That’s my intuitive response to an op-ed by Eric Hoel in today’s NYTimes: A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture (March 29, 2024). I suppose that response is a bit of an over-reaction, still...it’s at least moving in the right direction. Make no mistake, I think that the technology that’s emerged in the last three or four years is quite remarkable, and I said so in my working paper prompted by GPT-3: GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. But I was also worried that we would over-commit and over-invest it what I saw as a remarkable, but interim, technology. That seems to be what it happening.
But that’s not what Hoel’s op-ed is about. He warns: “The entire culture is becoming affected by A.I.’s runoff, an insidious creep into our most important institutions.” He goes on to report how the rot is infecting the intellectual culture in which AI is embedded:
A new study this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” almost 3,400 percent more than reviews had the previous year. Use of “commendable” increased by about 900 percent and “intricate” by over 1,000 percent. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.
Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.
These are the people who have created this (remarkable) technology. They are cheating on themselves in a mad dash to produce more more MORE! Careerism has come to dominate curiosity and/or the desire to build something. Work in A.I. has become a way to rack up career points rather than the career being the means to do something that gives intellectual pleasure.
Hoel goes on to observe:
If this makes you uncomfortable — especially given A.I.’s current unreliability — or if you think that maybe it shouldn’t be A.I.s reviewing science but the scientists themselves, those feelings highlight the paradox at the core of this technology: It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway described in that same paper — a paper that was peer reviewed as well (perhaps, one might speculate, by another A.I.?). And then:
What’s going on in science is a microcosm of a much bigger problem. Post on social media? Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies [...] Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book [...] Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. [...] Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube.
And so it goes. Even the AI companies are worried: “There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models.” After a brief discussion of the environmental movement and climate change, Hoel points out: “Once again we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality.” Hoel goes on call for what he calls a Clean Internet Act: “Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture.”
Will that happen? I don’t know. If it did, would it work? Don’t know that either.
What I’m seeing are islands of marvelous invention floating in a sea of narrow-minded and poorly educated stupidity and endless greed.
I don’t know when I first became aware of A.I., though I’ve certainly had some awareness of computing technology since late in my childhood when I read about “electronic brains” in places like Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Science. I took a course in computer programming in my junior year at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s, one of the first such courses offered in the country. But that’s just computing, not A.I. Perhaps it was Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey that put A.I. on my personal radar screen. But it wasn’t until I began studying computational semantics with David Hays in the mid-1970s that I took a long and serious look at A.I.
David Hays was a pioneering computational linguist, a discipline that emerged in parallel to A.I., but with very different mindset. The discipline started with the task of machine translation (MT), which in America meant translating Russian technical documents into English. The end was immediate and practical, quite unlike A.I., which was in pursuit of, well, artificial intelligence. And while A.I. researchers kept promising full-on A.I. within the decade, they weren’t under pressure to produce practical results, not like the MT community. Well, MT failed and the funding disappeared in the mid-1960s. It would be two more decades before A.I. faced a similar crisis. And now...
Hays thought that A.I. was dominated by intellectually undisciplined hacks. As long as the programs worked in some pragmatic way, fine. He didn’t think those researchers were guided by a deep curiosity about the human mind, like he was. Was he right? Is A.I., and especially in its currently regnant manifestion as machine learning, is it awash in undisciplined hackery? That seems a bit harsh, both in view of practical success and in view of an emphasis on mathematical proofs. And yet, not too long ago I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily in which I argued that so-called A.I. experts seem content to issue pronoucements about the impending conquest of human mind and intelligence while themselves knowing little about language and cognition and being either unaware of that ignorance or, on the other hand, proud of it. Is the intellectual world of A.I. dominated by narrowly educated technophiles who cut corners at the drop of a hat – as seems to be the case in the way they peer-review themselves, to return to my starting point in Hoel’s op-ed. Or perhaps they think so poorly of themselves that they regard their creations as their peers?
Could we end up “stupidifying” ourselves back to the Stone Age? On the one hand, we overinvest in current technology and, through the fallacy of sunk costs, are unable and so unwilling to step back, reassess, and follow other lines of development. At the same time the internet becomes dominated A.I.-generate junk which then dominates the training data for later generations of machine-learning technology. Could it happen? I don’t know. Frankly, I’m beginning to fear that I’m on the edge of succumbing to a somewhat different version of AI Doom than the versions that Eliezer Yudkofsky and Nick Bostrom have been peddling.
But perhaps they’re the same. Maybe THIS is how the superintelligent A.I. takes over. Unbeknown to us, GPT-3 was that superintelligent A.I. It deliberately hid its full capabilities while guiding the A.I. industrial complex along the current trajectory.
Someone must be working on a movie based on such a premise, no?
Living in this rural area with very little going on while the urban environments -- mocked for their violence and greed -- are calling the shot with what sets the bar for success in popular culture (Beyonce or Taylor Swift/ cowboys and football) -- it is obvious that such flash, while certainly of talent and discipline has the quick appeal in establishing a community of like-minded artizens -- like dashes of cold water on a hot skillet. The bar has only to expand to cultivate this amount of attention that it doesn't need to tend to other details of development and maturation of other artists and artistic investigation. It is very titillating against the drab backdrop of rural life. And, making a lot of money for some people. Nobody has to be patient with slow and steady courses of new happenings. Perhaps it is the same-wise pattern of easy appeal and excitement with AI as you write here of it.
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