So right now, many people are generally going nuts about a type of artificial intelligence that uses LLMs.
I’ve been a heavy user in the past month and am using LLM AIs to run large portions of my business. I’ve even used it to help me organize my book reviews on this website.
They are impressive, but they don’t interact with the physical world, so what’s to worry about?
Well, I think it’s less to do with AIs per se, and more with what humans can do with them. By manipulating language, symbols, and culture, they can mess with humans’ foundational operating system – the stuff that allows 8 billion of us to cooperate and generally get along at an unimaginable scale compared to history or other species – and generally sow chaos and confusion.
Yuval Noah Harari spelled out this worry in The Economist.
Here is his conclusion –
Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.
We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of AI tools in the public sphere, and regulate AI before it regulates us.
Yuval Noah Harari for The Economist
Ok, so those are some big claims.
So – what can GPT-4, currently the best LLM AI come up with? Can it actually come up with new, believable identities?
Let’s take 15 minutes and see!
We’ll try 2 new religions and 2 new national identities.
I will include my written prompts; otherwise, everything is 100% unedited AI written.