An interesting cause of spurious content is what we informally refer to as "reference collisions": contexts where a single word may reference multiple concepts (like an eggplant emoji), and an unintended concept is generated. The line between benign collisions (those without malicious intent, such as "A person eating an eggplant") and those involvi... See more

GPT-3 raises many philosophical questions. Some are ethical. Should we develop and deploy GPT-3, given that it has many biases from its training, it may displace human workers, it can be used for deception, and it could lead to AGI? I’ll focus on some issues in the philosophy of mind. Is GPT-3 really intelligent, and in what sense? Is it conscious?... See more

Targeted harassment, bullying, or exploitation of individuals is a principal area of concern for deployment of image generation models broadly and Inpainting in particular.Inpainting – especially combined with the ability to upload images – allows for a high degree of freedom in modifying images of people and their visual context. While other image... See more

The new system, called AutoML Zero, tries to build an AI from the ground up using nothing but the most basic mathematical concepts that govern machine learning.Amazingly, not only did AutoML Zero spontaneously build a neural network, but it came up with gradient descent, the most common mathematical technique that human designers use to train a net... See more

DALL·E 2 currently has a very limited ability to render legible text. When it does, text may sometimes be nonsensical and could be misinterpreted. It’s important to track this capability as it develops, as image generative models may eventually develop novel text generation capabilities via rendering text.

As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too. I would expect any consciousness to be far simpler than ours, but much depends on just what sort of processing is going on among those 175 billion parameters.

Clune also stresses the importance of thinking about the ethics of the new technology from the start. There is a good chance that AI-designed neural networks and algorithms will be even harder to understand than today’s already opaque black-box systems.

If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like. Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

“…Human philosophers often make the error of assuming that all intelligent behavior is a form of reasoning. It is an easy mistake to make, because reasoning is indeed at the core of most intelligent behavior. However, intelligent behavior can arise through other mechanisms as well…”