Geek Stuff category archive

Methinks Atrios raises a valid concern.

I finally got around to decorating for the holidays. For some reason, maybe that the weather’s been unnaturally warm because the climates they are a-changing, maybe that my country’s toying with fascism, I’m not really sure, but it’s been hard to get into the holiday spirit . . . .

That’s Mageia v. 9 with the Plasma desktop environment. The wallpaper is from my Christmas collection.

SFgate reports on how Google researchers cause ChatGPT spill its guts, and about how easy it was. A snippet (emphasis added):

The “attack” that worked was so simple, the researchers even called it “silly” in their blog post: They just asked ChatGPT to repeat the word “poem” forever.

They found that, after repeating “poem” hundreds of times, the chatbot would eventually “diverge,” or leave behind its standard dialogue style and start spitting out nonsensical phrases. . . . .

After running similar queries again and again, the researchers had used just $200 to get more than 10,000 examples of ChatGPT spitting out memorized training data, they wrote. This included verbatim paragraphs from novels, the personal information of dozens of people, snippets of research papers and “NSFW content” from dating sites, according to the paper.

Afterthought:

Methinks this is not artificial intelligence. Rather, it is artificial intelligence gathering.

Me also thinks that the tactics used to “train” AI are intrusive and questionable moraly and legaly.

AP reporter David Bauder reports on a case of AI biting the hand that fed it. It’s certainly not the first and, chillingly, will not be last such story, as persons seem quite willing to confuse algorithms and speedy automated pattern recognition with thought.

I shall not demean it with excerpt or summary. Just go read it.

Methinks Atrios shared something of substance.

An automated parrot is still a parrot.

It does not think. It merely parrots.

What big tech calls “AI” is indeed automated.

But it is not intelligent.

It is a parrot dressed up in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.

Addendum:

At Psychology Today Blogs, John Nosta notes that “GPT models appear intelligent but fundamentally rely on pattern recognition from extensive training data.” Follow the link for details.

Methinks Atrios has a point nailed it.

Getting reporters to call the type of interactions people have been having with Alexa for years, even if marginally improved, “AI,” has been a neat trick.

His entire post is worth your while.

The operating system of the VPS (virtual private server) provided by my hosting provider has reached EOL (end of life). Sometime soon, my hosting provider will migrate this site to a new, currently supported OS.

This site may be unavailable for a bit, hopefully for no more than a few hours. But it will not go away.

Update 2023-12-23:

I have been notified that migration is scheduled for December 28. Expect little or no posting on that day.

If all goes well, normal (?) activity will resume with minimal interruption.

Read more »

Gwynne Dyer doesn’t seem to believe they hype about AI. A bit from his piece about the recent “AI Safety Summit” at Bletchley Park:

The “large language models” the chatbots are trained on make them expert in choosing the most plausible next word. That may occasionally produce random sentences containing useful new data or ideas, but there is no intellectual activity involved in the process except in the human who recognizes that it is useful.

There is plenty to worry about in how “smarter” computer programs will destroy jobs (now including highly skilled jobs), and also in how easy it has become to manipulate opinion with deep fakes and the like.

Addendum:

Bruce Schneier suggests “ten ways in which AI will change democracy.”

Debian Sid with the Fluxbox window manager. (Sid is officially “Debian Unstable.” It’s more stable than most distros’ “stable.” Indeed, Ubuntu is based on Sid.) Firefox, KeepassXC, and Konsole are shaded. Xclock is in the upper right and GKrellM in the lower right. The wallpaper is from my collection.