Kulturkampf

[benji]

From February but I hadn't seen this piece before:

Last week, the New York Times published a 10,000 word conversation between star “technology columnist” Kevin Roose, and Microsoft’s new Bing bot, a search tool powered by the most advanced large language model (LLM) the public has ever seen. “Welcome to the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” the Times declared. But what does “artificial intelligence” mean, exactly? How are these models being used? What can they do? For anybody just tuning in — presumably including most Times readers — these are reasonable questions. Unfortunately, one would be hard pressed to find answers for them online, and certainly not from Kevin Roose.

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Thursday, Kevin framed his night prompting Sydney to generate scary-sounding bites of language, which Sydney successfully generated, as “I had a ‘disturbing’ conversation.”

At the time of my writing, this tweet has received 4.2 million impressions, which is to say hundreds of thousands if not millions of people read some portion of the piece, and likely millions or tens of millions have now heard some greatly-embellished version of what is already a greatly-distorted portrait of AI capability. “I had trouble sleeping,” Kevin continued. Was his purpose to terrify? Clearly. But why?

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At no point in Kevin’s thread, in the introduction to his ‘conversation,’ or in the transcript’s body does he explain how Sydney operates, or what is happening, exactly, when he provides it with a question. He — ostensibly a “technology columnist” with the job of understanding these things, and educating the public about them — simply says he’s terrified. Then, he shares a conversation that would seem, to anyone not steeped in this subject, evidence Sydney not only has the capacity to love, manipulate, and hate, but wants to conquer the world.