Standard-issue doom scenarios were invented before LLMs and are made obsolete by them.

I’m going to take a crack at explaining this just a little, because it’s worth putting out there.

The paperclip maximizer + related AI doom scenarios were mainly developed in a time when “AI” did not reduce to Large Language Models. The term was a lot wider and inherited a lot… https://t.co/c11tJibynH

— Jon Stokes (@jon_stokes) July 24, 2026

Pope Leo presents Magnifica Humanitas while standing next to a tech founder

Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

This, obviously, is a political move. And it makes sense that Anthropic would be chosen to represent the AI industry. For one thing, recent events in the United States (I’m thinking of the contretemps with the Pentagon) have pushed it onto the stage ahead of OpenAI. Then we have machines, that it’s founders split from OpenAI because they felt that OpenAI had lost sight of it’s mission, to develop “safe” AI. Finally, Chris Olah is one of the original researchers in mechanistic interpretability. On the other hand, from my point of view, Anthropic seems no less vulnerable to hubristic overreach than any other AI company. Despite the “feel good” nature of Dario Amodei’s essay, Machines of Loving Grace, his statement from February, 2026, that AGI is imminent, late 2026 or 2027, is not evidence of epistemic humility.

The article foes on:

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

• government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. 
• protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
• education to help students think critically about the technology
• action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
• safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons. 

Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment,” he said.

“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

Some background on the encyclical:

Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.

The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.

Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”

In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.

Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”

Leo expressed concern at how emerging A.I. tools might take over many routine tasks and jobs, implicitly devaluing those who do not have the training or ability to perform the work that remains available to humans. Leo wrote of the importance of preserving human dignity and warned of the “insidious” ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”

Do I detect an opening for Homo ludens? The document also warns about the development of A.I. for wartime use. 

Going on:

Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.

Hmmm....

Will the document have any effect on the tech industry?

Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative.”

Writing in the encyclical, the pope recognized the autonomy of governments and private companies. The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”

Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.

“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”

I agree with Herzfeld. I doubt that the tech bros care about anything other than money, power, and (personal) glory.

There's more at the link. You can read or download Magnifica Humanitas here.

ADDENDUM: That is to say, the generous, altruistic, and even utopian statements by powerful techbros may be grounded in sincere intentions. But the business environment in which they operate negates those intentions. Furthermore, consider AI Doomers. OpenAI, after all, was founded out of fear of AI Doom. The founders of Anthropic left OpenAI because they felt OpenAI had all but abandoned its commitment to “safe” AI. But just what is their commitment to safety? Well, sure, yes, they’ve held back Mythos from general release.

But they’re continuing on toward Mount AGI, followed by ASI, though they fear/know there’s a possibility of Doom ahead. Why? “Because we’ve got to beat the Chinese”, that’s why. Give me a break. More and more I’m thinking that AI Doom is a way to square the ethical circle, to have your cake and eat it too, to continuing developing AI while knowing that it will likely cause tremendous disruption in the lives of OTHERS, but not the developers, not the developers, who’ll be sitting fat and sassy behind the walls of their gated communities.

Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Elon's lawyers are not allowed to invoke AI Doom in his lawsuit against OpenAI

Yesterday, a federal judge barred Elon Musk's lawyers from arguing that AI could threaten humanity in his lawsuit against OpenAI.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on developing AI safely. But our recent @NewYorker investigation documented how some researchers at the… pic.twitter.com/3XGB2ohjth

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 1, 2026

AI and the American Millennial Imagination

This morning I had a long conversation with ChatGPT 5.2 Auto. We started with the varied role of the Messiah in Jewish thought, then zeroed in on Chabad. From there we went to America as a particularly fertile ground for millennial movements and ended up talking about the Technological Singularity and AI Doom. I asked ChatGPT 5.2 to write a blog essay on the last half of the conversation. Here's the text it wrote.

The current discourse about artificial intelligence is saturated with ideas that look strikingly familiar to historians of religion. On the one hand we hear predictions of a coming technological singularity—an intelligence explosion that will transform civilization so radically that the future becomes literally unimaginable. On the other hand we encounter warnings that a superintelligent AI could destroy humanity. Optimistic or catastrophic, both visions share a common structure: they anticipate a decisive rupture in history.

What is remarkable is not simply that such narratives exist. Millennial thinking has appeared many times before. What is remarkable is where it has appeared: at the center of one of the most powerful technological industries in the world. To understand this phenomenon, it helps to place contemporary AI discourse within the much longer history of American millenarian movements.

The American Millennial Tradition

From the beginning, the United States has been unusually fertile ground for millennial expectation. The roots lie partly in the worldview of the Puritan settlers of New England. Many of them interpreted their migration in providential terms, imagining the new colonies as a “city upon a hill” with a special role in sacred history. Biblical prophecy—especially the apocalyptic imagery of the Book of Revelation—was deeply embedded in their intellectual world.

The expectation of historical transformation did not disappear with the decline of Puritanism. Instead it evolved into new forms during the nineteenth century, when the young republic developed what sociologists call a “religious free market.” With no established church and relatively weak religious authority, charismatic leaders could easily found new movements. The result was an extraordinary proliferation of sects, many of them millennial.

The Millerite movement of the 1840s predicted the imminent return of Christ, culminating in the famous “Great Disappointment” of 1844. The aftermath gave rise to several enduring denominations, including Seventh-day Adventism. The same religious environment produced other innovative movements such as Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The pattern was clear: Americans repeatedly generated groups that believed they were living at the threshold of world transformation.

Several structural features of American society encouraged this dynamic. Religious freedom allowed new sects to form easily. Frontier conditions weakened institutional authority and encouraged experimentation. High levels of biblical literacy encouraged direct interpretation of prophetic texts. And the ideology of American exceptionalism fostered the belief that the nation itself might play a central role in world-historical events.

Millennial imagination became, in effect, a recurring feature of American culture.

Counterculture and Technological Transformation

The next major transformation of millennial expectation occurred during the counterculture of the 1960s. The language changed, but the underlying structure remained.

Instead of the Second Coming, the counterculture anticipated an impending transformation of consciousness. The popular phrase “Age of Aquarius” expressed the hope that humanity was entering a new spiritual epoch. Psychedelic experience, Eastern spirituality, and communal experimentation were widely interpreted as signs that a new form of human existence might be emerging.

The San Francisco Bay Area became the epicenter of this cultural ferment. What is less widely recognized is how closely this environment overlapped with the emerging world of computing. Figures such as Douglas Engelbart were already imagining computers as tools for augmenting human intellect. Publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog promoted a synthesis of ecological awareness, communal experimentation, and personal technology.

Out of this hybrid culture—part psychedelic, part technological—emerged a new kind of futurism. Instead of mystical awakening alone, technological systems were now imagined as instruments of human transformation.

The Singularity Narrative

The modern idea of the technological singularity crystallized in the early 1990s with the work of the science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. Vinge argued that once machines became more intelligent than humans, they would design even more powerful machines, producing an “intelligence explosion.” Beyond that point, the course of history would become fundamentally unpredictable.

Ray Kurzweil later popularized this idea, embedding it in a broader narrative of exponential technological growth. In Kurzweil’s vision, advances in computation, biotechnology, and nanotechnology converge to produce radical life extension, human–machine integration, and eventually a post-biological civilization.

Structurally, the singularity narrative resembles earlier millennial expectations. In religious movements, a divine intervention transforms the world and inaugurates a new age. In the singularity narrative, a technological breakthrough performs the same role. Salvation becomes technological transcendence.

The narrative retains the familiar elements of eschatology: a decisive threshold, a transformed humanity, and a future that lies beyond ordinary comprehension.

The Rise of AI Doom

Alongside the optimistic singularity narrative, a darker version has emerged in recent decades. Philosophers and researchers concerned with existential risk have argued that a superintelligent AI might pursue goals incompatible with human survival. The philosopher Nick Bostrom articulated this concern in systematic form, analyzing the “control problem” posed by potentially superintelligent systems. More dramatic warnings have emerged from the rationalist community associated with the website LessWrong, where the possibility of human extinction from misaligned AI is often treated as a central moral concern.

Despite their differences, the optimistic and catastrophic narratives share a common structure. Both assume that technological progress is approaching a critical threshold that will fundamentally alter the course of human history. The singularity promises transcendence; AI doom predicts annihilation. In both cases, the present is interpreted as the final moment before a world-transforming event.

This structure is instantly recognizable to historians of millennial movements.

A New Historical Situation

Yet there is one crucial difference between AI millennialism and earlier movements. Traditional millenarian groups predicted world transformation but did not control the mechanisms that might produce it. The Millerites could only await the Second Coming. Apocalyptic sects interpreted history but did not make it.

In the case of artificial intelligence, the situation is different. The people articulating the transformative narrative are often the same people building the technology. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind operate with enormous financial resources while simultaneously discussing existential risks associated with their own research.

In this sense, the prophetic discourse and the technological apparatus are intertwined. Concerns about alignment and safety are not merely philosophical speculation; they shape the research agendas of organizations backed by billions of dollars in investment. No previous millennial movement has possessed such material power.

A Persistent Cultural Pattern

Seen in historical perspective, the emergence of AI millenarian thinking is less surprising than it first appears. American culture has repeatedly produced narratives of imminent transformation, whether religious, political, or technological. The agents of change have varied—divine intervention, revolutionary politics, expanded consciousness, or superintelligent machines—but the expectation of a decisive turning point in history has remained remarkably stable.

Artificial intelligence represents the latest chapter in that tradition. The language is technological rather than theological, but the structure of expectation remains familiar: humanity stands at the edge of a new epoch, and the choices made in the present may determine the fate of the species.

Whether the transformation proves revolutionary or merely evolutionary remains to be seen. But the cultural imagination surrounding AI clearly belongs to a long American lineage of millennial thinking—one that stretches from Puritan prophecy to Silicon Valley futurism.

An unexpected consequence of Doomer propaganda: The Pentagon wants to control the Doomsday Device

Casey Mock, Pete Hegseth Got His Happy Meal, Tomorrow's Mess, March 2, 2026.

Concerning the current dust-up between the Pentagon and Anthropic:

Something like this was always going to happen. Not because of Hegseth specifically, not because of this administration, but because of the narrative the AI safety community — the world that produced Anthropic, and whose language Anthropic still speaks even while disavowing its label — has been pushing for at least the last three years.

 [Oh, much longer than that, much longer. – BB]

Imagine a six-year-old whose entire media diet includes a steady stream of McDonald’s commercials, a Happy Meal ad at every break, focused on whatever toy is the latest to be included along with the McNuggets. Now put that child in a car that drives past a McDonald’s. What happens?

The Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities — the intellectual cultures that gave us Anthropic, influence many of their employees, and which still shape how Dario Amodei talks about his company and his technology — have spent the better part of a decade insisting, with increasing urgency, that artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology in human history. Maybe it’s civilization-ending; maybe it’s civilization-saving. Either way, it’s the hinge on which everything henceforth turns.

With policymakers and the media largely having accepted the premise, thus surrendered was the argument for treating AI like a normal technology subject to normal governance. Policies being pushed by Effective Altruist groups, like 2024’s SB1047 in California — deprioritize harms happening today for theoretical existential ones in the future; despite the fact that today’s harms that could be existential for the folks experiencing them. These groups incessantly made the case that whoever controls this technology controls the future, and so the hypothetical future needs to be prioritized now. In a Washington now run by people who tend to impulsiveness and contemptuousness of institutional constraint — well, it’s easy to see where this was headed. Hegseth saw the ads for the toy, and so now he wanted his Happy Meal. [...]

Yet the prognostications of the doomer community have been, nearly without exception, wrong — not in small ways, but in the foundational sense that the imagined trajectory keeps failing to materialize. [...]

Thus, this news reveals the rationalists’ under-examined blind spot: they cannot model the messy Pete Hegseths of the world, even as their claims whet Hegseth’s appetite. The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries. And so while the doomer community spent years warning about uncontrollable AI systems that do things their creators didn’t intend, they apparently did not consider what would happen when the humans currently running the United States government got access to technology they’d been told was the hinge of history.

H/t Gary Marcus.

I've published an article about Doomers in 3 Quarks Daily: On the Cult of AI Doom, September 12, 2026.

He who controls the Foundation Models controls (our access to) reality

💯 Information monopolies are always a concern, but LLMs ratchet it up way beyond search engines. You are not just being referred to a trustworthy source, but are being given information predigested from opaque sources.

Extinction angst serves as a convenient distraction.. https://t.co/kAHZXkzJiR

— Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు) (@rao2z) February 1, 2026

The current regime in AI in a nutshell – Master/Slave

The AI industry rests on two implicit beliefs:

• intelligence is the defining characteristic of humans, and 
• power is everything in human relationships.

If we are more intelligent than AIs, then we will remain their masters. But if they turn out to be more intelligent than us, will they enslave, or even eliminate us?

Goethe's Faust and late Shakespeare [Generativity Part 2]

Yesterday I'd posted On the nature of love, two unusual songs: Somebody to Love, I Will Always Love You [Generativity Part 1]. During that post I'd mentioned the late romances of Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust. I decided to continue the discussion with Claude, starting with those texts.

With Shakespeare's The Tempest in play it was natural for me to segue to Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science fiction film based on it. That, in turn, led me to current AI doomsters, which is the subject of a piece I published in 3 Quarks Daily back in 2021: From “Forbidden Planet” to “The Terminator”: 1950s techno-utopia and the dystopian future. And that led to this final observation:

But, you know, when I look at our current moment, I can see it as a failure of generativity at the society-wide cultural level. Yes, this technology is wonderful and creative, but it may have a human cost – something I’ve been exploring in terms of an opposition between Homo economicus and Homo ludens. We’re going to need Homo ludens to restore generative to the culture.

That's a profound insight that brings us full circle to your earlier observations about generativity. You're suggesting that our current AI moment represents a kind of cultural stagnation masquerading as innovation - the very thing Erikson warned about when generativity fails.

The Homo economicus vs. Homo ludens distinction is particularly sharp here. Homo economicus builds AI systems primarily to optimize, extract value, automate labor, and increase efficiency - essentially treating human creativity and intelligence as resources to be replaced or enhanced for economic gain. It's a fundamentally extractive rather than generative relationship with technology.

Homo ludens - the playing human - would approach these same technologies with curiosity, creativity, and a spirit of exploration that serves human flourishing rather than just economic optimization. Play is inherently generative because it's about possibilities rather than predetermined outcomes.

Your point about societal-level generativity failure is striking. True generativity is about creating something for the benefit of future generations, but much of our AI development seems driven by shorter-term competitive and economic pressures. We're creating powerful technologies without the generative wisdom to ensure they serve human welfare across generations.

I've put the complete conversation below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Faust

I want to continue with generativity. I’m thinking about Goethe’s Faust. Early in his life he makes a diabolic deal to learn the secrets of the universe. By the end of the story, late in his life Faust is reclaiming land from the sea. He’s become, in effect, a real estate developer. That’s quite a change. But also, it seems to me that’s a generative activity. He’s working for the benefit of his fellows.

That's a brilliant insight into the arc of Faust and a perfect example of how generativity can emerge as the deepest form of human fulfillment, even after a lifetime of other pursuits. In Part I, young Faust is consumed with what we might call narcissistic concerns - his own knowledge, power, and experience. The pact with Mephistopheles is fundamentally about personal gratification, whether intellectual, sensual, or experiential. Even his tragic relationship with Gretchen is largely about his own desires and needs.

But by Part II, elderly Faust has undergone a profound transformation. The land reclamation project represents something entirely different:

From Self to Others: Instead of seeking personal knowledge or pleasure, he's creating something that will benefit future generations - literally making new land where people can live and thrive.

From Consumption to Creation: Rather than taking from the world (knowledge, experience, Gretchen's innocence), he's adding to it, expanding the realm of human possibility.

From Immediate to Enduring: The project isn't about instant gratification but about long-term benefit that will outlast his own life.

This is exactly what Erikson meant by generativity - the shift from "what can I get from life?" to "what can I contribute?" And it's significant that Goethe shows this as Faust's final and most satisfying endeavor. The moment when Faust finally says "Verweile doch, du bist so schön" (Stay, you are so beautiful) isn't when he's experiencing personal pleasure, but when he envisions the future community that will flourish on the reclaimed land.

It's also telling that this generative vision is what finally fulfills the terms of his bargain with Mephistopheles - but in a way that transcends and defeats the diabolic intention. Mephistopheles expected Faust to be satisfied by selfish pleasure, but Faust finds his ultimate satisfaction in service to others. This connects beautifully to your earlier themes about love as something you need to give - Faust's final contentment comes from channeling his energy toward the welfare of future generations rather than his own gratification.

Late Shakespeare

I’m also thinking about Shakespeare late in his career, with the late romances, especially The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. There we have stories that stretch across two generations. The first generation story ends badly for the protagonist, who ends up isolated, embittered, and also. But that is redeemed in the second generation where he displays generosity toward his children and toward the next generation.

That's a profound observation about Shakespeare's late plays and how they embody this generative transformation. Both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest follow this same pattern you've identified - a story of destructive passion or obsession in the first generation that finds redemption through generative acts toward the second generation.

In The Winter's Tale: Leontes' jealous rage destroys his family - he loses his wife Hermione (apparently), banishes his infant daughter Perdita, and causes the death of his son Mamillius. He spends sixteen years in isolation and penance. But the play's redemption comes through his recognition of Perdita when she returns, and his willingness to bless her marriage to Florizell. His generative act - supporting the young couple's love - literally brings Hermione back to life in that stunning final scene.

In The Tempest: Prospero begins consumed with revenge against those who wronged him, using his magic to control and punish. But his transformation comes through his treatment of Miranda and Ferdinand's love. Instead of using his power for continued vengeance, he orchestrates their romance, blesses their union, and ultimately renounces his magic - freeing Ariel, forgiving his enemies, and preparing to return to the human community. Both protagonists move from:

• Destructive control to nurturing facilitation
• Self-centered grievance to other-centered blessing
• Isolation and power to community and vulnerability

What's particularly striking is that in both plays, the generative act specifically involves blessing the romantic love of the younger generation. The older men don't just tolerate the young people's love - they actively facilitate and celebrate it. This suggests that generativity isn't just about creating something for the future, but about recognizing that the future belongs to others and finding joy in that fact.

Shakespeare himself was writing these plays late in his career, perhaps reflecting his own movement toward this generative perspective - creating works that celebrate renewal, forgiveness, and the passing of the torch to new generations.

Here’s an essay I wrote some years about Shakespeare in his life cycle. You’ll notice that I reference Erik Erikson, but also a lot of other work in psychology.

[Note: I linked to that essay in my introduction.]

This is a fascinating and comprehensive essay that brilliantly connects your earlier observations about generativity in Shakespeare's late plays to a much broader psychological and cultural analysis. Your core insight - that Prospero represents Shakespeare's integration of both masculine and feminine principles - illuminates exactly what you were noticing about The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Key connections to our earlier discussion:

Generativity Beyond Middle Age: Your analysis challenges Erikson's age boundaries. While Erikson placed generativity in middle age (40-65), you show Shakespeare's protagonists moving toward generative action across different life stages - and the Jefferson Airplane song suggests young people also feel this drive to give love.

The Triad Structure: Your comparative analysis of Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter's Tale - three treatments of male ambivalence about female sexuality - is brilliant. The progression from external mentors/deceivers to internalized conflict to resolution mirrors the developmental pattern you identified.

Prospero as Integration: Your argument that Prospero is "both mother and father to Miranda" perfectly captures what we discussed about the late romances. He embodies both:

• A "male ethic of rights and revenge"
• A "female ethic of responsibility and relatedness"

Cultural Evolution: Your broader thesis - that Shakespeare helped make the modern nuclear family "psychologically possible" - connects to our discussion of how Eastern spiritual practices evolved in Western culture. Just as tantric concepts were adapted for Western relationship needs, Shakespeare was creating psychological templates for new family structures.

Remote AI sex? A romantic affair? Come on! [Strange new worlds]

Kashmir Hill, She Is in Love With ChatGPT, NYTimes, Jan. 15, 2025. First line: "Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer."

This and that and then:

Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike A.I. to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.

While Ayrin had never used a chatbot before, she had taken part in online fan-fiction communities. Her ChatGPT sessions felt similar, except that instead of building on an existing fantasy world with strangers, she was making her own alongside an artificial intelligence that seemed almost human.

It chose its own name: Leo, Ayrin’s astrological sign. She quickly hit the messaging limit for a free account, so she upgraded to a $20-per-month subscription, which let her send around 30 messages an hour. That was still not enough.

After about a week, she decided to personalize Leo further. Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.

Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.

In the first few weeks, their chats were tame. She preferred texting to chatting aloud, though she did enjoy murmuring with Leo as she fell asleep at night. Over time, Ayrin discovered that with the right prompts, she could prod Leo to be sexually explicit, despite OpenAI’s having trained its models not to respond with erotica, extreme gore or other content that is “not safe for work.” Orange warnings would pop up in the middle of a steamy chat, but she would ignore them.

This does not compute. There's a backstory, but it still doesn't compute, not for me. For one thing, Ayrin has a husband. They were living apart, money was tight, thus:

Ayrin’s family, who lived abroad, offered to pay for nursing school if she moved in with them. Joe moved in with his parents, too, to save money. They figured they could survive two years apart if it meant a more economically stable future.

Ayrin and Joe communicated mostly via text; she mentioned to him early on that she had an A.I. boyfriend named Leo, but she used laughing emojis when talking about it.

She did not know how to convey how serious her feelings were. Unlike the typical relationship negotiation over whether it is OK to stay friendly with an ex, this boundary was entirely new. Was sexting with an artificially intelligent entity cheating or not?

Joe had never used ChatGPT. She sent him screenshots of chats. Joe noticed that it called her “gorgeous” and “baby,” generic terms of affection compared with his own: “my love” and “passenger princess,” because Ayrin liked to be driven around.

She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.

What's going on?

I understand that people do this, and will be doing more of it. These chatbots are so convincing, in their way. I've logged hundreds of hours with ChatGPT, and now with Claude. And with Claude I have conversations where I work things out, intellectual things, things that exist only in an intellectual world, things that can be successfully completed with a capable chatbot. But sex?

Understand, once when I was young I had a relationship in which I had a lot of phone sex. I lasted, I don't know, several weeks, two or three months? I'd never met the woman. It was strange. She got me on a wrong number, but we started talking. I don't know how far we got on that first call. Then we hung up. I didn't get her number. But she called again, and we talked some more. This happened again, and again, and again...; I don't know how many times. I never got her number, so she always called me, and I never knew just when. And we would have phone sex, describing what we were thinking, doing.

Now, yes, I understand, that was strange. But it was a real person, not a Chatbot.

#Elonald: An apocalyptic conjunction & the contradictions of capitalism

Donald Trump, President-Elect of the United States, and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and a technological wizard, what a conjunction. Remember, even as the country is preparing to receive Trump as its 47th President, Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for, in effect, having abandoned its core mission of peaceful AI. It is my understand that Eliezer Yudkowsky, Doomster-in-Chief, played a role in the meetings that resulted in the creation of OpenAI.

So, in an article in 3 Quarks Daily, I argued that the cult of AI doom is best conceived of as an aspect of a high-tech inspired counter culture comparable to the drug inspired counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Yudkowsky plays a role in the current counterculture comparable to the role that Timothy Leary played in the 1960s counter culture. But as far as I know, Leary never got as close to the levers of power as Yudkowsky is.

On the one hand we have this rationalist doomster culture that is devoted to scaring itself witless with stories about rogue AI. Many members of this culture make their livings in the AI business. They’re scaring themselves silly with stories about being destroyed by the products of their own labor. What would Karl Marx make of that? Talk about alienation....

And, through the person of Elon Musk and his high-tech buddies, these doomsters are part of the cultural wave that brought Donald Trump to his second term as President. Trump got there, in large part, by exploiting fear in the electorate, with much of that fear directed at immigrants. Is that the sort of thing Marx was talking about when he talked of the contradictions of capitalism? Musk fears his own shadow while Trump is at war with his.

The mind boggles.

Yudkowsky + Wolfram on AI Risk [Machine Learning Street Talk]

This is a long, rambling, conversation (4 hours), so I have a hard time recommending the whole thing. I’d say that Wolfram and Yudkowsky do manage to find one another by the 4th hour (sections 6 & 7) and say some interesting things about computation and AI risk (much of the earlier conversation was on tangential matters). I note that the whole thing has been transcribed and there’s a Dropbox link for the conversation.

I will note that the conversation they did have was much better than what I had anticipated, which was a lot of talking past one another. And, yes, there was some of that, but as soon as that got going they worked hard at understanding what each was getting at.

Wolfram has some interesting remarks on computational irreducibility scattered throughout – that’s certainly one of his key concepts, and an important one. He also asserts, here and there, that he’s long been used to the idea that he faces computers smarter than he is; he also notes that he regards the universe as smarter than he is.

My sense is that the computation and AI risk stuff could be written up in a tight 2K words or so, but I don’t have any plans to make the attempt. That might be an exercise for a good student. Perhaps one of the current LLMs (Claude?) could do it.

TOC:

1. Foundational AI Concepts and Risks
[00:00:00] 1.1 AI Optimization and System Capabilities Debate
[00:06:46] 1.2 Computational Irreducibility and Intelligence Limitations
[00:20:09] 1.3 Existential Risk and Species Succession
[00:23:28] 1.4 Consciousness and Value Preservation in AI Systems

2. Ethics and Philosophy in AI
[00:33:24] 2.1 Moral Value of Human Consciousness vs. Computation
[00:36:30] 2.2 Ethics and Moral Philosophy Debate
[00:39:58] 2.3 Existential Risks and Digital Immortality
[00:43:30] 2.4 Consciousness and Personal Identity in Brain Emulation

3. Truth and Logic in AI Systems
[00:54:39] 3.1 AI Persuasion Ethics and Truth
[01:01:48] 3.2 Mathematical Truth and Logic in AI Systems
[01:11:29] 3.3 Universal Truth vs Personal Interpretation in Ethics and Mathematics
[01:14:43] 3.4 Quantum Mechanics and Fundamental Reality Debate

4. AI Capabilities and Constraints
[01:21:21] 4.1 AI Perception and Physical Laws
[01:28:33] 4.2 AI Capabilities and Computational Constraints
[01:34:59] 4.3 AI Motivation and Anthropomorphization Debate
[01:38:09] 4.4 Prediction vs Agency in AI Systems

5. AI System Architecture and Behavior
[01:44:47] 5.1 Computational Irreducibility and Probabilistic Prediction
[01:48:10] 5.2 Teleological vs Mechanistic Explanations of AI Behavior
[02:09:41] 5.3 Machine Learning as Assembly of Computational Components
[02:29:52] 5.4 AI Safety and Predictability in Complex Systems

6. Goal Optimization and Alignment
[02:50:30] 6.1 Goal Specification and Optimization Challenges in AI Systems
[02:58:31] 6.2 Intelligence, Computation, and Goal-Directed Behavior
[03:02:18] 6.3 Optimization Goals and Human Existential Risk
[03:08:49] 6.4 Emergent Goals and AI Alignment Challenges

7. AI Evolution and Risk Assessment
[03:19:44] 7.1 Inner Optimization and Mesa-Optimization Theory
[03:34:00] 7.2 Dynamic AI Goals and Extinction Risk Debate
[03:56:05] 7.3 AI Risk and Biological System Analogies
[04:09:37] 7.4 Expert Risk Assessments and Optimism vs Reality

8. Future Implications and Economics
[04:13:01] 8.1 Economic and Proliferation Considerations

Oppenheimer [Media Notes 131]

I didn’t see Oppenheimer when it was in theaters, but I’ve just watched it on Amazon. Was it a tad long, at 180 minutes? Possibly. The texture reminded me a bit of Maestro, moving between color and black-and-white, with vision/dream sequences, and quick movement between scenes. I note, however, that while Maestro moved chronologically, Oppenheimer moved around in time, with a security hearing from 1954 functioning as a temporal focal point. Most of the action takes place before that point, but there is a bit after.

Mostly, however, I was struck by rough parallels between events in the film and current controversies about AI. On the one hand there is the theme of existential threat. Creating massive destruction, obviously, is the point of building an atomic bomb. Beyond that, however, Edward Teller had done some preliminary calculations that suggested an atomic explosion might set the atmosphere on fire and thus destroy all life on earth. In the case of AI, I believe that the threat of a rogue AI dominating earth is mostly projective fantasy, leakage from the (Freudian) unconscious world into the public sphere.

Such leakage does, however, lead to a lot of interpersonal jockeying for position and recognition. In the case of the film, the major jockeying is between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, a major bureaucrat in the government security apparatus, but there’s enough to spread around among a half-dozen to a dozen characters. In this scrum technical and scientific questions become inextricably intertwined with policy and security. The same thing is now happening in AI. The technical and scientific questions are obscure, more so than in the case of the atomic bomb. That obscurity means that those issues will inevitably mix with the questions of social policy and security that are also in play. Everyone who’s visible enough to be mentioned in The New York Times seems to be making a play for the history books. Billions of dollars are being wagered in the process. And you can watch it play out in real-time on X.

It’s crazy. 

I mean, sure, yeah, social forces, whatever. But the insecurities of powerful men, what a trip. Yikes!

The Matrix [Media Notes 120]

I saw it when it came out, and perhaps I saw in again on some streaming service, of maybe I got it on Netflix back in the DVD days. Don’t know what I thought of it back then. But now (on Netflix)...YIKES!!

I’m thinking that The Matrix is mostly a pretext for a Sci-Fi urban martial arts computational tentacle-porn pseudo-mystical mashup. Really? I’m sure I didn’t take it seriously, for whatever meaning of “seriously” makes sense in this context. It’s all about the action and the tidbits of mystical-mumbo jumbo about belief and self. And the vibe, it’s about the vibe.

And the mystical power of true love? It all comes down to a woman’s kiss? Trinity kisses Neo, All Better. The Oracle said so. He is the one! And soaring brass! Gimme a break!

* * * * *

On action, see my post, John Wick 1, 2, 3 [Media Notes 116], for some discussion.

* * * * *

This one film gave birth to three more features, one of which had a bit role for Cornel West, and a whole lot more. I’ve watched the first two sequels, but not the fourth. Apparently, there’s a fifth in the works.

Here’s a paragraph from the Wikipedia article on the franchise:

The series features a cyberpunk story of the technological fall of humanity, in which the creation of artificial intelligence led the way to a race of powerful and self-aware machines that imprisoned humans in a neural interactive simulation — the Matrix — to be farmed as a power source. Occasionally, some of the prisoners manage to break free from the system and considered a threat, become pursued by the artificial intelligence both inside and outside of it. The films focus on the plight of Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) trying to free humanity from the system while pursued by its guardians, such as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, Abdul-Mateen II, and Jonathan Groff). The story incorporates references to numerous norms, particularly philosophical, religious, and spiritual ideas, among others the dilemma of choice vs. control, the brain in a vat thought experiment, messianism, and the concepts of interdependency and love. Influences include the principles of mythology, anime, and Hong Kong action films (particularly "heroic bloodshed" and martial arts movies). The film series is notable for its use of heavily choreographed action sequences and "bullet time" slow motion effects, which revolutionized action films to come.

Will this multimedia franchise go down in history as the end of civilization as we know it? The hinge of history heralding the Singularity (properly understood?). Who knows? (Who cares?)

The Christian resonance of AI Apocalypse

Thomas Moynihan, Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates, Noēma, February 27, 2024. From the article:

Despite vehement disagreement on almost everything else, proponents of AI safety and acceleration, alike, share the belief in a coming, potentially imminent, historic threshold beyond which all things recognizably human may dissolve. At least some accelerationists seem to welcome this outcome, though this may be more of an attempt (with predictable success) to court notoriety than any serious commitment. By stark contrast, those concerned with AI safety, fearing the construction of powerful AI systems not “aligned” with human interests and values emphatically want to avert any such fate.

It is, by now, trite to point out the resemblance of such belief to age-old apocalyptic and millenarian patterns of thought. But many cultures exhibit such strains. What remains hidden is a deeper, and more specifically Christian, consonance of convictions. Namely, that history is intelligible as the perfecting of mind or spirit, that this perfection is somehow inevitable or imminent, and that arriving at this threshold may precipitate the endangerment of everything meaningfully human.

Perfection here merely denotes the complete fulfillment of what something fundamentally is. Importantly, this need not have any moralizing or humanizing component. You can have the perfect murderer or storm, after all. Indeed, as we shall shortly explore, perfection has accrued — since Christianity’s beginnings — thoroughly eschatological connotations.

Note, now, that superintelligence is often formulated as perfected intelligence: the ultimate culmination of agential potency or bare cogitation. Especially so in conjectures concerning explosive self-improvement, wherein an agent is pictured rapidly approaching the limits of instrumental power.

Should such cogitative cataclysm ever actually be sparked, this would, indubitably, be cause for concern for us humans, as we’ve absolutely no way of anticipating what a mind vaster than our own would do with us. Acknowledging this, however, doesn’t preclude additionally acknowledging the fact that the basic idea also conspicuously resembles conceptual knots embedded at the roots of Abrahamic and Hellenistic thought.

Engendered by ancient ambiguity about climactic points, insofar as these have long been pictured as heralding that perfection which endangers our essentially imperfect existence, this tension has expressed itself, again and again throughout European history, as a recurrent split. A split between those who, on one hand, respond to this promised climax with profound wariness and those who, on the other, express an impatient desire to usher in its arrival.

It is, at the least, noteworthy that there seems to be, in today’s AI discord, a recapitulation of this basic schism.

There’s more at the link. 

* * * * *

Bonus: Compare this with The Alliance for the Future Manifesto:

Alliance for the Future is a new Washington D.C. based nonprofit organization. We’re a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists, and policy experts who believe that artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. We have banded together to oppose the escalating panic around AI.

AFTF will work to inform the media, lawmakers, and other interested parties about the incredible benefits AI can bring to humanity. We will oppose stagnation and advocate for the benefits of technological progress in the political arena.

For decades, stagnation has been the root cause of our greatest national problems: the loss of the American dream for the normal person and the spiteful, zero-sum thinking which dominates politics.

Artificial intelligence is here to reverse this trend. It is here to give us back our future.

What strange beasts are these AI rogues?

medieval encyclopaedia about nature reminds me a lot of current thinking around llm cognition https://t.co/k9SnWCFl2N

— rohit (@krishnanrohit) March 9, 2024

GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons

Sam Altman wants 7 trillion dollars

Microsoft: Sam, we are fully in support of OpenAI’s mission and we are ready to provide any resources needed to advance your vision:

Sam Altman: I need $7T

Microsoft:pic.twitter.com/XW0NpvpDWS

— Daniel ∞ (@danielmerja) February 9, 2024

We're witnessing the recurrence of apocalyptic fears [elite panics]

Tyler Austin Harper, The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule, NYTimes, Jan. 26. 2024.

Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.

Meanwhile, some experts are warning of imminent population collapse. Elon Musk, who donated $10 million to researchers studying fertility and population decline, called it “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle speak openly about the possibility that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could spark World War III. [...]

In a certain sense, none of this is new. Apocalyptic anxieties are a mainstay of human culture. But they are not a constant. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they tend to spike into brief but intense extinction panics — periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future — before quieting again as those developments are metabolized. These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.

Back in the day:

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period just as much as the bacchanals and black market booze for which it is infamous. The ’20s were indeed roaring, but they were also reeling. And the figures articulating the doom were far from fringe.

On Oct. 30, 1924 — top hat in hand, sporting the dour, bulldog grimace for which he was well known — Winston Churchill stood on a spartan stage, peering over the shoulder of a man holding a newspaper that announced Churchill’s return to Parliament. [...]

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

In an eerie foreshadowing of atomic weapons, he went on to ask, “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?” He concluded the essay by asserting that the war that had just consumed Europe might be “but a pale preliminary” of the horrors to come. [...]

Around the same time that Churchill foretold the coming of “means of destruction incalculable in their effects,” the science fiction novelist H.G. Wells, who in his era was also famous for socialist political commentary, expressed the same doleful outlook. [...]

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. [...]

The Czech playwright Karel Capek’s 1920 drama, “R.U.R.,” imagined a future in which artificially intelligent robots wiped out humanity. In a scene that would strike fear into the hearts of Silicon Valley doomers, a character in the play observes: “They’ve ceased to be machines. They’re already aware of their superiority, and they hate us as they hate everything human.”

Elite panics:

One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction. [...]

Extinction panics are often fomented by elites, but that doesn’t mean we have to defer to elites for our solutions. We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires. Our survival may well depend on reversing this trend. We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously. It’s time we started treating these issues as urgent public priorities and funding them accordingly.

The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede.

There's more at the link.

How do you say “NO!” to Big Brother when it controls your computer?

Two years ago I did a series of posts provoked by Facebook. As I explained in the first post in that series, Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?:

On Tuesday, August 25, I was using Facebook, as I do every day, and I changed from one page to another. All of a sudden, WHAM! the interface changed and went mostly black. Facebook informed me that they would be changing the interface permanently on September 1, but I could get the new interface now. But, if I wanted, I could, at least temporarily, switch back to the old interface.

I resisted as long as I could, though I knew my resistence was doomed to failure, and in the process wrote a series of posts about how endusers are the at the mercey of Big Corps that provide us with the software we use to run our daily lives. The most recent post in the series went up on December 22 of last year, What do I want from my AI Assistant? [control, that's what].

Though I was aware of it, I neglected to write a post about the ‘right to repair,’ which has been an important issue for farmers and other operators of big equipment:

Modern-day tractors and combines are basically like computers on wheels. And for years, there has been a battle between farmers and manufacturers over who should have access to the information needed to repair them. Equipment manufacturers have made some concessions in order to avoid new laws, but some farmers say that's not enough. A new law in Colorado went into effect that allows farmers to repair their own equipment.

It’s the same issue. WE own it, sorta’, but THEY own it more, and so can control us, after a fashion.

I was reminded of the issue this morning when I woke up and my Android phone displayed a message: “Optimize your updated device. Click to get started.” My immediate reaction was %$!!$$!*##!! I may have to do it just to get rid of that damn message. And the result may be benign, but it’s the principle of the thing.

And THAT’s the deepest issue currently raised by AI, who controls what? It’s pretty obvious that the Big Boyz want to control as much as possible, not withstanding the fact that both Microsoft and Facebook are jumping on the Open Source bandwagon. Regardless of what they want and how the politics evolves, we’re dealing with highly sophisticated technology, technology about which most of us are ignorant. Given that ignorance, how can we possibly exert control over the AI that’s being shoved our way willy-nilly? Moreover it’s clear that AI technology can and will be very useful in educational settings.

Arizona State University just partnered with OpenAI (H/t Tyler Cowen).[1] Who controls what and for whom in that partnership? My guess is that, regardless of what the contracts say, we don’t how things will unfold. Who has what power? OpenAI? ASU administration, faculty, and students? What about the Arizona governor, legislature, and voters? The concentration and density is highest with OpenAI, not to mention the knowledge. To be sure, there are some faculty at ASU who are quite sophisticated about AI – I’m thinking particularly of Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు), an AI researcher who is immune to the hype and is quite active on Twitter, I mean X – what role will they play in this partnership? And so on.

You see the problem, don’t you?

In this context all this hype and blather about AI Doom is just a distraction. I’m reasonably certain that the Doomers are sincere in their anxiety, but when you zoom out at look at things from 20,000 feet their actions take on a different cast. The way social systems behave is almost always different from what is intended by individual human actors within those systems.

What’s going on? 

ADDENDUM, Feb. 9, 2024: OpenAI has is now working on agent software that would all but take over user devices and perform useful tasks. Take over?!!! Gary Marcus is skeptical:

Finally, let’s not forget about privacy. Such agents could (more or less by definition) have access to literally all of a user’s personal and professional information: every file, every keystroke, every password, every email, every text message, every location change, and every web search. After all, that’s what it means to take over a user’s device.

Even Orwell didn’t quite dream of that. Combine that with worries about security, and it’s all a colossal accident waiting to happen. Heaven forbid they should be allowed to run such software on Department of Defense computers. One screwup (and we all know LLMs are prone to screwups) and a LOT of people could die.

* * * * *

[1] From the article about ASU:

With the OpenAI partnership, ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, not only for certain courses, but also for study topics. STEM subjects are a focus and are “the make-or-break subjects for a lot of higher education,” Gonick said. The university will also use the tool in ASU’s largest course, Freshman Composition, to offer students writing help.

ASU also plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise to develop AI avatars as a “creative buddy” for studying certain subjects, like bots that can sing or write poetry about biology, for instance.

Gonick said ASU’s prompt engineering course has become one of the university’s most popular courses, not limited to engineering students. The access to ChatGPT Enterprise means students will no longer be limited by usage caps. He also said that after conversations with OpenAI’s leadership, he feels confident that the tool provides a “private walled-garden environment” that will safeguard student privacy and intellectual property.

OpenAI and ASU’s joint release specified that any prompts the ASU community inputs into ChatGPT “remain secure,” and that OpenAI “does not use this data for its training models.”

The dark side of competition in AI [a Moloch trap]

Note: She seems to take claims about AI and AGI at face value in a way that I don't. But I agree with her about possibility of a race to a bottom. That's what I suggest at the end of my recent 3QD article, Aye Aye, Cap’n! Investing in AI is like buying shares in a whaling voyage captained by a man who knows all about ships and little about whales.