Who happens to be one of the latest alumni of the Young Global Leaders Forum?
One of the founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. (I’m sure you did not guess this one)
ChatGPT does not seem to know anything about it. When I ask, this is the answer:

As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there is no public record or credible evidence to suggest that George Soros or his charitable organizations have made direct donations to Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.

While George Soros is indeed involved in various philanthropic efforts through his charitable organizations, such as the Open Society Foundations, there is no known indication that these organizations have directly contributed to Wikipedia.

BingChat is a little more direct:

“I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. 🙏”

These two responses are typical of these two services:
ChatGPT is mostly deflecting and obfuscating (otherwise known as: bullshitting) while
Bing Chat just tell you to buzz off if you ask something it considers to be out of line.

I tried the image generators as well. I wanted to have a generated image on the top of this post. A robotic bull sh*tting. My request was refused. It would have been funny as hell. I got as far as the robotic bull, which was just a robot-like stylized replica of the Wall Street statue.
I also asked (for a previous post) to create an image of Dr Evil and Mini Me with the faces of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari. That request was also rejected. (I still wonder why…..)

As I am writing this, I feel a terrible weight on my chest. This is terrifying.
This whole project has nothing to do with intelligence, it has nothing to do with knowledge. It is all about control. In a way, we are witnessing the undoing of the Guttenberg revolution.

When nefarious actors can buy full control over our collective civilizational knowledge and can control our access to it, we are doomed.

The point of the debate over artificial intelligence is to normalize the idea that internet search engines will be replaced by a system that will provide a single answer to every question. You will no longer have to trouble yourself with the selection and evaluation of different sources. The answer will be evaluated for you by an absolutely impartial AI algorithm. It will be fact-checked, it will follow the science, it will represent the correct understanding of whatever the subject is. And your questions will be recorded, just to make sure that you can be properly educated if you ask the wrong, or impertinent one.  
We can be certain, that we will always have the correct answer, because if the facts, the science, the correct understanding changes, it will be replaced seamlessly by the correct understanding and you will not even have to know that it was ever any different.

It will be worse than 1984, and the likes of Klaus Schwab and his minions, much like David Shapiro with his superpower for elucidation, will be in control of it.
This is the reality of artificial intelligence. The conversations about general intelligence and the singularity are the pink gas coming out of the fembots’ nipples to put us to sleep.

Is this sad, pathetic, frightening or just ridiculous?

Let me know!

You could also restack, reference and recommend!
Let's keep feeding the algorithm!

Further reading (more from me)

• Artificial Intelligence vs. Programmed Stupidity

• AI is no match for natural stupidity
  You can find a long list of references at the end this post

• The anatomy of fear porn utopias

• AI-23 an exploratory surgery - part #1

• AI-23 - part#2 epistemology

• AI-23 - part #3 promises and dangers

• Hollywood and AI