TL;DR: The discipline of philosophy has a concern for history which stymies the use of LLM-driven chatbots.
Continue reading “Philosophy and the robot overlords”Tag: ai
Slop by numbers
I started to write a post about Open AI’s drop of more than 700 AI-generated math papers, but I got distracted by something else. In the meantime, they’ve started to unravel.
Continue reading “Slop by numbers”AI alignment
AI alignment is the project of making AI so that it won’t kill us or sell us out. A naïve conception adds a constitution or statement of principles, basically one more document to start the prompt for an LLM’s linguistic riffing. That makes the mistake of thinking that the danger is superintelligent or rogue AI, as if the AI are people who need to be raised to know the difference between right and wrong. The real danger is systems people don’t understand (used carelessly) or systems that people do understand (used maliciously). Like all problems of technology, it is a social problem that is simultaneously about people and about machines.
But really this post is just an excuse for the meme.
On AI at the APA
Over at the blog of the American Philosophical Association, I rant a bit about how using chatbots shirks the work of philosophical writing and reading. You can read it over there (by clicking the link) or here (below the fold).
It’s part of the APA’s AI and Teaching series. Thanks to Will Fraker, who edits the series, for some helpful pushback on bits here and there.
Continue reading “On AI at the APA”Somebody gets it
Higher education at its best is teaching students how to think, how to feel, how to tell the truth, how to observe the difference between fact and fiction. And then take those skills and apply them wherever their career leads.
Nicholas Urie1
The inevitable next level
In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”
As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.
Continue reading “The inevitable next level”Turing cycles
In a short article at Nature, Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and Dave Danks argue that current AI has general intelligence.2 I think that their argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.3 On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.
Continue reading “Turing cycles”E-scatology
My paper Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit (with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz) has been accepted at the journal AI and Ethics.
Updated drafts with ten different coauthors
Updated drafts posted in the last few weeks:
* Who’s sorry now: User preferences among Rote, Empathic, and Explanatory apologies from LLM chatbots, with Zahra Ashktorab, Alessandra Buccella, Jason D’Cruz, Zoë Fowler, Andrew Gill, Kei Leung, John Richards, and Kush R. Varshney4
* Chatbot apologies: Beyond bullshit, with Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz
* Music genres as historical individuals, with Emmie Malone and Brandon Polite
Higher-order bullshit
Three snapshot applications of AI:
During early phases of the war in Gaza, the Israeli military used software to select bombing targets on a scale that would not have been possible for human analysts.5
During the Trump administration’s initial attack on the federal government, there was lots of nonsense about how Elon Musk and DOGE were using software to identify waste. House Speaker Mike Johnson commented that Musk has “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data, and… the data doesn’t lie.”6
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commissioned a report with the ridiculous title “Make America Healthy Again.”7 It turns out that many of the citations in the study are erroneous, including references to articles which simply do not exist. Incorrectly citing things and misrepresenting results is plausibly human malfeasance or incompetence, but totally inventing sources suggests chatbot hallucination.
The wrongs committed here are morally different, and I don’t want to suggest a false equivalence. But each of these cases provides a specimen of how reliance on AI has been used to further dangerous agendas. Yet the reliance on AI is really just a sideshow.
Continue reading “Higher-order bullshit”