One indicator that could be useful for estimating the progress in self-driving is the progress with openpilot, the leading open-source software for that.
It has a github page, and boy it has some issues. Things like:
RomanS
Karma: 848
And some of these bots have been through many iterations of detection and counter-detection, and are routing their requests through residential-IP botnets, with fake user-agent strings trying to approximate real web browsers.
As someone who has done scraping a few times, I can confirm that it’s trivial to circumvent protections against it, even for a novice programmer. In most cases, it’s literally less than 10 minutes of googling and trial & error.
And for a major AI / web-search company, it could be a routine task, with teams of dedicated professionals working on it.
I think the both explanations can be true at the same time:
Twitter is refusing to pay a bill to Google
Twitter is severely abused by data scrapers.
One likely scenario is where Google itself is a main culprit.
E.g. Elon learned that Google is scraping twitter data on industrial scale to train its AIs, without paying anything to Twitter. This results in massive infrastructure expenses for Twitter, to be paid to… Google. Outraged Elon stormed into the Alphabet headquarters, but was politely asked to get lost. Hilarity ensues.
Not alien life, mind you, but crafts require interstellar travel to be plausible, and we have reason to doubt that. Even unmanned Von Neumann probes would have a very hard time arriving to their destination still functioning (never mind braking...), and non-inertial engines presume a violation of known physics so deep, it’s unbelievable we’ve missed all signs of it being possible until now.
While I agree with your general argument, I would like to point out that the aliens don’t have to be from another star system.
It seems that our Solar System has at least a dozen of separate places that could harbor life, from the clouds of Venus to the possible subsurface oceans of Pluto and beyond. And the list mostly considers the life that is similar to our own, requiring warm water (and not, say, solitons of the solar plasma). Extending the list with truly alien forms of life could increase the number of possible cradles to perhaps two dozens (??) in our Solar System alone.
Additionally, perhaps humans are not the first species on Earth that has created a technological civilization. So, theoretically there could be aliens originated from Earth.
I propose the term Jasmine’s alignment, as a reference to the sudden (and fake) alignment of Jasmine in this famous scene of Aladdin (1992), right after Jasmine has realized that there is a possibility of escape:
the other path isn’t guaranteed to work, but if the default path is probably or almost certainly going to get everyone killed, then perhaps ‘guaranteed to work’ is not the appropriate bar for the alternative, and we should be prepared to consider that, even if the costs are high?
I think it’s an extremely important point, often ignored.
Trying to prevent the AGI doom is not enough. If the doom is indeed very likely to happen, we should also start thinking how to survive in it.
My LW post on the topic, with some survival strategies that might work: How to survive in an AGI cataclysm.
But if you order up that panda and unicorn in a rocket ship with Bill Murray on request, as a non-interactive movie, without humans sculpting the experience? I mean let’s face it, it’s going to suck, and suck hard, for anyone over the age of eight.
Strongly depends on the prompt.
I would pay some real money to watch a quality movie about panda and unicorn in a rocket ship with Bill Murray, but with the writing of H. P. Lovecraft, and with the visuals of HR Giger.
The ship’s innards pulsed with eldritch life, cold metallic tendrils stretching into the vastness of the ship, their biomechanical surface glistening under the muted luminescence. Tunnels of grotesque yet fascinating detail lay like a labyrinthine digestive system within the cruiser, throbbing in eerie synchrony with the void outside. Unfathomable technologies hummed in the underbelly, churning out incomprehensible runes that flickered ominously over the walls, each a sinister eulogy to the dark cosmos.
Bill Murray, the lonely jester of this cosmic pantomime, navigated this shadowy dreadnought with an uncanny ease, his eyes reflecting the horrid beauty around him. He strode down the nightmarish corridors, a silhouette against the cruel artistry of the ship, a figure oddly at home in this pandemonium of steel and shadow...
I think you probably used my prompt for the one I got right, which is probably why I got it right (the tone and structure are very familiar to me after so much experimentation).
Nope, this one. But their prompt does incorporate some ideas from your prompt.
The key[1].
You got 4 of 8 right. In two cases you failed to recognize humans, and in another two—GPT4.
It was a weakly adversarial test:
I took a few less-known but obviously talented writers from the top of my head, and copied the excerpts from the first pages.
For GPT4, I’ve used several prompts from the competition, and then selected the parts for their stylistic diversity.
I suspect that a test with longer excerpts would be much easier for you, as the vanilla GPT4 is indeed often easy to detect due to its repetitiveness etc (I haven’t tried the APIs yet).
If GPT4 already can fool some of us science fiction junkies, I can’t wait to read the fiction by GPT5.
David Langford’s science fiction newsletter Ansible has a regular item called Thog’s Masterclass, exhibiting examples of “differently good” actually published writing. Dare the Thog-o-Matic to see some random examples. ETA: or look at any Perry Rhodan novel.
Thank you!
BTW, have you read “Appleseed” by John Clute? I have a feeling you may be one of the few people on Earth who can enjoy it. A representative sample:
They passed the iron-grey portcullis that sealed off the inferno of drive country. A dozen ceremonial masks, mourning the hardened goblin eidolons of KathKirtt that died hourly inside drive country, hung within their tile embrasure above the frowning portal. The masks were simplified versions of the flyte gorgon. Their single eyes shut in unison at the death of one of the goblin eidolons, who spent their brief spans liaising with the quasi-sentient engine brother that drove the ship through the demonic rapturous ftl maze of wormholes. Even for eidolons with hardened carapaces, to liaise was to burn and die. When Tile Dance plunged through the ashen caltraps of ftl at full thrust, the engine brother howling out something like anguish or joy all the while, its entirely imaginary ‘feet’ pounding the turns of the maze, goblins lived no longer than mayflies.
- ^
Only one, two, and seven are human: from “Ra” by qntm, “Contact” by Sagan, “Noon: 22nd Century” by Strugatsky. The rest is GPT4
The original one.
Judging by my limited experimentation with submitted prompts, several of them are are already superior to mine. But mine has the advantage of writing in a more academic tone, which I think is more suitable for this story.
Among the submitted ones, my current favorite is this one. The resulting prose is more human-like, but the tone is of a young-adult work, which is a disadvantage in many cases. An example:
Chapter One: An Outlier Among Outliers
Somebody had to keep an eye on the squiggly lines, and as it turned out, that person was me.
Hello there. I’m Dr. Kiera Laine. The more I understand about how the universe works, the less I understand about how the world works. I’m an astrophysicist, no, the astrophysicist, if you ask any of my colleagues in the snobbish circles of Oxford.
I’ve made a career of studying the Cosmos, charting the glittering highways of distant galaxies, the uncharted nebulae and black holes. Yet, in the world of academia, my job is equivalent to the janitor who strolls in when everybody else has gone home, only my broom is the supercomputer running complex algorithms.
Take the seismic data we were currently analyzing, for instance. To the ordinary human eye, it was just an endless sprawl of jagged lines across the monitor screen. To mine, it was poetry in motion.
On one seemingly ordinary Tuesday, sitting amidst towers of towering servers, and screens flickering with quantum code, I noticed a blip. An anomaly. A hiccup in the heartbeats of Earth. So subtle that anyone else might have missed it.
But hey, it’s the subtle ones that turn your world upside down, right?
This little blip was buried in layers of geological data gathered from sensors scattered around the globe. To be specific, it originated from the Arctic tundra, one of the coldest, remotest regions on Earth. Which was in itself, weird. These things didn’t usually come from the frozen wasteland.
To confirm my suspicions, I ran the data through another round of computations. It held up.
Well, that’s… different.
A smirk played on my lips as I spun in my chair, letting the dim light of the screens blur into streaks. I liked different. Different meant interesting. Interesting meant I wasn’t stuck in the eternal loop of the same old patterns.
If nothing else, this will give me something to wave in the faces of those who call me a ‘backroom boy’, huh?
The calculations I ran were robust, I knew that much. And the implications? They were hard to digest, even for someone like me, whose job description involved digesting the undigestible.
A part of me wanted to dismiss it as an error, an oversight, a faulty sensor, maybe. Yet, my intuition and the frisson of excitement curling through my veins told me otherwise.
So, what do you do when you stumble across a seismic anomaly hinting at the possibility of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization that existed around the time of the late Cretaceous period?
I chuckled to myself. It was indeed a question for the ages. The thought alone was ludicrous, absurd, impossible. And yet…
Oh, isn’t that the definition of science? The art of making the impossible possible.
I pulled up the geological timelines again, brushing a hand through my messy bun. The anomaly was at the precise layer of Earth’s crust that correlated with the era of the Troodon dinosaurs. An era where, according to the established norms of science, civilization as we define it today, was a mere gleam in the cosmic eye.
There is no such thing as a coincidence, Kiera, I reminded myself.
What I had in front of me was more than an anomaly. It was a door, creaking open to the unknown. It was a question mark against everything we thought we knew about the history of intelligence on Earth.
What I had in front of me was potentially the biggest discovery of the millennium.
Is it too early to start practicing my Nobel acceptance speech?
I stared at the blip again, my heart pounding like a drummer gone rogue. My mind wandered to the realms of the impossible, painting images of scaled, feathered creatures crafting tools, constructing dwellings, staring up at the stars with the same curiosity that I did.
Here be dragons, indeed.
And as the fluorescent lights of my tiny office flickered, casting an otherworldly glow on the static lines of data, I made my decision. This was too big to be swept under the rug of daily routines.
The world was about to be hit by a comet of knowledge, a comet of truth, a comet that might redefine the story of life on Earth. It was time to assemble a team, to embark on a year-long journey of discovery.
I drew in a breath, filled with anticipation and a tinge of apprehension. This was going to be interesting.
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen.
And with a few quick keystrokes, I sent an email to the head of my department.
Subject: A Matter of Seismic Importance...
This has less of the fingernails-along-a-blackboard feeling given off by every sentence of the original story
Below I’ve collected excerpts from the works of several less-known but talented human writers. Or maybe they were written by GPT4. Can you guess which ones are human-made?
Sample 1:
“Nottingham has enough pubs and clubs”, say the local police. If you wanted to get around every last one of them it would be a year at a brisk trot before you were starting to visit establishments more than one mile from the centre of the city. Pick a Friday or a Saturday, any Friday or Saturday of the year: the establishments will be rammed and jumping and the streets bustling with people in their most tightly-wound and elaborately crafted drinking costumes. It’s almost Christmas but the cold season has not added much to the average number of layers.
Sample 2:
The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie. But in both, Pinocchio—a life-sized wooden boy who magically is roused to life—wore a kind of halter, and there seemed to be dowels in his joints. When Geppetto is just finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent flying by a well-placed kick. At that instant the carpenter’s friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled on the floor.
Sample 3:
He glanced outside at the buildings casting long shadows in the fading sunlight, the city frozen in the grasp of time. He took a deep breath. And then, he jumped.
He closed his eyes, feeling the rush of displaced seconds, the vertigo of time stretching, condensing, then snapping back into place. When he opened them, he found the world stilled. The shadows were now statues, the sun paused in its descent, and a bird hung motionless in the sky. This was Finn’s minute—his extra minute.
Sample 4:
Once upon a Martian sunrise...
Yeah, I know, sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale or a bedtime story, right? But I promise you, on my physicist-turned-astronaut honor, this isn’t fiction. It’s the raw, unadulterated truth. My truth.
Red soil underfoot, as fine as confectioner’s sugar. Low-grav shuffle making every step a dance move. Peaks and valleys sprawled across the horizon like a mythological beast sleeping off a hard night.
I’m Corporal Thea Kolinski, an astrophysicist by trade, astronaut by accident, and currently the number one recipient of the “Most Unlikely to Succeed” superlative in our six-person crew. A crew assembled to survive on Mars. A first in human history.
Sample 5:
Then, as abruptly as it began, the light faded. Billy blinked, expecting to see a spaceman, green and with eyes as big as dinner plates, but instead, there was a rock. A simple, gleaming, alien rock, sat innocently in the middle of his vegetable patch.
The spaceship blinked out of existence just as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Billy alone in his garden, a lump of extraterrestrial mineral his only proof of what he’d witnessed.
Sample 6:
For in the silence of their failure, a sound, inaudible to human ears but felt in the marrow of their bones, resonated from the vessel, wrapping the men in a shroud of madness. One by one, they fell, their minds invaded by images of cosmic horror, their sanity shredded by the unintelligible secrets whispered by the alien ship.
Standish was the last to succumb, his face a rictus of terror as he stared at the vessel. As the sun dipped below the horizon, plunging the valley into an unfathomable darkness, Standish’s final cry echoed through the hills of Belseth, marking the tragic end of their misguided endeavour.
Sample 7:
“Jump!” he shouted to Mandel. The crawler shuddered, throwing up clouds of sand and dust, and started to turn stern up. Novago switched off the engine and scrambled out of the crawler. He landed on all fours, and, without standing up, scurried off to one side. The sand slid and sank underneath him, but Novago managed to reach firm ground. He sat down, tucking his legs under him.
He saw Mandel, who was kneeling at the opposite edge of the crater, and the stern of the crawler, shrouded in steam and sticking up out of the sand on the bottom of the newly formed crater. Theoretically it was impossible for something like this to happen to a Lizard model. Here on Mars, at least. A Lizard was a light, fast machine—a five-seat open platform mounted on four autonomous caterpillar-tracked chassis. But here it was, slowly slipping
Sample 8:
No, I ain’t pullin’ your leg, sonny, it’s the God’s honest truth. It happened in our little town of Lonesome Hollow, right there in the foothills of the Appalachians. It’s a tale that puts the ‘odd’ in odds and ends, I tell you.
The lass in question was Amelia, known to most as plain ol’ Millie. Millie was as normal as the day is long, a pretty thing with a head full of chestnut curls and the sweetest smile you’d ever see. She ran the general store, knew the names of every critter in town, and baked the best apple pie this side of the Mississippi.
the most important things are compute and dilligence
I agree. Judging by the fact that AI is strongly superhuman in chess, the only winning strategy is to completely remove the human from the loop, and instead invest in as much compute for the AI as one can afford.
a sequence that no computer would consider or find
If it’s a sequence that no superhuman AI would consider, this means that the sequence is inferior to the much better sequences that the AI would consider.
It seems that even after 2 decades of the complete AI superiority, some top chess players are still imagining that they are in some ways better at chess than the AI, even if they can’t win against it.
Impressive! The approach could be fully automated, and could generate a full-sized novel without any human guidance.
It seems that one day there will be a Midjourney for books.
I find it more enjoyable to pretend that it’s the first novella of my young son. He will improve, and will surpass myself. But the first work must be full of shortcomings, no way around it.
It’s more interesting to focus on what GPT4 got right, as its successes better represent its future potential than its failings of the young age.
I checked the Sagan’s Contact (full text). There is not a single “thrum” in the book. There are a few “the low”, but not in this context.
only read chapter 1 and 35
I think the whole thing is worth reading, in spite of its shortcomings. One could say that the very act of reading the first AI-generated science fiction novella is a sort of a first contact with an alien mind by itself.
A strange alien that is desperate to sound like a human, and is already better at mimicking humans than most humans, but is clearly not a human.
Like the majority of literary critics, GPT4 pretended that is has read the entire thing:) The text is too long for its context window.
But I like the idea. Perhaps one could use a combination of a GPT-critic and a GPT-writer to recursively improve the text.
BTW, below is my attempt to get a review from GPT4. Selected 5 chapters semi-randomly and asked it to analyze the excerpts.
As a literary critic, I found this novella both intriguing and complex. Here are some of its strong and weak sides.
Strengths:
Innovative Concept: The narrative intertwines paleontology, artificial intelligence, speculative evolution, and space exploration in a very innovative manner. The concept of dinosaurs evolving into a civilization and then into a powerful AI is fresh and daring.
Character Depth: The characters of Ada, Leo, and Ada’s mother are well-developed. Their personalities, motivations, and interactions are engaging and add depth to the storyline.
Intriguing Plot: The plot is well-paced, with twists and turns that keep the reader engaged. The progression from a geological exploration mission to a cosmic conflict is handled quite deftly.
Evocative Imagery: The descriptions of the cave, the transformation of Earth into computronium, the resurrection of the Troodons, and the final space journey are vivid and imaginative, enabling readers to visualize the scenes.
Meticulous Research: The narrative reveals meticulous research into the fields of paleontology, artificial intelligence, and speculative fiction. The inclusion of Troodons and the theory about their potential evolution adds authenticity to the plot.
Weaknesses:
Heavy Science Fiction Jargon: The use of heavy scientific jargon could be off-putting for some readers. The complexity of some concepts, like computronium, could have been better explained to make the narrative more accessible.
Plot Consistency: The leap from Ada’s palaeontological discovery to the superintelligence of Ada’s mother seems abrupt and unexplained. This transition needs more backstory or explanation to enhance plot consistency.
Lack of Emotional Depth: The emotional aspects of the narrative could be explored more. The reactions and feelings of Ada and Leo as Earth transforms and they are hurtled into space could have been presented in a more impactful way.
Absence of other Characters: The narrative focuses primarily on Ada, Leo, and Ada’s mother. More characters, particularly human ones, would add diversity and complexity to the storyline.
Unresolved Ending: While the open-ended conclusion allows for sequels, it may leave some readers unsatisfied. A hint of a potential plan or strategy for Ada and Leo might have given a stronger sense of direction for the concluding chapters.
Overall, the novella is a fascinating exploration of speculative evolution and cosmic conflict. With some improvements in accessibility, emotional depth, and plot consistency, it could become an influential work in the science fiction genre.
I’ve also noticed that GPT4 is rather repetitive. For example, the main protagonist is always a woman (and usually a researcher), unless prompted otherwise.
Perhaps it’s the result of using the web interface where one can’t change the settings that affect creativity (e.g. “temperature”).
If I came across this story in a magazine, I wouldn’t read beyond the first paragraph, except out of curiosity as to whether it was all so dreadful. (It is.)
We’ll soon see many such tests. I suspect that even the GPT4 of today will fool many seasoned readers.
Personally, I’ve enjoyed the novella. Not the best I’ve ever read, but I wanted to learn what comes next, which is a high bar these days.
BTW, you have two Chapter 6′s, 8′s, and 9′s, which seem to be multiple versions of ChatGPT’s responses to the same prompt. Was this intentional?
Yep, posted the entire conversation as it was. In several instances, I asked it to rewrite a plot twist I didn’t like, etc.
In this comment I’ll collect fun plot summaries to test your prompt templates:
a woman whose head suddenly became a tomato fruit
GuySrinivasan, a user of Lesswrong website, is shocked by an AI-generated story about a woman whose head suddenly became a tomato fruit. He advises the author to try to get a prompt which writes a great story given a REASONABLE premise instead.
after the invention of extremely resilient construction materials, humanity has spread to the ocean floor. We are now facing global food crises as the oceans ecosystems are disrupted beyond apparent recovery.
A space opera that takes place in an advanced multi-species multi-planetary society called IO that control a large area of the galaxy which they call the Grid. A previously unknown civilization (Wisps) encroaches on the Grid for the first time. Wisps are not carbon based lifeforms and more alien in their biology and societal structure than societies seen in previous science fiction stories. The story alternates between the perspectives of the two societies. From each perspective the other side is frightening and hard to understand. As the story progresses, the actions of the two sides and their misinterpretations of each side’s actions escalate to a war.
a group of scientists has discovered that Troodon dinosaurs were intelligent species who have created a technologically advanced civilization, suddenly destroyed. The year-long path to the scientific discovery starts with the group stumbling upon a strange outlier in their geological measurements.
a boy who can travel in time, but only in one direction—into the future, and only one minute per time jump.
Suggestions are welcome!
Points 7 and 8 just read like hysterical Orientalist Twitter China Watcher nonsense, to be quite frank. There is absolutely nothing substantiating that China would recklessly pursue nothing but “superiority” in AI at all costs (up to and including national suicide) beyond simplistic narratives of the CCP being a cartoon evil force seeking world domination and such.
I have the experience of living in a strongly anti-West country ruled by the same guy for 10+ years (the Putin’s Russia). The list of similarities to Xi’s China includes the Shameful Period of Humiliation often employed by the state media to reinforce the anti-West narrative (in the case of Russia it’s the 1990s).
With this background, I see the points 7 and 8 as valid, and likely applicable to the majority of anti-West governments of the same nature.
7… Our AI policy isn’t OK with second place in the long run. Any AI-restriction treaty that China will accept requires not just Chinese parity, but Chinese superiority in AI
Yep, same for Russia. Even if the Russian gov decides to make the impression of accepting such a treaty, or even if it starts enforcing the treaty among civilian companies, the Russian military will continue to secretly work on military AI anyway. As Putin himself said, “The country that secures a monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the world”.
Another of his famous sayings: “there is no value in a world where Russia doesn’t exist” (the context: a discussion about Russia destroying the world with nukes if the West attempts to subjugate Russia).
8. Then again, Beijing is hard to predict. It may agree to an AI disarmament treaty in 6 months, or it might confiscate private GPUs in an effort at mass mobilization, spending billions to build the next LLM. It might do both.
Again, same for Russia. Putin has the reputation of accepting any vaguely reasonable expert proposal, and even several contradicting proposals on the same topic, if the proposers are strongly loyal to Putin.
This sometimes results in the wildest shit becoming a law. For example, Russia banned exports of biological tissue samples, because someone told Putin that it could be used to develop a virus to exclusively kill Russians (which is a biological nonsense).
In general, Russia is way behind the US or China in the field of AI. But several major companies (Yandex, Sber) have demonstrated the ability to adapt and deploy some relatively recent open-source AI tech at scale.
Even with the severe hardware sanctions in place, maybe in 5 years or less there will be a Russian GPT4.
I agree. It’s strange how otherwise highly intelligent people fall into the trap of using Hollywood movies as a learning tool. Especially given the fact that fiction is often harmful for your mind, and given the fact that the Hollywood fiction in particular is harmful in several additional ways.
There is nothing useful one can learn from the listed movies, unless you’re specifically studying mass media (e.g. as a movie maker or a sociologist). For every mentioned topic, it’s better to grab a non-fiction book.