Transcript
Explain it to me like I’m 80
Mom: What’s with these AIs escaping and hacking people? That sounds scary.
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests a hundred million dollars in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
Kurzgesagt put out an interesting video on that Open AI hack that was in the news recently.
Also, I’m not saying AI companies shouldn’t be held liable. But they definitely don’t know what the fuck they’re unleashing.
https://youtu.be/ujkD4SxPKOI
So watched the entire video. Kurzgesagt used to be better than this.
Even with warnings from experts they decided to anthropomorphise the agents to “tell the story”. You are just adding fuel by it. No disclaimers or reminders will work over it.
Yeah, they lost a lot of credibilty when it comes to AI topics. You can wonder if they took money from the AI safety crowd. Another channel pretty much dead to me now.
I think it’s more along the lines of drumming up hype to impress (dupe) investors. “Hey look, our AI is soooo sophisticated it “accidentally” broke “containment” and “hacked” some systems!”
Yeah I love kurzgesagt but it did feel like they were swallowing the koolaid. They did end on saying that they want companies to be held more accountable and regulated which is definitely the right position to have, but it felt like they were anthropomorphising the AI’s a lot which felt gross
Getting regulation in is part of the goal of this marketing campaign. They want their tech regulated so the cost of entry for any competition rises. “Can’t do local hosting, too dangerous!”
Agree with you entirely. It’s a real shame this is happening in the US because they’re never going to be held accountable if they can pretend it’s the difference between making billions of dollars and not.
Kurzgesagt swallowed the techbro party line ages ago.
That video is absolute trash, and completely fails to give a fair view. It constantly treats LLMs like they’re people with feelings and ideas, which is exactly what’s wrong with media reporting.
This video made me unsubscribe from Kurzgesagt. The sensationalistic/story-telling tone of describing LLM actions is exactly what LLM-companies want. They did a small comparison to a virus and I think it is kinda fitting. But a virus is not alive just like LLMs.
Yeah, I considered pulling my patreon for them the moment I saw the title.
In “A Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”, Cory Doctorow has a good bit about this kind of sensationalism referring to news that is actually targeted at potential investors taking over the airwaves - which both the title and ending of this video definitely are. I did enjoy the middle where it went through how the LLM harnesses actually worked together and communicated; that I think was novel. But the sensationalism starting at the title is shit, and I question here whether it’s just a bid to get more views for them, as opposed to drinking the cool-aid.
Either way, they get one more strike before I pull the plug on my end.
Yeah I felt the quality of some of their videos dropped at some point in the past couple year, felt more clickbaity, shock value than years ago… This anthropomorphising of the “agents” for the story made me mad the whole time, very sad I unsubscribed…
Maybe they started using AI around then.
Then I’ll be the one to say it, AI companies should be held liable.
What a fucking loser.