I think I am going to have to inscribe this on my tombstone: LLM AI’s are a far cry from the AI’s of sci-fi, to the degree that calling it “artificial intelligence” is irresponsible branding
Mostly because this is good autocorrect being labeled as AI. It’s not intelligence, it just looks like intelligence to people that aren't knowledgeable.
I’ve read a lot of Philip K Dick (Galactic Pothealer should be somewhere on a shelf around here) but I actually never read Philip Jose Farmer. I’ll check him out, thanks!
The beauty of paranoia was that key premise was the Computer issuing contradictory instructions, frequently unknowingly, because the Computer, alongside being all powerful was functionally insane and/moronic
How shortsighted and naive does someone have to be to think AI today is the finished thing and that advancements in speed/acceleration and accuracy/credibility aren’t but a handful of years in the future? The danger is lurking just around the corner and people need to come to grips with that fact
Science fiction writers have the advantage of solely attempting to illustrate through allegory, rather than having to replicate organic processes that are only minimally understood through binarist technology that can just barely mimic the complexity of its predecessor.
(We say this as a writer ourself: illustration and allegory are no small task, it's just fundamentally different from what "creating AI" is trying to achieve.)
[I know it's not cyberpunk, but...] In Pratchett 'Discworld' the Unseen University has a thinking machine / proto-computer that once became deranged after talking to a deranged professor. I think we're here
Listen, I feel like we should have all seen that Sir Terry was going to be the most prophetic of all of the sci-fi or fantasy authors. We're not living out a Philip K. Dick cyberpunk futuristic dreamspace, our dystopia is just an improbably dumb Ankh-Morporkian farce
I think everyone thought it would need to actually have a use and be good at it for people to shell over all of their cash and freedom to get access, but in reality it just needed to look shiny and sound cool in news articles.
Oh, that's very cool, I'd love to read it again for the first time. I don't necessarily see a lot of direct references to it these days, but it's one of the defining texts of the genre, so once you've read it you'll start to see its DNA everywhere.
We only call this drivel AI because the hype men do it and "hallucinating stochastic parrot gorged on plagiarism and misinformation" doesn't acronym well.
Not that it is AI
And the working "AI" stuff isn't public facing (e.g. Alphafold...), at least most of it
So general AI use is (porn) pictures, virtual friends and story telling masking as "answering questions"
TRULY. I read so much dystopian fiction and like. Everyone led me to believe that things would be so much cooler when the world burned. I did not expect to be sitting in a wet puddle mumbling about how dumb everything is.
Not so much a story of how stupid AI was going to be as a story of how stupidly humans would obey them: 'Computers Don't Argue' by Gordon Dickson.
For the real life version, look up 'Robodebt'.
An amazingly accurate prediction from @greatdismal.bsky.social is that the Europeans would be the ones policing AI (Turing Registry) and standing up to tech conglomerates like Sense/Net.
Comments
"The cliché is inexperienced."
You may find its narrative beats quite on point.
“The computer is your friend”
That scene will never get old.
https://youtu.be/68mbFvenlaQ?si=84u9HLcBYZHX08e1
Friend Computer loves you.
Happiness is mandatory.
REDO FROM START
And the working "AI" stuff isn't public facing (e.g. Alphafold...), at least most of it
So general AI use is (porn) pictures, virtual friends and story telling masking as "answering questions"
https://thegreatcomicbookheroes.blogspot.com/2014/04/jack-b-quick-in-i-robert-by-alan-moore.html
For the real life version, look up 'Robodebt'.