Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

Photo: Ramin Talaie (Getty Images)The success this year of powerful new generative artificial intelligence models like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, have laid the groundwork for a new era of AI tech set to explode even further in 2023. Google, though equipped with its own powerful (but definitely not sentient) LaMDA AI chatbot, says it doesn’t plan rushing its models out to the public. Executives at the company clarified their comparatively cautious approach during an all-hand meeting according to…

Photo: Postmodern Studio (Shutterstock)ChatGPT, a new AI-fueled chatbot, might be a little too popular for its own good. So many people have been flocking to it—a million in just the five days after opening to the public—that it’s caused the chatbot to crash several times over the past week. OpenAI, the company behind the bot, has asked users to “hang tight” as it “scales up” systems and figures out how to deal with the influx of new users.I first noticed the platform’s issues last Wednesday, when I was in the middle of a…

Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)When it comes to tracking the incremental advances of AI potential, humans have an odd tendency to think in terms of board games we probably haven’t played since childhood. Though there’s no shortage of examples, even recent ones, highlighting AI’s ability to utterly own the cardboard gaming space, those tests only go so far in illustrating the tech’s effectiveness at solving real world problems. A potentially far better “challenge,” would be to put an AI side by side with humans in a…

DeviantArt’s DreamUp AI image generator is based on Stable Diffusion, though any image it creates that’s uploaded to DeviantArt will come pre-tagged as AI art and will credit any creators it drew its designs from.Screenshot: DeviantArtThe year of our lord 2022 could be accurately described as the rise of AI. Instead of Skynet raining fire on our heads, we have AI image generators creating a different kind of apocalypse, especially for artists who promote their work online. So far, few have tried to answer how creators can…

Illustration: local_doctor (Shutterstock)What do our creations think of us? Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is a language model released by OpenAI in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce text that seems like it could have been written by a human. Taken individually, the AI’s lines don’t smack much of poetry or strictly cohere, but in aggregate, they gesture at something more. What would it produce if asked to meditate on the human soul and to produce spiritual poetry like ours? What does it think of our religious…

I asked DALL-E to create an image of a reporter struggling to make deadline in the style of Caravaggio. I wouldn’t say it truly captured the old master’s flair as its much too impressionistic. However, I do feel the subject’s pain.Image: DALL-EInternet art and image archives are already flooded with images developed with the use of artificial intelligence. Expect even more images of high imagination or photos of dubious origin now that the AI image generator that arguably started the current artificial image craze,…

Photo: Stefani Reynolds (Getty Images)OpenAI believes it’s ready to start letting DALL-E users edit images of real human faces, a possibility previously blocked over concerns of potential sexual and political deepfakes proliferating from the AI.In a letter to users on Monday spotted by TechCrunch and shared with Gizmodo, OpenAI said it would reintroduce the ability to upload and edit real human faces to its advanced AI image generator after building new detection and response techniques meant to prevent misuse and…

Unfortunately for one Twitter-based AI bot, users found that a simple exploit in its code can force it to say anything they want.Photo: Patrick Daxenbichler (Shutterstock)Have you ever wanted to gaslight an AI? Well, now you can, and it doesn’t take much more knowhow than a few strings of text. One Twitter-based bot is finding itself at the center of a potentially devastating exploit that has some AI researchers and developers equal parts bemused and concerned.As first noticed by Ars Technica, users realized they could…