Does this analogy work, though?
It makes sense that you can get brand new sentences or brand new images that can even serve some purpose using ML but is it creativity? That raises the question of what is creativity in the first place and that’s whole new can of worms. You give me an example of how Bing can write poems that were not in the dataset, but poem writing is a task that can be quite straightforwardly formalized, like collection of lines which end on alternating syllables or something, but “write me a poem about sunshine and butterflies” is clearly vastly easier prompt than “give me theory of everything”. Resulted poem might be called creative if interpreted generously, but actual, novel scientific knowledge is a whole another level of creative, so much that we should likely put these things in different conceptual boxes.
Maybe that’s just a failure of imagination on my part? I do admit that I, likewise, just really want it to be true, so there’s that.
I have to admit, reading things like this I can’t help but be put at ease, somewhat. I almost feel AI alarmism leaving my body.
Here’s my guess why that happens: rat-sphere bloggers are the ones responsible for me treating AI threat seriously. Seeing how someone smart enough to post here get so....carried away, deciding to post it, and getting not lighthearted ridicule but upvotes and the usual “AGI around the corner” chatter reminds me that this community is still made of mere people, and worrying about AI is partly a cultural norm here, a meme. It also shifts my prior somewhat in favor of AI skepticism—if you guys can get carried away in this manner, perhaps in the AI-doom scenarios also have a critical flaw that I’m not bright enough to see? Hope so!