BG 275 – Artificial Stupidity (AS)
We humans are busy developing and already using Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a large scale.
That is sometimes useful, but also a problem. We still do not yet understand exactly how our own intelligence and our own consciousness work, but we are building forms of Artificial Intelligence that should not only work as well as our own intelligence, but even better!
That seems doomed to failure to me for now.
Of course, AI can be very useful! For the time being certainly for simple repetitive actions, calculations, designs and decisions. And now that the market is flooded with AI systems, developers will have to continue to innovate.
Almost all of the current AI systems are based on so-called ‘large language models’ (LLMs). This means that the developers copy huge amounts of text and other data, often illegally (a pressing ethical and legal issue!), and ‘feed’ it to their software.
With that, they have developed software that can not only literally repeat what we say, but can also predict what we are going to say before we have even said it! Sometimes it does so in a stunningly convincing way, but more often it works rather clumsily. This is not only because AI itself is not yet functioning optimally, but also because of the often-dubious data with which it is fed.
Only in recent years have developers discovered that simply feeding AI huge amounts of data is not enough – something that seems obvious, but …