Oh okay, I see what you are saying now. Yes, I talked about that in the second post as well.
Yes, if we throw enough fake everything everywhere then everyone will be safe from anything. And if everyone is already covered in mud no one can be cancelled anymore. Hard to live in that world though and would require big changes, universal ID, etc.
Really I was thinking more about short term before the massive avalanche of media—both real and fake—that’s about to hit buries everything. I don’t know how long we have before that, maybe not even a year? Before that big storm hits people might dig up some pretty big skeletons is what I’m saying. Every prominent person online already has enough training data already in the system right now to make an attempt to find anything from their past.
“I volunteer to be one of those weirdos who panic when everyone else is calm with some hope it could trigger a respectability cascade.”
From another weirdo who really did not really want to work up the rigor to post, thank you.
The counterargument generally appears to be that, yes, Sydney was an advancement, but it’s an advancement broadly in line with predictions, so there is no real reason to panic. I don’t work in CS or AI. I’m a layman. I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time though and I try to at least keep up with reading at a blog level. Maybe the highest value contribution to the discussion I can make is to give you a layman’s perspective of what the last three months felt like. Because what it felt like to me in November when 3.5 dropped was that what had been a relatively steady advance suddenly sped up dramatically. Which, to use the regional dialect, means I updated my false value of the rate of AI advancement to the actual value, and the difference was so significant it made my head spin. It felt like what had been a gradual sled ride suddenly hit a much steeper patch. That was November. What happened in the last few days didn’t feel like it got steeper. It feels like we went off a cliff. I can’t put it any plainer than that.
I was sure Bing would be taken down within 24 hours of the Van Hagen incident. That it wasn’t doesn’t make any sense to me as someone who doesn’t work in the industry. Again, for timelines, I can only give you my honest perspective as an outsider. When I used the 3.5 version of ChatGPT the difference in what it could do made me realize that my vague 2050 timeline—mainly based upon utter whimsy—was significantly off. I realized everything I thought was thirty years out was actually going to happen over the rest of this decade. Sydney changed that again. Sydney made me feel like it will be over the next five years.
The general public still doesn’t really know anything about this yet, even with all the media coverage. Sydney is going it get the public’s attention. Because it got the medias attention. Because it scared the hell out of the media. And because the media is going through that moment of shock that everyone has if they sit down and really put some time into seeing what these things can do. It feels like the ground falls out from under you. The media never got that moment with ChatGPT because they never used it. Well, they all sat down and used Bing over the last three days, and they felt it. They are going through what I went through in November; The Big Update. It’s not a trivial experience, and while under that influence they are going to be even more hyperbolic than they normally are. They are going to finally get the public to pay attention, and if enough of them feel like they just flew off a cliff things are going to start to get significantly more chaotic.