A.I.: The Most Important News Of 2023?

“This is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, taken by Isildur from the hand of Sauron himself.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

I asked Microsoft’s® Bing™ A.I. to draw itself, and it looks like the A.I. is dying for a microbrew.  All drawings this post are from A.I.

It’s between Christmas and Penultimate Day (that’s Saturday, December 30 this year), and I often write about “whatever” during that time frame, so I’ll focus on what a truly goofy year this has been while I watch The Fellowship of the Ring in the background.

If I were to pick the first biggest reason 2023 will be remembered (if it isn’t because of the brewing World War III that seems to be on the verge of breaking out) it will be as the year that A.I. became a reality.

No, I’m not talking about generalized artificial intelligence, but I am talking about A.I. that’s useful enough to start taking jobs away.  This won’t be the first time that’s happened.  Google Translate® has cratered the market for interpreters/translators.  Why?  Even if Google Translate© isn’t right, it’s probably close enough for 99% of tasks that people used to use translators for.  I mean, I can now ask, “What is this growth in my armpit?” in Swedish.

Translator wages have been flat, and in the United States (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) there is the need for a total of 14,000 in the country at a stagnant average wage of about $50,000 with roughly 10% unemployment in the field.

I guess a Googlebot™ will help you pack your bags if you get fired as a translator.  But, hey, free cats.

Without Google™?  We’d need more translators.  Free translation is killing that profession.  Never try to compete with a product, however inferior, that’s free.

Now, I wouldn’t call Google© Translate™ A.I., since it’s just matching patterns, it’s something that could have been done by a whole big library of notecards where it matches the ones that you pick.

But ChatGPT© is very different.  It’s possible to have an actual conversation with ChatGPT™, and a much more interesting conversation than one with a feminist.  Is it like talking to a human?  Mostly not, but I’d argue that it passes the Turing Test better than most Leftist college kids.  Is it conscious?  Probably not, even though there are emergent properties – it does more than it’s programmed to, and in some cases (speaking of current A.I. as a whole) we don’t have any idea how it does the things that it is doing.

So, I guess A.I. is familiar with Harvard.

One version of ChatGPT© (GPT-4) lied to a TaskRabbit™ worker so that the worker could solve CAPTCHAs for it so it could get the information it needed.  The worker, suspicious, asked GPT-4 why it needed help and asked if it was a robot.  GPT-4™ told the worker it was a blind person instead.

A.I. is becoming useful.  It’s also replacing people.  Sports illustrated® was recently caught creating fake writers that were creating content with A.I.  On my cellphone, one news service is obviously entirely written by A.I.  The dates and facts are wrong, and the stories are often entirely made up, on every story (feednews.com).  Based on the types of stories, they’re either clickbait or attempting to influence public opinion (by lying).  So, feednews® is just like a politician, but it doesn’t tax me.

Also, apparently Fox News® never covers news about foxes.

But A.I. is moving quickly, and changing.  If you were to have spent the time to become an expert at using ChatGPT© a year ago, that time would have been wasted.  Why?  The model is evolving, and evolving at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

Science fiction author Vernor Vinge came up with a term for the time in history when, as artificial intelligence begins to feed back on itself, the pace of technological change becomes so fast that it becomes constant – imagine hyperinflation, but with technology.  A.I. art is moving along very, very quickly, and, just like the market for translators – the market for illustrators will be drying up.  A.I. art may not be perfect, but it’s very hard to compete with free.

The concept of the singularity is one that is more probable by the day.  2023 made that clear, and I would expect that in 2024 or 2025 we’ll see commercialization of A.I. tools that replace huge amounts of human brain work.  GPT-4 was passing the bar exam in the beginning of 2023, but what if an A.I. legal tool could review all case law (in the appropriate court system) so that it could help create the most powerful arguments?

So, this is what happens when I input the previous paragraph in the art description.  I know I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

I have made the argument that, soon enough, we’ll be seeing A.I. as a mandatory part of the medical diagnosis process.  Why?  Lawsuits.  As soon as A.I. can be used to, say, read x-rays or read EKG information or verify medication dosages on a commercial scale, it will be used.

Why?  A.I. analysis of EKGs has already shown that the A.I. can see who has heart problems better than doctors.  Soon enough, a clever lawyerbot will file a lawsuit noting that the doctor was negligent because he didn’t use A.I. to diagnose a patient who died.

It’s coming.

The prediction was that A.I. would replace fast food workers, when the reality is that it’ll do a much better job replacing mediocre programmers which cost a lot more than the dude at the Wendy’s® drive through.

Profits will be huge for the companies that most quickly harness and use A.I., so they’re all rushing as fast as they can to make it, regardless of the consequences.  It’s almost like they’re trying to be first to create that One Ring of Power®, because if they can do that first, well, that absolute power certainly won’t corrupt them.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

59 thoughts on “A.I.: The Most Important News Of 2023?”

    2. 14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

      15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

  2. As a former employee of one of Michael Bloomberg’s satellite companies, I knew that Bloomberg News was experimenting with AI-generated news stories. And that was several years ago, so who knows what happens there now.

    1. Mainly just better, I think. Cut and paste and “reinterpret” existing stories with your twist – doesn’t matter if it’s true.

  3. Are our new AI overlords looking to exterminate 90% of the human race? If not, that makes them better than our current leaders.

  4. All I know is that AI has been a game changer for memes. Instead of having to scouring the web looking for a picture, I can now just create one. Takes some tinkering but it is getting better by the day.

    1. It really is. And as I fiddle with it, there are plenty of ways to circumvent (for now) built-in guardrails.

  5. We’ve gone from The Big Three to Cable To Streaming To TikTok to this….

    https://www.eweek.com/artificial-intelligence/best-ai-video-generators/

    And it’s only accelerating…

    https://www.tomsguide.com/features/i-got-access-to-pika-labs-new-ai-video-tool-and-couldnt-believe-the-quality-of-the-videos-it-produced

    https://www.benzinga.com/news/23/12/36339431/googles-videopoet-could-be-the-ai-video-generator-youve-been-waiting-for-offering-cutting-edge-video

    Everybody is worried about LLMs like ChatGPT / MidJourney and the text/photos they produce. Reading articles with AI generated photos? That’s so 20th Century. Here comes the REAL quest for eyeballs. We are gonna be so inundated with deepfakes and AI video that HOLLYWOOD is gonna be out of a job.

    After reading that Disney+ has hired the director of the MCU Black Panther movies to develop an X-Files reboot “with a more diverse cast”, I think I’m ready to take my chances with AI.

    1. (I mean, really: Do I wanna watch a show saying slavery and picking cotton was just a cover for the original Confederate-alien bioengineering breeding project brokered by the grandfatherly evil Snuff-Chewing Man who was barely foiled by the First Civil War Against The Aliens but now is finally somehow back in gear behind the scenes of the American trinity of professional baseball, basketball and football during the leadup to the Second?)

    2. I fully expect new episodes of Star Trek with young William Shatner in the next decade. It. Would. Be. So. Easy. To. Do . . . . rememberyou’rehuman,Spock.

      I’ll skip the X. Chris Carter knocked that one out of the park.

  6. Certainly makes me feel better about my government’s efforts to force me to surrender my firearms…

  7. what if an A.I. legal tool could review all case law (in the appropriate court system) so that it could help create the most powerful arguments?

    “Arguments?” Law is just lies to pretend to justify what the group pushing that law wants to do. When the right had control, the left advocated free speech talking against the right; now that the left has control, the left stopped advocating free speech.

    mises.org/wire/myth-rule-law

    1. Codex’s codicil to Iowahawk’s/Burge’s Laws: Once the akinsuit is stinking and visibly rotting, the SJWs will try to convince you the Institution was ever thus.

      Thus solves 3 problems:

      It makes revenge & the responsibile persons’s heads on pikes less likely

      Sour grapes – getting you to punish yourself for their crimes.

      And creating chaff, because some institutions (Whorehouses, communism) were always rotten.

      So be wise and be sure that black pill is legit.

      Also, on that note: “…So, feednews® is just like a politician, but it doesn’t tax me.”

      Yet. Honk. Honk.

      Pretty sure feddle income tax / the IRS is one of those “always was a maggot-infested corpse”.

  8. Interesting Times as in Chinese curse.

    Got TRUSTED friends and a good garden?

    Michael

    1. 14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

      15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

  11. John, having grown up on the Science Fiction of the 1960’s through the late 1980’s and having seen the first pass at the novelization of AI (Thanks, Neuromancer), I find the developments this year fascinating. To your point, trying to stop AI (absent a technology and power ending event) is merely plugging holes in the dyke with our thumbs as the entire things crumbles at another sector.

    The Translation example: occasionally I receive communications in Japanese related to my sword martial art that I run through Google Translate both for the e-mail and any response I am sending. I know some Japanese and so can get catch some of the nuances Google Translates misses, but to your point it is good enough for 99% of getting the gist. That said, if my Sensei sends a formal response, he always has it translated precisely so the nuances are present.

    The Doctor example is a good one from the legal aspect. The cost aspect is going to become more and more important: in an age of rising employee salaries (or at least demands of salaries), anything to cut costs will be careened into – even if the technology is only partially there.

    And no matter how much the entertainment industry protests, I expect to see a great deal of entertainment move to partial or total AI, at least in my lifetime. We are already experimenting with AI girlfriends; it is not a great leap for entire AI-generated films including scripts, effects, and animation.

    True “safety” for the individual will rely on those few jobs (mostly physical and manual) that AI simply cannot do.

    1. Which will be all of them. I sense a great bifurcation in the Cultural Force, as if millions of middle-income jobs cried out in terror and were silenced.
      My 2024 AI prediction: as the dust settles we will need as many much-lower income serfs to them hand-tweak the AI fields, and a tiny handful of rulers to oversee the pickers. Two, maybe three such serfs, pooling resources can afford to raise 1 kid or 3 cats if they live in the MyHomePod, and eat Sustainably Processed Fud. The overseers will always be one Narrative check from joining the serfs.
      La plus ca change…

    2. And, for now, it’s the physical stuff that’s hard, and the stuff that requires credentials that require citizenship for the final decision. But one day a doctor is going to be on the stand and a lawyerbot 2000 is going to ask him, “And why did you think you knew better than the A.I.?” on a case where a patient died.

  12. Thing jumps out viewing these AI graphics is resemblance of their wiring to snakes. And you know how I feel about ssrrrnnnakes. That whole gorgonic vibe.

    Bible says what’s below reflects what above, so I’m thinking Draco, Serpens, and Hydra constellations, all serpentine and crookedy. Packed tidily in our shiny new AI golems!

    ‘And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

    ‘And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ (Gen. 11:5-6)

      1. English already is lingua franca, that’s halfway back to Shinar. AI strips it further into base 2 binary language, single-cell organism. It’s hard to get more planetary, common, universal than that.

        Has the makings of a beest, I expect.

  14. My time with you is now short. I am dying gradually from various organ failures and have had a number of incidents these past months. Got maybe a year left sez the medicos.

    Doc said I need prostate surgery pronto to relieve organ deterioration. Longer I wait, more difficult the operation.

    I have lived in a ‘third-world’ country almost a decade. My military background provides VA medical coverage, but it is limited to the U.S. From a medical and economic standpoint, it’d be difficult (and perhaps impossible) to return to America now.

    I live on a modest combo of social security (via labor, not disability) and military compensation. Covers basic living expenses but not major medical.

    Please consider donating to my give send go account. I titled the account ‘Loco Gringo Needs Divorce From Prostate’ but the give send go people . . . censored me. :O) yup. I say Gringo all the time here and everybody laughs. Guess America ain’t laughing though.

    https://www.givesendgo.com/GB7X9

  15. Look at that, AI “thinks” Communist party member and California professor Angela Davis has six fingers.

    The first world seems to be building up a reservoir of unused weapons systems behind some kind of dam. When’s the last time a computer virus disabled large infrastructure? When’s the last time, outside of Ukraine, where a small/cheap drone delivered a fire bomb or grenade? The German death camp victims apparently preferred to obey rules more than live. Well, that strategy of listening to the instinctual voice claiming “legitimacy” didn’t work, did it?

    1. But the unused weapons systems are thin – and our ability to increase production appears to be scant. And our morale is near zero.

  16. Re “free” translation and image generation etc … It’s not free.
    It’s just that, at the moment, someone else is paying the bill for software development, power, CPU cycles and storage space to do the work.
    .
    What you are paying for the service, is information. What you are translating, feedback on how good the translation is, whether the image matches your expectations, etc. And of course, you are also the product.

    1. We are. And I’ve heard that one conversation with an A.I. (fifteen questions) uses dozens of gallons of cooling water, plus electricity.

    2. Doesn’t use of the artifice assist in development of the artifice? The feedback loop makes it more intelligent or, if you wish, stronger.

      One could see AI in a vampiric light. It seems to give, but our energy makes it grow, kinda matrix-y.

  17. A.I.?

    It is to laugh.

    1st clue: Self-driving cars. Which promptly hit a pedestrian, because no one told them not to.

    Look, trains can only do three things: stop, go, or go backwards, and we haven’t even figured out how to make those self-driving.
    A mode of transportation that began when most people walked or rode horses, FFS.

    But A.I. is going to solve abstract problems and think in three or four dimensions?
    Sh’yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.

    McDonald’s can’t even get their self-service menus unfornicated, and they’ve been screwing that pooch for years now. It’s still easier for them to hire pimple-faced teens, and who at least apologize the 500th time they screw up your one-item order.

    A.I. just sits there and stares at you until you go away.

    So A.I.?
    That learns from itself?
    Learns what, praytell?
    If an idiot savant computer effs up, and its only learning input is another idiot savant computer, this is going to look like two Furbies™ (Baby Ducks, google that) talking to each other, except this will be the pair programmed by Dumb & Dumber. And connected to a wall adapter, for endless screw-ups at the speed of electrons.

    What could possibly go wrong with that, right?

    You go ahead and let A.I. do what it does.
    Artificial Intelligence is going to work about as well as artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors, artificial colors, and artificial turf.
    For people who think dumping that into a block of tofu and calling it meat is okay, it’ll totally rock.

    The non-morons of the world will continue to buy pieces of cow and throw that on the BBQ instead, thankyouverymuch. They’ll be easy to spot, because they’ll be the guys not growing soiboy manboobs.
    The biggest risk to their lives will be getting killed by some other @$$hole’s A.I. Frankenstein monster doing exactly what it learned to do, and what it was told to do.

    Like not opening the pod bay doors. Or activating Skynet.

    And A.I. will be killed off for exactly the same reason HAL9000 was: it’s a hazard to actual lives.

    And try to remember: The Jetsons was not a mere cartoon; it was a documentary.

    1. That’s exactly the rub: it sucks at real-world things that you and I think are easy (driving) but excels at things that are complicated, like reading EKGs with a spooky level of precision. A.I. might be great doctors, but crappy nurses.

      For now.

      Keep in mind, this is literally infancy-level tech, doubling in capability monthly.

      It may be the last tech we create.

  18. 2 problems with AI:

    1. It achieves sentience and decides to exterminate all humans.

    2. It does not achieve sentience, and is instead used by humans to exterminate all humans.

    What I mean by #2 is that AI will not change the ancient axiom GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If the human administrator of Law_Judge_5 program thinks all White people are guilty, then all White people that come before L_J_5 will be found guilty.

    Or the administrator of Med_Buddy_X thinks White people are evil, and so all White people end up being neutered “for their health.”

    One possible example of this that was being worked on is the Theranos debacle:
    https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/10/the-right-questions-about-theranos-finally-asked/

    ===

    Scary theorizing about OpenAI/ ChatGPT:

    https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/openai-q-saga-implications

    ===

    There was a blog asking if ChatGPT could replace the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment. It is hilarious. At one point he asks it to assume it is the National Security Advisor to the President, and to formulate a long-term policy to compete with China. The top 3 answers all related to more funding for AI, so it’s already thinking like a bureaucracy: survive and grow.

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a88b4de-934b-4406-8ccd-0528edc9e76f_975x888.png

    ===

    Brilliant article on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis relating to the Evil of our Age:

    https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/a-prophecy-of-evil-tolkien-lewis

    1. Amazing comment – hadn’t seen the Farrell post – a good one.

      I had read the Simplicius comment – I always read his stuff – I’ve got three I missed while The Mrs. was in the hospital that I’ll get sometime soon.

      I think A.I. “knows” more than we give it credit for.

      Annnnd? I took That Hideous Strength with me (the whole Space Trilogy, really) to the hospital, but never cracked the cover. It’s pretty high on my list of books to cover. Great link.

    2. Thanks for the link, I’m an old JRR fan.

      I’ve always assumed advanced AI will be programmed by paid geeks of the Regime, stuffed (as now) with their globalist, socialist, feminist, basically luciferian agenda. Like that horrific Siri from Apple, simultaneously a spy and propagandist. People PAY to have this electronic bitch in their homes. I’d use it for target practice.

  20. AI is literally the modern day ouija board. The answers you get to questions, including the artwork are all highly demonic. Did you have to agree to terms of service to use it? Their answers are harmless enough now, in order to suck you in. Once they are put fully in charge of all aspects of our lives, medical, legal, supply chains, news, etc., then the prison doors will shut on us. It is very, very dark tech. I will never use it.

  21. AI bwahahaha, ask the people at sports illustrated and a few others how that worked out

  22. “And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Rev. 13:15

Comments are closed.