Attempting Pasta and Pondering A.I.
Tonight, I mashed together two posts I had in mind because neither seemed quite sufficient on their own. Let's look at food first, and then explore AI! I made an American-style spaghetti sauce and then maliciously poured it over rotini noodles. No, I have no respect for traditional Italian cooking. Sorry, not sorry.
Pseudo-Italian Meat Sauce:
3 cloves of garlic, minced, and sauteed in olive oil
1-1/2 pounds of ground turkey, browned.
Salt and pepper to taste
1 standard jar of commercial spaghetti sauce
See? No respect. Tastes fine to me, though. I should have added mushrooms and olives, but I don't have those on hand. And let's be honest with ourselves by admitting together that spaghetti noodles create a needlessly messy meal.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence text and art generation is creating widespread consternation. There seems to be a perpetual fear of technology coursing through society. Robots will take over the dangerous drudgery work and render everyone unemployed, but also robots will take our jobs! AI can generate drafts and offer writing prompts, but also now all our art will be made my robots while we have no work but drudgery! All these tools make our lives easier, but somehow also cause inflation and global warming or something!
@tarazkp wrote a post entitled The AI of Trolling, where he discussed some cases of people being duped by AI when they really should have known better. I replied with a link to an interview with Stephen Wolfram and mentioned that people forget about the old garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) problem inherent to computing. Algorithms are not real intelligence. The neural nets can generate a sentence that very closely resembles human language, but this does not guarantee the result has meaning or the claims it makes have any basis in reality.
Maybe we are on the cusp of Language User Interfaces supplementing the standard Graphical User Interfaces we've been accustomed to using for decades now. Maybe AI will remain an unrealized promise of science fiction like virtual reality thus far, tantalizingly close yet massively limited. In any case, technology does not cause systemic unemployment. It is certainly disruptive when an old industry is transformed, so I don't want to give the impression it will be a painless path if AI does advance. However, the greatest need I foresee will remain real human creativity in both art and engineering.
Tools multiply productivity, and that is fundamentally good. Don't let this latest manifestation of Luddite paranoia prevent you from exploring opportunity, but do give credit where credit is due and disclose when you are using these tools. Also, don't let rabble-rousers or politicians pin the blame for the coming economic unrest on technological growth.
I'd love to see keyboards replaced with language, but we can't just talk to our computers in a business setting without being enormously disruptive in common office environments, nor without very challenging security hazards, particularly now that AI can spoof our biometrics with great facility. Our irises can be gotten by ordinary cameras and could be all over the net already, same with fingerprints and face recognition. Folks that use biometrics will very shortly be being hacked with terrible regularity, and I predict the more common forms of biometric uses will be abandoned quickly, since AI can spoof our voices, and all our other biometric data captured so easily in so many ways.
Frankly, I'm surprised we're not already seeing it happen. Maybe haxors are developing hacked resources carefully to maximize their fraudulent take, who knows. What I do know is I'm never, ever going to use biometric data to log in to anything, because I don't want anyone to hack my personal biometric data that I can't ever unhack once they do.
If they steal my password, I can make a new one, recover from my loss, and move on. If they steal my prints, retina, voiceprint, and facial image, I'm screwed forever, and ever.
Thanks!
You gotta add wine and sugar to the sauce, though!!! And crushed red pepper.
Love,
the pasta sauce troll that lives under the lasagna bridge
I almost never have wine, I'm trying to cut back on sugar, and I live with people who are wimps about peppers.
Love,
the pasta sauce troll who shoots down constructive criticism with overcooked meatball artillery.
Jeeez, dude, those meatballs are like rocks. But at least they won't give me salmonella.
GIGO definitely applies in the AI world. I work in Payroll/HR and there the hot button topic is when AI used for screening applicants ends up disproportionately adversely impacting certain classes of people (i.e. racist or genderist or other -ists).
Once again the GIGO principle applies, how are they coding these AI bots that this is happening?
Whatever they use for "training," it's just material available online. The AI isn't really being taught to think... Yet... But it knows what sorts of words to assemble in order to create a plausible sentence. Truth is simply not part of the equation.