I tried using AI. It scared me.

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As usual, the man put it in words better than I ever could. AI is utterly fascinating, and yet I can't help but feel a bit uneasy about the progress that's being made currently. This isn't going to go away, this is going to become huge. And I'm not sure whether it's in a good or bad way.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 2243 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/bouncy_egg šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

I work in technology and have had a healthy skepticism about messianic-sounding trends like blockchain, augmented reality, internet of things. They're fun, but put on wait-and-see watchlist. OpenAI and ChatGPT feel very different to me, and like Tom, I have a hair-on-my-neck sense of impending sea change.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 773 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/Odd_Bodkin šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

Growing up you would always hear older people talking about how much the world has changed since they were a kid and you think "It can't be that much different" but then seeing how much the world has changed and continues to change since I was a kid is both astounding and a little terrifying looking forward. The technological advances that are made seem to just keep getting crazier and crazier like an avalanche that doesn't end. I can't even imagine what the world will look like in another 10-20 years and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest factors in that which is what makes it so scary.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 118 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/FishAndRiceKeks šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

We've already seen how gullible some people can be when it comes to fun, politically-aligned conspiracies.

I can easily imagine AI and search engine algorithms working together to create a "parallel universe" of bespoke content designed to psychologically kite certain people towards certain viewpoints.

I mean, people didn't need evidence to believe Obama was born in Kenya. They just went along with it. Now imagine AIs feeling certain blogs, forums, and social media feeds with hyperealistic memes, video, and audio. There will be fact-checking certainly, but will it happen quick enough? Or will certain people care?

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 704 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/Wazula23 šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

I think saying Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, and Kazaa in that order was a nod to Weird Al's "don't download this song" but I can't prove it.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 139 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/mydearwatson616 šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

Online interactions are about to become meaningless, you'll never be able to know what you're talking to.

We're outsourcing humanity in a way that terrifies me.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 512 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/weavdaddy šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

  1. Anything that is in the world when youā€™re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

  2. Anything that's invented between when youā€™re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

  3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

ā€”Douglas Adams

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 152 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/barbecue_invader šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

Man I hate gmail's tags as well. All I want is an option to make it so an email can only have 1 tag assigned to it. It's basically impossible to properly categorize all the emails I get, and incredibly frustrating when an email keeps showing up all over the place. I've got filter rules so long they span multiple lines just trying to make it so that 1 email from a specific domain only shows up under that one tag, and only one tag.

or at least let order my rules by priority and have an option that 'removes all other tags' before applying a new tag. It's just so dumb...

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 59 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/angrylawyer šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies

If AI is indeed at the bottom of the curve, the world is going to change to a degree that I feel no one can know.

If youā€™ve been around recently thereā€™s been a really convincing voice AI floating around, couple that with chat gpt to impersonate someone. You are talking fraud out the ass and people being friends or lovers with AI that simulates a celebrityā€™s personality. Along with deepfakes you could have you celebrity crush as your partner in every way but physical.

šŸ‘ļøŽ︎ 75 šŸ‘¤ļøŽ︎ u/HustlerByDay šŸ“…ļøŽ︎ Feb 13 2023 šŸ—«︎ replies
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All I wanted to do was fix my email. I did not expect to have a minor existential crisis about how much the world might be about to change. Normally this is the sort of talk that Iā€™d have given on stage at some conference about the future of the web, but, um, Iā€™m in New Zealand right now, and I also have this vague suspicion that those conferences might not be relevant for too much longer. I was lucky enough to live through the mass adoption of the internet. For anyone younger than about 25 watching this, you wonā€™t remember just how fast and how incredible that transformation was. And I was on the cutting edge of it, I was living it, I was one of the people who understood what was going on. Useful new technologies generally follow a sigmoid curve. You have a slow takeoff as the technology is invented and the major pain points get sorted out, and then you have this incredible explosion of growth as people find it useful and the technology gets better and better and better and better, and loads of competitors enter the market, and people find more and more and more and more real-world, practical uses for it. And thereā€™s this massive race to make newer, better, bigger things that people keep making more stuff with. And then you reach the limit of whatā€™s possible with that technology, and the rate of progress flattens out again. Basically, thereā€™s a reason very few people camp outside Apple Stores for the new iPhone any more. I remember Napster from back in 1999. And in hindsight, I think Napster was the first big sign of just how many industries were going to be changed or completely destroyed by the internet. Not just the music industry, but travel agents, video rental stores, encyclopaedias, shopping malls, big-box stores, the postal service, journalism, the entire media industry. Napster wasnā€™t the first sign, but it was the first major one that millions of non-technical people were using by choice. The first one to get big mass-media attention and legal problems. It was the first big popular disruption, the first warning shot, the first rumble of thunder off in the distance that said the storm was approaching, that everything was about to change. I donā€™t think many people realised that at the time. And even if they did, they couldnā€™t have predicted the world that would follow. The world I grew up in, the world that Iā€™ve got really comfortable with, the world of the web, of social media, of smartphones. This video youā€™re watching now is a very early-2023 video, and a very English-speaking one. This is a record of a point in time and space. And I might be wrong about this, I donā€™t know where technologyā€™s going to go from here. But: I think that world, my world, the one I grew up in, is about to change radically. I think weā€™re on a new sigmoid curve, and I have no idea how far along that curve we are right now. And I donā€™t know if I want to change with itā€¦ but I think Iā€™ll have to. And all I was trying to do was fix my email. This is a really specific problem, but it really annoyed me, and I have to explain it for the rest of this to make sense, so bear with me. Almost every email system has the idea of folders. You have one copy of an email, and once youā€™re done with it, you file it in a folder like a piece of paper in a filing cabinet, because thatā€™s the mid-20th-century physical analogy that the inventors went with. But. In 2004, Google launched Gmail, which threw all that out in favour of labels. Email is just in one big pile, you search to find stuff, and you add labels to help you sort it. I hate labels, because I like the analogy of folders, thatā€™s what I started out with, thatā€™s what I was already using. I didnā€™t want to change for no reason. But everything else about Gmail was so much better than any of the alternatives at the time that I moved over to it a couple of years later. And I decided, fine, I will just treat labels like folders, Iā€™ll change my workflow as little as possible. Each thread gets one label. Thatā€™s like putting it into a folder? Which meant that when I backed up my emails, which I do, never trust having only one copy of something, particularly if that copyā€™s up in the cloud, but when I did that, I could use a regular old-school desktop email program like Microsoft Outlook to make that backup. You can use programs like that with Gmail accounts, they talk to each other. If they didnā€™t, stuff like the default Mail app on iPhones wouldnā€™t work, and people would complain. But those old-school systems donā€™t understand labels, so Gmail just lies and says theyā€™re folders. Great! That means my email program can talk to Gmail, and request a copy of all those messages, one ā€œfolderā€ at a time, and then I know itā€™s backed up every message. Theyā€™re even stored in actual email folders, like I wanted! It took fifteen years for me to notice: that wasnā€™t working properly. I was doing a routine backup last month, and I noticed that a thread in that email backup was missing several recent messages. And that made me suspicious, the kind of discomfort that you get when you know something is wrong, but you donā€™t know what it is yet. So I looked a little bit further, and I realised loads of messages were missing in my backup. More than a hundred thousand of them, over fifteen years. They were still there in Gmail, on the web. They hadnā€™t been lost. Itā€™s just they hadnā€™t been backed up. And thatā€™s because, it turns out, in Gmail, labels only attach to individual messages and not the full thread. That is invisible to most people. Itā€™s barely mentioned in the documentation. And itā€™s a really subtle, annoying distinction. If you send an email, put a label on that thread, get a reply, and then just hit ā€œArchiveā€: that reply doesnā€™t get the label. And as you go back and forth, and add to that thread, none of the other messages there get a label unless you explicitly untag and retag the whole thread. Which means more than 100,000 unlabelled messages werenā€™t in my backup. Is this a really specific, nerdy problem that only Iā€™m annoyed about? Yes. Absolutely. Iā€™m one of the very few people in the world that itā€™s going to affect. Loads of people donā€™t sort or label their emails at all, and most donā€™t back them up. But I needed to fix this, I needed my backup to work, and I did not want to change my damn workflow. But how on earth do I fix every email thread over fifteen years, without painstakingly clicking through all of them? I grew up fixing things with code, so obviously, thatā€™s where my brain went. Google has a service called Apps Script. It means that anyone can write simple code to easily change and automate things in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, YouTube, whatever. Itā€™s a brilliant service, Iā€™ve no idea how it ever got made! And it will inevitably, one day, be shut down with very little warning, because thatā€™s just what Google does. But Apps Script meant that to fix this problem, I could just spend an hour or so writing a bit of code. And itā€™s been a while since Iā€™ve done that! First thing I do when Iā€™m coding something thatā€™s simple like that, is I write out what itā€™s meant to do in plain English. Just the flow of logic, so I can then use that as a guide. So I wrote it, and then I thought, hang on, isnā€™t there an AI thing thatā€™s meant to do this now? Yes, this is a video partly about ChatGPT, but I promise Iā€™m not going to go into the details there. Telling someone about your fascinating AI conversation is like telling someone about your dreams. They donā€™t care, it just sounds like youā€™re hallucinating nonsense. But Iā€™d seen posts from people being freaked out about how good ChatGPT is and, intellectually, yeah, I looked at it and I agreed with them. It seemed surprisingly good. But it is just a text transformer. All it does is guess what the next word in the phrase is. I knew that weā€™d been seeing some improvements in that lately. I made a video two years ago about ā€œthe sentences computers canā€™t understand, but humans canā€, and at the end of that video, I made a joke about how computers with language skills are ten years away, just as they have been for the last 40 years. I was wrong. Turns out thatā€™s pretty much solved now. But ChatGPT is still just a thing that predicts what the next word is going to be. It produces generic, milquetoast output thatā€™s confidently wrong about a lot of things. Itā€™s going to help spammers and maybe have a little bit of real-world use. Right? But I thought, okay, letā€™s put my text description in, tell it to translate to this obscure Google Apps Script, see what it does. ā€¦and it wrote the code for me. In a few seconds. And I felt this pit-of-the-stomach, existential horror, and at that moment, I couldnā€™t explain why: but I figured it out later. Itā€™s just predicting the next word. The code it gave back was a bit wrong, but frankly, my first attempt wouldā€™ve been a bit wrong. So I asked it in plain English to fix a couple of the errors that Iā€™d spotted, and it did, and that version was nearly right. Not quite, though. It used a really strange approach. I tried to work out why it had done that, and then I realised, I could just ask. And it told me, in English, why it had done that. And it had made the same mistake I did with my backup. Because, turns out, Googleā€™s documentation is wrong, Google Apps Script itself treats labels as attaching to threads not messages. Google wrote their own programming language wrong! So I told ChatGPT about the error. And it fixed the script. It bodged its way around Googleā€™s bad documentation to build the thing I was actually asking for. And after all the back-and-forths, I didnā€™t actually save much time! But it was so much easier. I never had to pore through documentation to find the exact specific magical incantation that I needed. Also, my coding skills are years out of date. Thatā€™s one of the reasons I donā€™t make computer science videos any more. The last time I learned a new thing in code was probably 2015. My old skills were good enough. I didnā€™t want to change my workflow. Iā€™m not sure if ChatGPT is a better coder than I am, but it felt about equal. It felt like watching while someone wrote code, with me occasionally chiming in and going, ā€˜um, I think you might have made a mistake there?ā€™ And sometimes, I was the one who made the mistake. At one point, I realised Iā€™d written the wrong thing in that first text description, ChatGPT had just been following my wrong instructions. I know itā€™s just a text model that predicts what word comes next, but it didnā€™t feel like it. So at first, I thought that pit-of-the-stomach existential-dread feeling was because my brain had gone ā€˜thatā€™s a humanā€™, or ā€˜thatā€™s an alien intelligenceā€™. Or because I was starting to think, well, what if my brain is just a transformer system thatā€™s trying to predict what the next word is? Iā€™m sure I remember some old pop-science article about how your brainā€™s a prediction engine and ā€œsurpriseā€ is just a fancy word for ā€œbeing wrong about what comes nextā€. But then the next day I gave ChatGPT a more difficult problem, one that required not just translating English to code, but actually a bit of a logical leap, and it just confidently, completely failed in multiple, obvious ways. And that meant that I wasnā€™t worried about it coming for my job. Not yet, anyway. Sure, no-oneā€™s asked for that exact problem to be solved before, the one about the labels and messages. ChatGPT wasnā€™t just copying and pasting from somewhere, there was arguably creativity involved. But, if Iā€™m honest, a lot of the programming I used to do was just copying and pasting bits from somewhere. At some point, every modern programmer searched on Google or Stack Overflow and ā€œadaptedā€ something that someone else wrote. Itā€™s basically part of the job at this point. Iā€™m deliberately avoiding the argument about creativity, AI art, and copyright, by the way. I donā€™t know how I feel about it, and I donā€™t know how the courts will resolve it. If I hired a human artist or musician to create a painting or song in a more famous artistā€™s style, that would be weirdā€¦ but it would be legal. As long as theyā€™re not pretending to be the famous artist, as long as the smaller artist is not trading on their name, thatā€™s fine. The style of most of my videos on this channel is just a slightly faster version of the TV shows I watched growing up. Thatā€™s what this intelligence was trained on. And this video is basically in the style of every other video essayist on YouTube. Itā€™s just I tend to go to the beach a bit more often. [seagull screaming] If someone set up an AI to generate YouTube videos, or even YouTube educational videos as a genre, I think Iā€™d be fine with that? I donā€™t think Iā€™d have a problem with my work being a small part of a massive pool of training data. But if someone started ripping off specifically my name and my work? Yeah, I can see why artists are furious about that. The British legal term for it is ā€œpassing offā€. Iā€™ve said before: please donā€™t train models on what I make. Or, frankly, on anyone specific without their consent? But okay, I wasnā€™t worried about being replaced, and I wasnā€™t worried that I was actually talking to some human-equivalent alien artificial intelligence. So why did I still have that feeling of dread? Artificial intelligence, text transformers and diffusion models, everything that weā€™re currently seeing, seems to be on that sigmoid curve of progress. And I donā€™t know what point on that curve weā€™ve got to. If weā€™re already most of the way up that curve, then cool. Programmers and artists have brand new tools, but they canā€™t create something at a human level with them. Itā€™s not going to take many jobs. Itā€™s gonna make peopleā€™s work more efficient, the same way that loads of inventions, like Photoshop, have done before. If weā€™re at the middle of that curve, then wow, weā€™re gonna get some really impressive new tools very soon, that still need some humans to work them. Maybe Siri and the Google Assistant are going to become the things hey were always promised to be. But that feeling of dread came from the idea that ChatGPT, and the new AI art systems, might be to my world what Napster was to the late nineties. The herald, the first big warning that this new technology, the thing that was going to change everything, was starting to actually change everything. Where huge numbers of people, not just the nerds, were actively using it. And it didnā€™t matter that Napster got sued out of existence, because by then there was Morpheus and Grokster and LimeWire and KaZaA. And then there was Spotify. The old business model, that idea that you bought a copy of music, had been struck a mortal blow and no-one noticed it for a while. If you hear echoes of the Napster case in the lawsuits against AI art programsā€¦ so do I. I was getting a haircut the other week, and unprompted, the barber started talking about ChatGPT, and how heā€™d actually used it to write a formal email that he couldnā€™t be bothered to put together himself. He wasnā€™t a particularly technical person, he wasnā€™t a nerd like me, but heā€™d used it easily, the same way that someone who wanted to get a load of music for free would figure out Napster. Itā€™s not about ChatGPT, not specifically. Itā€™s about what it represents. Because if weā€™re still at the start of the curve for AI, if weā€™re at the Napster point, then everything is about to change, just as fast and just as strangely as it did in the early 2000s, perhaps beyond all recognitionā€¦ and this time Iā€™m on the wrong end of it. Iā€™m like the music executive, back in ā€™99. It feels, to me, like something might have just gone very wrong for the now-comfortable world that I grew up with and that Iā€™ve settled down in. Thatā€™s where the dread came from. The worry that suddenly I donā€™t know what comes next. No-one does. Iā€™ve been complaining for years that it feels like nothing has really changed since smartphones came alongā€¦ and I think that maybe, maybe, I should have been careful what I wished for. At some point, Iā€™ll look back on this video and, with hindsight, I will easily be able to see where we were on the curve. We all will. Part of me hopes that I am entirely wrong, that in a few years Iā€™ll still be working like this. The email thing is a metaphor, of course, it wonā€™t be email folders for you. It might be something else, something youā€™re attached to. Maybe something minor, or maybe the whole industry you work in. But right now, that feeling, that creeping horror, that dread: it turns out that was the worry that after years of being fairly steady and comfortable, my world is about to changeā€¦ and despite everything, I will still want my email to be in folders. ā€¦and now, an AI-generated NordVPN ad! Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tools for staying connected while travelling or just browsing the internet. Itā€™s called NordVPN and itā€™s been a game-changer for me. With NordVPN, I can access content from anywhere in the world, no matter where I am. Whether Iā€™m in a country with strict internet censorship, or I want to access a web site that blocks people from a particular country, or just want to catch up on my favorite shows from back home, NordVPN has got me covered. Some other amazing features of NordVPN include the ability to connect up to six devices simultaneously, and 24/7 customer support. Whether Iā€™m using my laptop, tablet, or phone, NordVPN makes it easy to stay connected and secure. So, if youā€™re looking for a VPN that can help you access content from around the world and keep you safe and secure online, give NordVPN a try. Trust me, you wonā€™t regret it! To get the best deal theyā€™re currently offering, go to nordvpn.com/tomscott or click the link in the description. I am going to be out of a job soon.
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Channel: Tom Scott
Views: 6,000,947
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Keywords: tom scott, tomscott
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Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)
Published: Mon Feb 13 2023
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