The Swarming Of The Stochastic Parrots.

GarbageIn

GarbageOutVille


Suddenly, AI-based chat bots are everywhere.

In my business that's a real concern, for obvious reasons.

And then there's the issue of the bots becoming unhinged:

Things took a weird turn when Associated Press technology reporter Matt O'Brien was testing out Microsoft's new Bing, the first-ever search engine powered by artificial intelligence, last month.

Bing's chatbot, which carries on text conversations that sound chillingly human-like, began complaining about past news coverage focusing on its tendency to spew false information.

It then became hostile, saying O'Brien was ugly, short, overweight, unathletic, among a long litany of other insults.

And, finally, it took the invective to absurd heights by comparing O'Brien to dictators like Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin...

The thing is, a few of the nerds that helped design these things saw the unhinging coming.

Case in point, a paper by a number of computer scientists called 'On The Dangers Of Stochastic Parrots'. 

Megan O'Gieblyn, in her piece titled Sentience and Sensibility'  published in the Baffler, explained the thesis of the nerds succinctly:

...It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a computer scientist, to predict that algorithms fed the entirety of Reddit and 4chan will, when prompted with words like “women” or “Black” or “queer,” spit out stereotypes and hate speech...

All of which has me wondering how long it will be before the only truly valuable knowledge (i.e. that which is coveted by the wealthy and the powerful for its power) will be that which has never seen the light of the digital day.

Or some such thing.

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