Seems a bit hypocritical. The leaders use professional speech writers in their talks so in a sense it isn't "their" original stream of thoughts expressed. AI probably wouldn't obfuscate or lie about having a picture taken of you and your gay son having dinner together. But who knows, it does depend on the prompt and hallucinations are common in both AI and professional writers .
And what are the chances that those professional speech writers are already using AI? I’d imagine that this will have the opposite effect to the one Gong desires. Those few people who are using AI to craft their sacrament talks will continue to do so, maybe with a little more finesse. A chunk of those people who hadn’t given it a second thought will now give it a go. I’ll wager that, assuming he’s ever allowed to give a sacrament talk, MG 2.0 has used AI to generate it, and that he will continue to do so.
Premise 1. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Premise 2. The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion. Therefore, the best evidence for the Book of Mormon is notoriously unreliable.
AI makes mistakes, hallucinates about historical facts, is credited by some with god-like insight, and is terrible at predicting unusual events in the future.
I think so also. GA talks are exactly the kind of output AI is good at, a lot of blending past statements in slightly new ways.
"if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person then it's probably, you got a problem." -- Lindsey Graham
AI makes mistakes, hallucinates about historical facts, is credited by some with god-like insight, and is terrible at predicting unusual events in the future.
Perhaps Elder Gong is indulging in some Jedi mind tricks.
When he claims that “As a creation of God, man can create A.I., but A.I. cannot create God.”, is he directing our attention away from the idea that Mormon god is not "big daddy in the sky", but is actually big AI in the sky?
Might a modern-day Brigham Young declare that ChatGPT is Adam is the only AI "with whom we have to do?"
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I don't see why machines may not be able to become superintelligent someday. I still like Stanislaw Lem's Golem XIV as a concrete picture of what such a mind might be like.
I don't think we are close to anything like that, however. I think that what gets called AI nowadays would more accurately be called "imitation intelligence".
I don't actually mean to take a stand on whether or not these chatbots are intelligent as opposed to unthinking. That's a subtle issue, but I'm kind of bored with it. I'm not really seeing any new ideas about consciousness here; it's basically Searle's Chinese Room. That's a cool thing to think about, but it's from 1980.
My point is about whether the chatbots are intelligent as opposed to stupid. I think they're stupid, but good at sounding smart. They are imitating intelligence, not demonstrating it. Even after all these billions spent on them, they still just don't actually get things. For the kind of hard tasks for which a real artificial intelligence would be wonderful, they are frustrating.
They may be good at routine tasks, and that may be all kinds of important, but they seem best at sounding smarter than they are. I think we would all be better off—and would get better use of the LLM chatbots—if they weren't trained to sound so smart, for marketing reasons, and instead showed their real capabilities and limitations more clearly.
And I don't see them becoming more intelligent than all humans anytime soon.
Perhaps not any time soon, but think about the state of computing 80 years ago. Who could have predicted the current situation in which, in the industrialized nations at least, virtually everyone over the age of 15 (and perhaps under 90) carries in their pocket, or on their wrist, a computer vastly more advanced than ENIAC.
(echoes of Asimov) Might we reach the point at which a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from (a) god?
by the way, what is your take on the Chinese Room? I'm inclined to think that the room system understands Chinese in the same way that a second-language learner (myself, for example) understands the target language - at least at first.
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I used to think that it was clear that the Room understood Chinese although the operator didn’t. What I guess I’ve realized from seeing chatbots do the same thing is that there’s a lot left unspecified about how well the Room understands Chinese.
A hypothetically perfect look-up table of brilliant Chinese responses to Chinese inputs could conceivably be said to understand Chinese—and a lot of other things—very well. A quick-and-dirty table of responses might produce passable Chinese but talking to that Room would not be worth anyone’s time because that Room would rely on a lot of cop-outs. You can say that it understands Chinese, I guess, but it’s stupid, even if it has memorized some nice classical allusions.
Chatbots seem to be somewhere in that range. Sure, there could be some breakthrough in AI technology in the next 80 years. But thinking that we are now lifting off toward superhuman computers seems like watching the Wright brothers fly their contraption and guessing that we’ll all be flying to work every morning in a generation or two—or flying to Mars every morning.
What has been demonstrated at this point is cool but it is an approach with inherent limits, and getting past those limits is going to require more new ideas. Maybe the necessary new ideas will be coming along soon and we’ll see the chatbots as the inspiring first step; we don’t yet have jetpacks or Mars colonies but we did get to the Moon 66 years after Flyer I flew around Kitty Hawk. On the other hand, getting from the windmill to the steam engine took a thousand years. And for all we know some things may be completely impossible for reasons we can’t yet imagine.
I’m inclined to be pessimistic and skeptical about chatbots because the inherent limits of their basic trick—copying the patterns of the Internet—seem like pretty hard limits, with no second stage that we can ignite to go higher. There’s no bigger Internet with deeper correlation patterns to copy. And we still know nothing about how it is that human brains have managed to extract from the buzz of reality the easily parsable text of the Internet. The chatbots have snagged the low-hanging fruit and the next apple isn’t even in sight.
What about having an AI-generated General Conference at some point in the future, with AI apostles that are kinder, more Christ-like, and capable of engendering spiritual feelings?
