Artists and authors are complaining that Generative AI is copying their works, and some systems will provide direct excerpts from published documents without providing a source reference. This is a problem that can be solved with “regular programming” by the LLM provider. Anthropic Claude has been providing real and valid references for some time whenever I ask for something in the style of a research report, and other LLMs are following suit. This is not exactly the same as a learning source reference, but it’s a step in the right direction. But this seems to not be enough for some artists ..read more

Generative AIs like MidJourney or DALL-E have become very popular, but they also have their detractors. We hear a lot about these systems cutting and pasting human artists' art, and parroting the distinct styles of established artists. Copyright law is attempting to adjust copyright law to exclude AI Art. This matters to creators at all levels. I would like to discuss AI Art starting from the Epistemology of Creativity. Where does novel art come from? The Selectionist Manifesto says "All useful novelty in the universe comes from processes of variation and selection". I know this is true. I ..read more

Evolutionary Computation is under-appreciated. Objections include "Evolution takes millennia" and "I don't get the point". They are (or should be) very important to people in the AI community because they are a primitive precursor to intelligence. Understanding Evolutionary Computation (EC) will make understanding LLMs easier. In order to not have to define "AI" again, I will now define a new term SHAG which stands for "SuperHuman Answer Generator". A SHAG is a computer based system which can provide answers to questions that the client or programmer that is using the system cannot (or c ..read more

Humans suck at almost everything. Yann LeCun recently pointed this out. And an infant sucks at everything (joke opportunity ignored) and a 4-year old knows some language but can't handle working at a factory. And if someone doesn’t know Math, they can't be a Math teacher. Queue up the scene in "I, Robot" where Will Smith's character asks "Can a robot compose a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" and the robot answers "Can you?" AIs can learn language and a couple problem domains that we want to use them for. Today. But if we want an AI to approve building perm ..read more

Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI that made ChatGPT) has recently been saying that he is about to make a major announcement that will upset many investors. Some people speculate this will be about OpenAI Open-Sourcing something. Some think he will ask for more regulation. Some think he will announce a long delay before GPT5. In fact, OpenAI hasn’t even started training it yet. My really wild speculation: "We don't actually need GPUs" The GPT5 delay could have been brought about by research at OpenAI leading to discovery of much much cheaper GPU-free LLM algorithms, and that those algorithms may not ye ..read more

Introduction A debate concerning AI Alignment is upon us. We hear ridiculous claims about AIs taking over and killing all humans. These claims are rooted in fundamental 20th Century Reductionist misunderstandings about AI1. These fears are stoked and fueled by journalists and social media and cause serious concerns among outsiders to the field. It's time for a sane and balanced look at the AI Alignment problem, starting from Epistemology. First we observe that "The AI Alignment Problem" conflates several smaller problems, treated individually in four of the following chapters: - Don't lie ..read more

People are different. AIs are different. Some people may be comparing ChatGPT to that crazy uncle we have to put up with each Thanksgiving. Some part of AI bias is in the eye of the beholder. Some is not. Some may advocate tight control of AI learning corpora. In essence, how they are raised, in order to guarantee uniform belief systems in entire generations of AIs. But a more freedom-flavored solution is to give everybody a choice. Let people choose which AI to use, as a Preferences setting. In every or all apps. Plug-compatible AI APIs will have to get standardized so that everyone can use t ..read more

Zeroth Principles can clarify many issues in the ML/AI domain. As discussed in a previous post, Epistemology is normally an armchair discipline, like the rest of Philosophy. It has only lately become accessible to experiments because we can use various Machine Learning models to test our hypotheses. I would like to introduce three statements in Epistemology that are (I claim) pretty hard to argue with: Omniscience is unavailable We don’t even have eyes in the back of our heads. Complex and chaotic systems cannot be predicted over the long term. Nobody, even an AI, can track everything that hap ..read more

Both the Science Fiction and Artificial Intelligence communities have, for decades, predicted the arrival of a personal chatbot style dialog-competent AI that you can access any time you wish for as long as you wish, possibly for all hours you are awake. One obvious implementation is to provide a phone number that anyone can speed-dial anytime on their cell phone in order to get connected to their personal AI. This would be a voice input and voice output chatbot that is competent to handle a full blown conversation – what I call Contiguous Rolling Topic Mixed Initiative Dialog. It will pr ..read more

Copied from my main site: Experimental epistemology is the use of the experimental methods of the cognitive sciences to shed light on debates within epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge and rationally justified belief. Some skeptics contend that ‘experimental epistemology’ (or ‘experimental philosophy’ more generally) is an oxymoron. If you are doing experiments, they say, you are not doing philosophy. You are doing psychology or some other scientific activity. It is true that the part of experimental philosophy that is devoted to carrying out experiments and performing stati ..read more