In both her writing and speaking on AI systems, Mitchell displays a razor-like focus that allows her to explain the core concepts that underpin those systems, even the more technically dense ones. Her book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide For Thinking Humans, is neither a prohibitively dense and jargon-laden tome nor a breezy walk in the park.
I do. It’s even gotten more intense in the last few years. We’ve seen these unbelievable generative AI systems like GPT-3 and other language models that can generate very human-like, seemingly creative text; [as well as] these text-to-image systems like DALL E and others that can generate these amazing images in all kinds of different styles from a text prompt.
The story is a little complicated. People have been fooled by AI chatbots for decades, even going back to the early days of ELIZA, the dumbest chatbot ever. Its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum back in the 1970s, was so alarmed by people’s reaction to it that he wrote a kind of anti-AI book about it. He thought it was going to be very dangerous that humans could be taken in so easily. This was in the 70s.
So, those kinds of errors are very possible with these systems. They don’t have the common sense understanding that we humans have. So they aren’t completely reliable and they are vulnerable to people manipulating their input data in interesting ways that wouldn’t fool a human but can fool these systems. We’re not there yet. We don’t have reliable intelligent AI systems. How long it is until we get them? It’s hard to say.