The concept of the technological singularity is a confused one. Here’s the thing about “general AI” or “self-aware AI”—it will be indistinguishable from really good mimicry of self-aware intelligence. When the singularity happens, we won’t notice. This is an excerpt of a YouTube comment on a video about AI technology. I thought about responding to…
Tag: AI
I don’t think consciousness is a byproduct
I’m not an expert and you shouldn’t particularly care what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. Physicalists aka materialists are often presented with the challenge of the so-called hard problem of consciousness. That is, essentially, how and why does subjective experience arise from physical brains? In general, I have the impression that most physicalists…
Why we should be nice to (some) AI
While modern “chat bots” (large language models or LLMs) like ChatGPT are far from sentient, they are amazing in their capability and their development has prompted greater public discussion around the future of AI and humanity’s relationship with AI. Some, even some experts in the field, are fearful of making rapid progress without first resolving…
Does AI image generation have a real world use case?
Since 2022 and the release of generative AI like Stable Diffusion, AI-generated images have been a novelty above all else. As some have pointed out online, modern AI seems at times like a solution in search of a problem. Now, a couple years into this AI boom (or bubble), some patterns of usage have emerged….
But is it art?
“What counts as art” is such a perennial question in philosophy that it has been practically beaten into the ground by now. What else is there to say? The topic has been given new life by generative AI and other technological phenomena, but fundamentally the arguments are the same as they’ve ever been. My own…
Where credit is due
Over time, I have become increasingly opposed to the idea of intellectual property. It is something I have been thinking about for a while, but recent open questions related to generative AI have brought this to the forefront of my mind. In particular, what I have been thinking about recently is that what copyright law…
AI as an archive of human language
This is a fascinating example of an application of AI. The current discourse around AI can be pretty negative as many of the downsides are apparent and widespread. However, AI has many good uses as well. Like any technology, its effect on the world depends on its user. We are in a period of mass…
Equality, equity, equivalence, identity, indistinguishability, isomorphism, resemblance, congruence, and similarity
While the title of this post might as well be a thesaurus entry, my purpose here is to investigate the differences between these concepts and how they operate in different contexts. Mathematical equality The reader is almost certainly very familiar with the equals sign or = used in math. Many of us first encounter it…
Who is Neuro-sama?
Neuro-sama (aka Neuro Sama or Neurosama) is a female-presenting AI vtuber (virtual YouTuber) created by Vedal987. In late December 2022, Neuro debuted on Twitch playing the rhythm game osu! and interacting with the live chat using text-to-speech and an anime girl avatar. The avatar was one that was included with the Live2D software used to…
“AI ‘art’ is bad” is a bad argument
There are many good reasons to oppose AI generated images being disseminated or put forward as art. Nevertheless, one argument I see with surprising frequency is that the images generated by AI look bad. The biggest reason I think this is a bad argument is because it’s contingent upon current technological limitations. AI image generation…
thoughts on mind 