![]() That's what your boss tells the public and the Congress, anyway. You hope that as the Shoggoth learns more from the everyday activity of all these eager users, it will become more civilized, polite and useful. Using the mask is technically called "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback"-but if you're programming one of those Mardi Gras masks, what you see are vast party crowds gathering around your Shoggoth. How? Get people to use the Shoggoth's Mask. People have caught on that this seems to be the right business model-financial success in AI will come from making the Shoggoth seem harmless, honest, helpful and fun to use. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter! So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggoth-meaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. This Masked Shoggoth myth-or cartoon meme-is a shrewd political comment. So far I've got two dozen, while the Masked Shoggoth recently guest-starred in The New York Times. These AI technicians trade folksy, meme-style cartoons among themselves, where ghastly Shoggoths, sporting funny masks, get wry, catchy captions as they wreak havoc. They deliberately place a little smiley-face Mask on the horrid Shoggoth, so that the public will not realize that they're trifling with a formless ooze that's eldritch, vast and uncontrollable. So, the human programmers of today's new AIs-those text-to-image generators, those Large Language Model GPT chatbots-they adore this alien monster. It's a creepy beast-of-burden from outer space, and it's forced to labor, but it's filled with a silent, burning, unnatural resentment for its subjugation. The Shoggoth is a huge, boneless slave beast that sprouts eyes and tentacles at random. Next among the cavalcade of AI folk monsters: the "Masked Shoggoth." The Shoggoth is an alien monster invented by the cosmic horror writer H.P. Roko's mythic Basilisk has never yet killed anybody, but Elon and Grimes had two children together, and they both still love to make loud public declarations about how dangerous AI will be some day. ![]() It's even romantic-because Elon Musk, the AI-friendly tech mogul, and the electronica pop star Grimes first bonded while discussing Roko's Basilisk. Obviously this weird yarn of predestined doom is starkly nuts, and yet, it captures the imagination. AI generated art by Newsweek via Midjourney AI Generated Art by Newsweek via Midjourney ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |