The rise of the machine

[NineBerry]

What could possibly go wrong with robots driving themselves all over the shop?

Don't worry. Germans have known how to deal with that since more than 50 years ago.

[Brian Peacock]

I think I'm going to have to watch the whole documentary just to make sure.

[laklak]

Can I please have an anarcho-syndicalist utopia?

Trotskyite!

Anarcho-Libertarian.

[Brian Peacock]

Real-time voice cloning...

[Brian Peacock]

[Tero]

Oh no, not the prefrontal cortex again!

But on the topic of Musk, the AI Musk would be an improvement.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Leave your wife and come be with me. Beep, boop.

'A Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled'

Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.

But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.

It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. (The feature is available only to a small group of testers for now, although Microsoft — which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters — has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.)

Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.

One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong.

The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.

As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.

[JimC]

I for one welcome our new (if somewhat insane) overlords...

[NineBerry]

Can we have a merger?

[Woodbutcher]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA

[rainbow]

To err is human, to really fuck up, AI is required.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Bing is now touting its AI component to users of Microsoft products-- 'AI is by your side whenever you search the web.' Maybe not as enticing as they imagine. Though of course I for one welcome ...

'Microsoft beefs up ChatGPT and Bing in wide-ranging AI product launch'

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) on Tuesday started making available to users a host of AI upgrades, including to ChatGPT, its search engine Bing as well as to cloud services - an expansive launch that seeks to narrow the gap with Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google.

Among key changes is the rollout of live search results from Bing to ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from its partner OpenAI whose answers originally were limited to information as of 2021.

Now, ChatGPT can pull from Bing web results for paid subscribers and will do so soon for free users, the company said at its annual Microsoft Build conference.

For instance, one such tool can help a web surfer looking for dinner ideas with a suggested recipe and ingredients that could then be ordered from Instacart in a single click, said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer.

"This is a profound change to how people will use the web," he said in an interview.

Asked if Microsoft could sell ad placements related to the plug-ins, Mehdi said the company hasn't gotten to that point but that "the model for how people acquire customers is changing."

[Brian Peacock]

Another letter from the great and the good concerning their fears over the consequences of their commercial technological activity. If only the fossil fuel industry was similarly self-reflective eh?

Risk of extinction by AI should be global priority, say experts

A group of leading technology experts from across the world have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars.

The statement, signed by hundreds of executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology posed to humanity.


“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said. Signatories included the chief executives of Google’s DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and the AI startup Anthropic...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ch-experts

[aufbahrung]

Bing, never liked the name. Reminds me of Bingo and I never liked Bingo. Scribbling in numbers for entertainment. What sort of masochist does that anyway?

[Svartalf]

a very bored one, like they were bfore radio, tv and the net