Comments on: On chatbots…

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 20:01:35 +0000

There are renegades who spot a FOTA pulse as a blip in an ancient feed sensing device. Hello (this is a second comment attempt, my first spawned a WordPress critical error, I type now in fear).

Like Simon, I am thinking too about this new, oft-disturbing (in potential disruption sense) tool where we might want to assert it as human vs machine rather than human using machine. Kirby Ferguson crafted this so well in the new and glorious chapter of Everything is a Remix.

Intelligence might be *based* on pattern recognition as Stephen Asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence. My patterns recognize a reference to the Colossus and my experience connects to our trip to see it together at Bletchley park. Yes, AI can spout an encyclopedic description of this machine, but it cannot have the lived feeling to have been there.

I opt for the latter.

And be careful, Talky Tina might be listening.

By: Simon Thomson

Simon Thomson — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:47:16 +0000

I’d like to think that this blog post was influenced (even just a little bit) by our conversation the day before?

As we briefly touched upon in our conversation and you have so brilliantly brought to life in this piece it’s about understanding where we place human-centred effort alongside that of our “technologies” and that we will inevitably shift the value of that effort as technologies evolve.

The main differentiator between humans and AI is that the latter only has learnt experiences but the former has both learnt and lived experiences. An AI system surfaces what it has learnt whereas humans can surface both what we have learnt and the lived experiences which shape that learning.

By: Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:31:00 +0000

This discussion floats between the two poles of AI – on the one pole is the idea that AI reduces to simple instructions (“it is not easy for a computer to grade an essay in anything more than a very functional rubric-informed way”) and on the other pole is the idea that AI is simple pattern recognition (“it is designed to give you an output that looks plausible”). Both are caricatures. A grading AI doesn’t actually use a rubric; it’s a question of ‘recognizing’ based on ten thousand unnamed parameters) when an essay is an ‘A’ and when it’s an ‘F’. And at a certain point, with enough data (and the right data), the ‘most plausible’ response is almost certainly the ‘right response’. But even more to the point – if people don’t think that these are the sorts of processes that produce knowledge and intelligence, either in a human or an AI, then what do they think are the right sort of processes? Personally, I think all human intelligence is based on pattern recognition. I would need a very good argument or demonstration to convince me otherwise, especially after seeing what underpowered and data-impoverished pattern-recognition-based computing devices like GPT-4 can do.