San Francisco: Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has envisioned a monument to the death of humanity.
“Sorry for killing most of humanity with a smiley hat and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming visitors to the “Misalignment Museum,” a new exhibit on the controversial technology.
The pieces in this temporary show mix the disturbing with the comic, and in this first display there are admirable observations for the viewer through an AI that transcends its perspective.
“The concept of the museum is that we’re in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity,” said Audrey Kim, the show’s curator.
“But then the AI realized it was bad and made a kind of monument to humans, so the tagline of our show is ‘Sorry for killing so many humanity,'” he said.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a concept that is even more elusive than simple AI in everyday life, with the rapid emergence of apps like ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbot and all the hype surrounding them. I have been seen.
AGI is “artificial intelligence capable of doing anything a human can do”, integrating human cognitive abilities into machines.
All around San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, startups are hot on the trail of the AGI Holy Grail.
Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has said that AGI, done right, could “elevate humanity” and change the “boundaries of possibility”.
Paperclip AI
But Kim wants to ponder the dangers of going too far, too soon.
“There’s been a lot of conversation on Twitter in fairly specific intellectual tech circles about AI security and I think that’s very important,” he said.
But those conversations aren’t as easily accessible to the general public as concepts you can see or feel, he added.
Kim is particularly fond of a sculpture called “Paperclip Embrace”: two human figures holding each other, made entirely of paperclips.
The work refers to a metaphor from philosopher Nick Bostrom, who in the 2000s imagined what would happen if artificial intelligence was programmed to create paper clips.
“It can become more and more powerful, and constantly improve itself to achieve its one and only goal, to destroy all of humanity, to fill the world with paperclips,” Kim said. “
Weighing the pros and cons of AI is a topic that became close to Kim’s heart in a previous job working for autonomous vehicle company Cruise.
There, he said, he worked on an “incredible” technology that could “reduce the number of accidents due to human error,” but that it also presented risks.
The exhibit occupies a small space in a street corner building in San Francisco’s hip Mission neighborhood.
The lower floor of the exhibit is dedicated to AI as a nightmarish dystopia where a machine powered by GPT-3, the language model behind ChatGPT, writes hateful calligrams against humanity in cursive.
One exhibit is an AI-generated — and completely fake — dialogue between philosopher Slavoj Žižek and filmmaker Werner Herzog, two of Europe’s most respected intellectuals.
This “infinite conversation” is a meditation on deeply fake: images, sound or video aimed at changing opinions by impersonating real people and has become the latest weapon of online disinformation.
“We started this project only five months ago, and so far many of the technologies presented here seem almost primitive,” Kim marveled.
She hopes to make the exhibit permanent with more space and more events.
