AI is what it is, and it does what it does. The real problem is how willing people are to “outsource their critical thinking” and blindly follow, “because AI said so.”

I know. I’m preaching to the choir.

> Weed is awesome but generally doesn't make billionaires.

Yes, but that's purely because of first mover advantage. Do you have any idea the amount of tax revenue governments are throwing away by trying to kill off THC product sales? One in three Americans at least tried cannabis even when it was ENTIRELY criminalized.

That's one hell of a market, that exists whether you tax and regulate it or not.

Weed is awesome but generally doesn't make billionaires.

And what I'm saying is that you could get your way and AI could be Butlerian Jihad style outlawed tomorrow, and people would still use it.

You could kill OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia etc. and people would still train models and use them.

You can't put the genie back into its lamp. That trick never works

SOME humans will always be willing to do or use ANYTHING. No question. But that's not the same thing as the decisions made by whichever humans are currently on top of the pile.

I guess my survival instinct kicks in and I'm nore willing to accept what I see as a pervasive and now endemic force in the technology landscape.

The big 3 could implode tomorrow and there is no future of tech that I see on this timeline that doesn't include LLMs.

Humans just don't put down monetarily "useful" tech like this. I've been around too long to think anything otherwise.

I just don't love the idea that the remaining "artificial intelligences" will be telling our future students who ask about the Tien-Amin massacre that such questions go against The Will Of Heaven.

BUT.

In real life, with real humans at scale, how "awesome" is the typical dudebro who bases his personality on Tyler Durden?

It's kinda like the party drugs that killed Sam. If there weren't good bits, he wouldn't have ignored the bad bits--and died.

To your point, California passed a law this year explicitly prohibiting legal defendants for blaming AI itself as an "autonomous" entity.

Nope. Pick a human. It won't even always be the creator of the model, sometimes the responsible culprit is the user. But you always have to pick a human to charge or sue, and they can't say "it wasn't me, it was ChatGPT!"

It's also a little discouraging how often it produces an answer that's almost correct. But occasionally it shows me something I did not know and it's useful for that.

A friend who is a local medical professional told me about it last week--and about a competing "medical LLM" intended for the same purpose, which my friend described as WORSE than ChatGPT.

(openai.com)

"Sam Altman convinced teen to overdose on hard drugs" has a better ring to it.

And Sam queried it constantly about what was "safe" and asked it "will I be okay" if taking its recommendations. He was not unaware that the drugs were dangerous... And he probably would have been safer with NO "help" whatsoever, for exactly that reason.

ChatGPT enabled him to ignore his own fears. Because it's dumb as hell, and designed to be an engagement-maxxing sycophant.

Despite which, it kept advising him to make multi-drug "cocktails"--worse yet, telling him to take the extra drugs not merely as a "fun mix" but so that the later party drugs would in theory mitigate the unpleasant effects of the first.