Author(s): Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

Originally published on Towards AI.

AI is an alien intelligence

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Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash

Despite all that has been said about AI capabilities (or often because of that), what AI can and can’t do is too often misunderstood. Indeed, not getting right what AI's real abilities are is a critical flaw that could undermine our interactions with AI. A few years ago, interacting with AI the right way could have been irrelevant for most people; now, it’s important for everyone, becoming more so as time goes by.

The advent of AI was marred by initial misconceptions –from humans, I mean. A notable example is the case of Blake Lemoine, a former Google engineer tasked with evaluating the Google AI chatbot LaMDA (a precursor to the current Gemini). Lemoine’s conversations with LaMDA impressed him so much that he deemed it ‘sentient’ and exhibiting ‘consciousness.’ I recall reading that he was reluctant to turn off LaMDA, fearing he would be ‘killing a soul.’ This incident occurred in May 2022, several months before the launch of ChatGPT.

Then, after ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022, many people were amazed at how easily the bot answered complicated questions, found information, and carried out tasks almost for free. But many didn’t get the bot’s tendency… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI