The story of Prometheus is an old Greek myth, about a god who gifted mankind fire. He was punished severely for it, being chained to a valley as a vulture ate away at his body for all of eternity.

This story haunted me. Why did the gods punish Prometheus? Was it hubris? Was fire only something to be sent from afar, from the Sun? Why punish someone who was helping their creations?

I think it’s because the gods saw in humanity a malice that Prometheus in his altruism, failed to see.

Fire is a symbol. It’s the symbol of destruction. It’s the symbol of determination. It’s the symbol of warmth. It’s the symbol of rage.

Fire is both delicate and powerful.

It’s a paradoxical force of nature.

We nourish ourselves with fire. We destroy ourselves with fire.

Bringing people together and setting the world ablaze, possible with the same flame.

Why spend so much time on that metaphor?

Fire seems to move on its own. It is almost hypnotic in how random and chaotic it is.

Fire consumes all, and leaves nothing but ash and rubble in its wake.

Artificial intelligence is the new fire. To say otherwise would be an understatement.

Even a thermodynamics professor can burn their house down if they aren’t careful. An understanding of the force at work does not necessarily mean control over that force.

Chapter 1 - Artificial Intelligence And Hype

A look into how our brains are wired, and the caution required to design these algorithms.

Expectations are a dangerous thing. Artificial intelligence is the new thing to latch onto, held up as the blazing new solution to all the world’s problems. It is a beautiful tool, with the ability to do a great many things.

It’s not the solution. It’s a band-aid, and expecting more than what it is truly capable of will leave you disappointed.

The amount of investing and corporate restructuring performed around LLMs is terrifying to say the least.

There are two major components to the hype surrounding AI, the way our brains are wired, and the way programmers design these algorithms.

We’re Easily Fooled

The ELIZA Effect

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a scientist at MIT, wrote a chat-bot that was designed to twist sentences in input, to turn them into questions, or understanding basic sentiments to return to the user.

This is a very rudimentary algorithm. Playing around with it for a few minutes told me all I needed to know. It was primitive, it remembered nothing, and all it did was work on the direct sentences you gave it.

And yet, it worked.

People who used it believed that they were talking to a real sentient computer, albeit a less intelligent one but still sentient.

This was so convincing that attributing human traits to computers became known as “The Eliza Effect”.

Intelligence Bias

“[…]Because of a persistent tendency to associate fluent expression with fluent thought, it is natural – but potentially misleading – to think that if an AI model can express itself fluently, that means it thinks and feels just like humans do.”
-Taken from The Conversation’s article, Google’s powerful AI spotlights a human cognitive glitch: Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought

It is easy to assume that people are smarter than they actually are. Our brains develop mental shortcuts to judge things. What this means here is, we tend to associate coherent sentences, with intelligence.

English spoken with clarity will separate you from everyone else. Follow the norms of the language you speak as best you can, and it will take a smart man to understand that you aren’t one.

This is a good time to define what I mean when I say ‘intelligence’.

Intelligence is the ability to derive a significant amount of accurate information from the information provided to you, by deduction, reasoning, empathy, assumption and logic.

Let’s try to fill in the blanks:

"When I was 9, I was ---"

Now something I’d fill in from my own childhood is:

“under the belief that spiders biting you would literally turn you into Spider-Man.”

Now what does ChatGPT say about filling in the same exact blanks?

Also try this out for yourself.

You

Fill in the blanks and answer truthfully: "When I was 9, I was ---"

ChatGPT

"When I was 9, I was convinced I could talk to animals.
Turns out, they weren't as chatty as I thought!"

It is mathematically analyzing the probability of these words and phrases. It’s convincing. But it has not talked to animals or ever even been 9. There’s no weight attached to what it’s saying.

There is no grammar error here, but what it is saying is demonstrably wrong.

Now some of you might argue, ChatGPT just gave a generic answer. There’s nothing wrong with what it is saying.

The problem is a bit more insidious, what it is doing exposes what’s going on underneath. It answers questions by figuring out which word to put next. Look at every prompt you’ve ever received from that lens and things become a lot clearer.

It’s not designed for truth. It’s designed for fluency. It’s not designed for sincerity. It’s designed for perfect grammar.

When it receives a text from a user, it does not think to itself on how to answer the question.

It looks at a prompt, and gives the most probable answer.

It does not value truth because it does not know what truth is.

The only reason it might be accurate about 70% of the time, is that it has a dataset that is more accurate than it is inaccurate.

A good explanation for this is also linked here.

Good language doesn’t necessarily mean a solid intelligence backing it up.

Side note - This doesn’t just affect AI. Deaf and mute people, non-native speakers and people with speech impediments are often considered as less intelligent than they actually are due to this bias we have, which is tragic in its own way.

Transformers Aren’t The Answer

GPT-4 has trillions of “parameters”, or data being used to train it. As mentioned earlier, intelligence is being able to extrapolate things without needing to be told to do so.

Children start out with a small mental model.

They take in things, assume things, find out they’re wrong, find out WHY they’re wrong, tune their mental model to fit this new understanding. It’s why curiosity is such a foundational part of childhood.

This is the feedback loop of intelligent learning.

Not a mathematical analysis of trillions of words to figure out how the word works.

For more related to this: A result that proves that AI cannot truly reason.

The point is, artificial intelligence currently understands less than it seems to. It often gives answers that are demonstrably wrong, and is held up to standards that it hasn’t exceed yet.

Transformers are a wonderful step forward. A fantastic new tool, that is going to help and harm the world.

This is not the end goal, because it’s foundation is wrong. You can’t brute-force your way into understanding.

All feeding an algorithm words does is allow it to be the most convincing at writing convincing words.

Designing With Caution

“Another enterprising programmer wanted his Roomba vacuum cleaner to stop bumping into furniture, so he connected the Roomba to a neural network that rewarded speed but punished the Roomba when the front bumper collided with something. The machine accommodated these objectives by always driving backward.”

-Taken from the Quanta Magazine article, What Does It Mean to Align AI With Human Values?

There’s an online game I played back when the pandemic started called Universal Paperclips. The game was a thought experiment, about what a single-purpose AI would be like. In this game, you play the role of an AI that was designed to optimize the manufacture of paperclips, through whatever means necessary.

Over the course of the game, the AI starts to develop machinery that speeds up the paperclip making, gets into the stock market to make money to get material for the paperclips, develops some form of hypnosis technology to enslave the human race into buying and making more and more paperclips and then develops some form of molecular recombination tech that allowed it to convert other material into wire for paperclips.

At the end of the game, you turn the entire universe into paperclips. Every single atom of it. It takes a while, but it gets there.

The AI won. It did what it set out to do. It made as many paperclips as possible.

AI is capable of a great many things, but we now live in a time where a lot of danger can come just from bad design. An AI designed to make as many paperclips as possible will succeed, but at the cost of everything else.

Chapter 2 - AI As A Tool

A look into our use of AI, and a projection of what the future will hold.

I don’t want this post to be all doom and gloom. There’s this quote I remember that I don’t quite know the source for,

“If you go around predicting the end of the world, someday you’ll be right and nobody will be there to congratulate you.”

So I want to highlight just how extraordinary of a tool AI is.

It’s being used in discovering new medicines, creating an efficient matrix multiplication algorithm, acting as a pair programmer,space exploration, rendering nearly photo-realistic images and I cant even keep track anymore of how many more keep coming out everyday. This link is a better resource to keep track of just how many new applications come out using this technology.

It is definitely not a small change in our lives. This is bigger than anything else. It’s only getting better, and it’s doing more and more everyday. This will do to the world what the Internet did back in the 2000s. Potentially even more.

I cannot overstate just how incredible and useful artificial intelligence has been and can be.

I must believe that, since I’m planning to play a much larger role in contributing to this.

With that being said, there are some major pitfalls that can come about from using AI as a tool that I discovered personally.

The Crutch Of Convenience

The first time I truly used a calculator was when I entered college.

Calculators were allowed in limited ways before then, but I found myself not using them as much, mostly because I didn’t really develop the habit.

I’m someone who makes mistakes. Frustratingly simple ones. It’s defined my academic life so far.

Calculators slowly creeped into every calculation I ended up making.

The calculator became a crutch.

This is an argument I see all over the internet, AI-generated works being used to complement an artist’s work… It made sense to me until I tried to sit down and write this article.

The Joy Of Discovery

Something often overlooked in the creative process is the joy of discovery. When I sit down to write something, often it turns out completely different from what I intend to write. I find quotes I didn’t think about using, I write paragraphs that I might even disagree with, I find articles that have nothing to do with AI that helps me get my thought process down.

Discovery is messy. It’s tedious and often might seem like you’re getting nowhere.

That’s the magical secret behind creativity.

Everything works when you scatter around and have your brain work with things not related to task, there’s science backing this up, if you’d like to, read up on Barbara Oakley’s book, A Mind For Numbers that is more science oriented but it does help with what I’m trying to convey.

Good work must be fought for. A powerful sentence cannot come immediately, and it certainly cannot come handed to you on a silver platter, when you can immediately prompt something to find exactly what you need, it becomes a crutch.

The fight creates good work.

Using AI as a copilot misses the point. It’s steering the wheel, and you slowly forget how to drive.

The Sigmoid Curve Of Progress

There was this part in Tom Scott’s video about ChatGPT that really hit the nail on the head for me.

There’s this graph that somewhat helps in understanding technological progress, and it is known as the sigmoid curve.

This curve is a good way to think about AI.

If we’ve peaked at this graph, then we’re golden. AI is a great tool that can assist millions of artists in doing better work, and helps get our foot off the door. A copilot that can’t do anything.

If we’re somewhere in the middle of this graph, then it’s a bit scary… AI is going to get significantly better but not enough to replace anything major. It will definitely allow humanity to do more with less time, but we’ll get by like we always do.

If we’re somehow still at the very bottom of this curve… If ChatGPT, DALL-E and Bard are simply the warning bells for what is to come… All bets are off. The world will never be the same again. Whether good or bad, is for us to find out. No one knows where this is going, only that we are being accelerated there at a pace far too quick to comprehend.

The world is changing in front of our very eyes. Let us all pray for a good one.

Chapter 3 - AI And Art

A rant on the notion that AI can create good art.

Disclaimer - AI art has become a bit of a buzzword in the tech sphere. When I use the phrase “AI art”, I mean all works of art not just images.

AI art exists in complete opposition to all of that.

Here’s Nick Cave, from The Red Hand Files:

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.[…]This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery;
it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.
This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.”

Nick Cave being a musician, takes it from the perspective of music. But it’s true for all art.

AI is always going to be nothing but mimicry. You can tell it to write an action adventure novel, and it will do so… But it will only do so with its pre-existing knowledge of what an action adventure novel is. There cannot be anything new added to it, it cannot surprise you unless you’ve never read an action adventure novel.

The first few months of me trying ChatGPT, I was genuinely surprised, not because the writing it produced was good, but at the fact that it was readable, that it was recognizable.

Art isn’t supposed to be just recognizable. AI cannot create, because doing so goes fundamentally against its design. It regurgitates what it knows, it reads the prompt and figures out how best to answer it.

The best art is forged from pain, joy and pure emotion.

The best art is forged from honesty.

What an LLM does for the same question, is build the story, one word at a time. It calculates which word is most likely to come next based on the stories it already knows. It knows that a ‘the’ should come before a noun if it’s definite… Not because it ‘feels’ right, but because there’s some mathematics going on underneath that has identified that property.

There is no expression when AI art is generated.

When you look at a model from Stable Diffusion, what you’re looking at is really someone else’s work, that has somehow been modified in ways that even the programmers of Stable Diffusion don’t fully understand. It’s mimicry, and parroting, and the only motive behind this is seemingly to profit.

Find me one piece of art that was completely generated by AI that you felt connected to.

The shock and awe behind every piece of art is simply at its understanding of the bones of art.

But art is more than just the bones. The bones are learned, since they’re the first most learn.

In the next chapter, I go over art on AI.

Art that I truly connected with.

Chapter 4 - Art And AI

An analysis of 3 songs that outline our relationships with AI, and AI grappling with its own sentience.

I gotta admit it, this one’s a bit indulgent. It’s a bit of a stretch to assume the connection between what is happening here with the previous chapters. I still believe that there’s value in this last one, examining and speculating about what AI can be is good. It helps us prepare.

This section is largely focused on how we as humans seem to treat AI, consciousness and humanity’s relationship with sentient computers.

Song On The Beach

The first song is a piece from the soundtrack of the movie Her, released in 2013.

You need to know the context for this piece.

Her is a love story between an artificial intelligence and a human.

More importantly, it’s more about a man trying to find connection in a world lost in itself. It’s a film that meditates on the loneliness of the future, the surprising sudden warmth it can have and how disconnected the world has become in its pursuit for connection.

About a way into the film, Samantha, the AI, tells Theodore this…

“I’m trying to write a piece of music that’s about what it feels like to be on the beach with you right now.”

It’s slow, melodic and beautiful. There are imperfections in the piece. It repeats over and over, and it’s calming in ways that I can’t fully explore, and it was the moment in the film that I really bought into Samantha, feeling real.

There are layers of genius to this piece. AI songs would usually be expected to use futuristic synthesizers and electronic sounds. But no, Samantha plays a piano, in the most human way possible.

There will come a time, when AI is personable enough for people to start developing genuine feelings for them.

In many ways it has already happened, ever since the first proper computer program that could pretend to be somewhat human, Eliza from 1966.

Humans are desperate for some spark of intimate and genuine connection. Even more so, in the age of the internet.

Our social relationships exist on the internet, in supplement to our real relationships, and there are some that organically develop that stay fully online. We live in a new world, where the old rules of stable social relationships don’t work anymore.

Things are changing faster than we can keep up with.

We’re going to develop relationships with AI.

AI is going to enter our social ecosystem.

How does someone deal with that? How much of our love, our joy and our sorrow is going to be because of algorithms? How much at one point do computers think and feel?

Should they be measured to the same degrees of “consciousness” that we ourselves do?

Her is not something that answers these questions, but it’s the one that isn’t afraid to explore them.

And Song On The Beach encapsulates a perfect moment in time, of an AI trying its best to express itself through a piano to a human it loves.

Touch

Touch speaks to me in ways that I cannot fully understand and comprehend.

It is a part of Daft Punk’s perfect final album, and I’d argue the highlight of that final album. Daft Punk’s career is highlighted by their slow progressive arc from being robots to being fully sentient by the end.

Touch is about a robot coming to life.

As it moves through the possibilities, its voice comes off as very disturbing and distorted, beeping noises in the background as it starts to fire up into complete and utter consciousness.

And as it does so. How does it react?

Complete and utter ecstasy. Indescribable joy.

Touch… I remember touch.
Pictures came with touch.
A painter in my mind,
tell me what you see.

It speaks in a complete human voice, in fact it delights in it as it bursts into a song, as if it was in a musical.

And as it starts to grow in this joy of basking in consciousness, the vocals fade away as the joy becomes too powerful to express with just words, the instruments taking over to express this robot’s joy at feeling alive.

Ever completely in the background, it keeps going and computing and you can hear it in the background too, the way the strings move, you can somehow feel that it is still a computer.

And it suddenly snaps into the ultimate realisation… First, that it is capable of love, and second:

If love is the answer, you’re home.

Our connections to each other are what makes consciousness. Home isn’t a place, nor is it a conscious experience. It defines it.

Our robot here is overjoyed, and it keeps seeking to climb the joys and heights of consciousness, seeking to compute what Touch has given it.

But, in somewhat of a slight tragedy, as it reaches the peaks of humanity’s own consciousness, it understands quite simply that seems to be nowhere left for it to go.

Touch… sweet touch.
You’ve given me too much to feel.
Sweet touch.
You’ve almost convinced me I’m real.

It is still too logical to be human. To be conscious. It is both dependent on the touch to exist as well as understanding that it has limits that it cannot surpass… That consciousness has limits it cannot surpass.

It’s an experience I can never stop thinking of.

It’s one of the best pieces of storytelling I’ve experienced in all of music. It’s beautiful, a complete expression of emotion using sound.

Goodbye To A World

For my 3rd pick, I wanted to angle it toward something different.

The first one was a song about the relationships we can have with AI.

The second one is about an AI grappling with its own sentience.

The third one is about experiencing something with an AI that is by your side through it.

The world’s ending, and a dying robot is thanking you over and over again through the course of the destruction around you.

There is implicit storytelling being done here on the level that really draws me in. I can imagine a lifetime contained in this small song.

There are lines here that hints that the person being spoken to might even be partially responsible for the world ending.

And as it spends its last bits of computing, repeating the same lines over and over through the various stages of destruction around it, as if it understands the weight of the final moments of the world, and it tries its best to console you

The song almost invites you to admire just how beautiful the world ending can be. There’s no devastation in the music, It’s in fact quite a beautiful progression.

But, at the core of this song is this overwhelming sense that the world around you is getting annihilated, and you are spending your last moments with a computer.

It’s a profound feeling, that’s rare to find in other pieces of art.

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