(A complete lack of) Any Intelligence

This week I attended a hugely problematic presentation (at an otherwise excellent conference) on AI and ChatGPT. It wasn’t a problem because of the subject of AI and associated tools – their advancement, risks, opportunities and impacts are, if not clear, at the very least becoming clearer.

The problem was with the presenter – to a room full of (although not tech experts) very intelligent and successful business people – they ran through a (IMHO) lazy series of slides and used LLM interfaces to undermine pretty much every profession and business, as well as every individual’s level of human intelligence.

Added to this being ‘soon to retire, so its not something for me to worry about’, using an real-life example of using ChatGPT to create a report they were paid “thousands for” and ending with a video where in 2100 – humans are nothing more than slaves – you can well imagine the startlement (if that’s a word) alongside the odd chuckle of those in the room. Oh and the presenter is also a crypto expert….and probably has a load of NFT’ somewhere.

If there were a few more present who had a little more exposure, knowledge and experience in the wild west of AI they would have chained themselves to the stage to stop the nonsense (my chains were at home).

There seem to be a lot of ‘experts’ out there who do nothing more than scrape the internet (the irony of them using the initial principles of AI data gathering is an interesting aside), to create a series of trigger points, provocations and present misleading messages to their audiences.

People generally have to be incredibly careful about their source information (in general anyway – but especially with AI and LLM’s) and those giving speakers the opportunity to spout (IMHO again) their nonsense and set hares running, should equally be circumspect about the credibility and efficacy of their content.

Sorry – rant over. For what its worth – here are a few places where intelligent and thoughtful perspectives on AI and all its implications can be found;

Books to consider reading -

Stuart Russell - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767248-human-compatible

Mustafa Suleyman & Michael Bhaskar - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/28/the-coming-wave-by-mustafa-suleyman-review-ai-synthetic-biology-and-a-new-dawn-for-humanity

To follow on LinkedIn or online –

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhulme/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthammonduk/ for specific and real AI insight, and (more obviously) https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfgoodwin/ for a wider range of considerations

John Naughton - https://memex.naughtons.org/

To tune into a podcast -  https://www.humanetech.com/podcast

And if you want to know who the speaker was – feel free to contact me privately and I’ll happily try everything I can to stop him them presenting again.

Also, I think I’m going to pull together some thoughts and slides on my own experiences of AI in action both from a tech and product perspective and a moral and ethical angle – it won’t be full of creating images on the fly but it will be honest and (I hope) at least a little thoughtful.