The real threat of AI
Get a clue, says panel about buzzy AI tech: It’s being ‘deployed as surveillance’
Thanks to @dianea for the original post
FTA: Don’t get so distracted by the promise and threats associated with the future of AI. It is not magic, it’s not fully automated and — per Whittaker — it’s already intrusive beyond anything that most Americans seemingly comprehend.
The AI isn't as intelligent as you think. In addition to massive amounts of training (it would take a human 5,000+ years of uninterrupted reading -- over 10,000 years of reading if they were allowed to eat, sleep, and have a life -- to read everything on which GPT has been trained) these systems require a tremendous amount of hand-holding during training:
Said Hanna: “We know from reporting . . .that there is an army of workers who are doing annotation behind the scenes to even make this stuff work to any degree — workers who work with Amazon Mechanical Turk, people who work with [the training data company] Sama — in Venezuela, Kenya, the U.S., actually all over the world . . .They are actually doing the labeling, whereas Sam [Altman] and Emad [Mostaque] and all these other people who are going to say these things are magic — no. There’s humans. . . .These things need to appear as autonomous and it has this veneer, but there’s so much human labor underneath it.”
But here's what you really need to know:
Her message was that, enchanted as the world may be now by chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, the technology underpinning them is dangerous, especially as power grows more concentrated by those at the top of the advanced AI pyramid. [emphasis mine]
Said Whittaker, “I would say maybe some of the people in this audience are the users of AI, but the majority of the population is the subject of AI . . .This is not a matter of individual choice. Most of the ways that AI interpolates our life makes determinations that shape our access to resources to opportunity are made behind the scenes in ways we probably don’t even know.” [emphasis mine]
As the old saying goes, If you aren't the customer, then you're the product.
