I think there's a number of just crappy scenarios that can come with LLMs and other generative AI:
- Further trashing our public discourse: making truth even more uncertain and valuable information even harder to find. We're not doing great with social media, and it's easy to envision that generative AI could make it twice as bad.
- Kneecapping creative work by commoditizing perhaps half of it. There's going to be a lot of bodies fighting over the scraps that remain.
- Fostering learned helplessness. I think you need to be a good writer and thinker to fully use LLMs' capabilities. But a whole lot of kids are looking at machines "writing perfectly" and think they don't need to learn anything.
We don't need any further progress for these things to happen. Further progress may be even scarier, but the above is scary enough.
Yeah these effects seem hugely foreseeable (and/or are currently happening already) but tend to not be the type of thing "AI risk" people are talking about.
Exactly! I am positive there will be a ton of negative impact, like with most (all?) of tech. And it might be worse than anything we’ve seen (although beating the Snapchat algo might prove tricky). But that’s NOT what Tegmark and Hofstadter are talking about… their concern is existential and somewhat philosophical in the case of Hofstadter, as if GPT-4 questioned his very nature. To me, that doesn’t make sense.
- Further trashing our public discourse: making truth even more uncertain and valuable information even harder to find. We're not doing great with social media, and it's easy to envision that generative AI could make it twice as bad.
- Kneecapping creative work by commoditizing perhaps half of it. There's going to be a lot of bodies fighting over the scraps that remain.
- Fostering learned helplessness. I think you need to be a good writer and thinker to fully use LLMs' capabilities. But a whole lot of kids are looking at machines "writing perfectly" and think they don't need to learn anything.
We don't need any further progress for these things to happen. Further progress may be even scarier, but the above is scary enough.