I'm actually a programmer and at least know the basics of how machine learning works - I took a course in it as well as data science. I do not on the other hand know how the brain or conciousness works. Therefore, I am not asserting it can "truly" comprehend or reason or empathize, but I think it can simulate comprehension and reasoning and empathy (pretty darn well from the outside)[https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712]. It's not perfect, it hallucinates and is poor at math, but it's certainly proving our capacity for art/creativity isn't as unique as anyone would have argued... say, four years ago. To me it brings to mind the old aphorism about no art being truly original. My point about neurons was to point out that there's no evidence of a magic spark inside of us that makes us creative, we are as far as anyone knows just combining and recombining different ideas based on the data we've been "trained" on. There's no such thing as an "original" poem or piece of art (although Chat-GPT does an excellent job extracting themes from poems I wrote.)

It was only a few years ago we said (a computer could never win at Go)[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/ai-experts-were-way-off-on-when-a-computer-could-win-go-2016-3%3famp], and at the time jt would make you a laughing stock if you ever claimed AI would soon be able to pass the Bar exam. The goalposts just keep shifting. You're going really against the grain if you think it's not doing anything impressive. If you've fooled around with Chat-GPT and are drawing your conclusions from that, know that Chat-GPT was neutered and not the cutting edge (although it's still very impressive, and I think it's purely contrarianism to state otherwise.) Have some imagination for what the future holds based on the trend of the recent past. We're just getting started, for better and for worse. This field is exploding, and advances are developed in months, not years.

I agree that it is a bit sad, and a bit scary.

> Chat-bots produce painfully average offerings; works that check all of the surface-level boxes, but that are completely flat. I encorage you to check out the demo page on openAI.

I'm sorry but if you're not wrong about this now, you will be in the next few years. GPT-4 can write some incredible poetry incredibly quickly, and at most all you have to do is edit them together and sand them a bit. There's no reason to think it won't keep improving.

Remember, you too are just a bunch of neurons trained on input, and you can be creative. GPT-4, likewise, can innovate. It can reason how to get through a maze, or explain a meme. It can pass the Bar Exam at the 90th percentile. We used to think our knowledge and intelligence made us special and irrepplacable, but we're realizing that maybe we're not. I think we have to admit that. Writing will have to be something you do for the joy of it, not to get others' validation, because there will always be a question now that a machine wrote it. I say that as a person who considers themselves a writer, too.

You thinking of Bankman-Fried? Effective Altruism is much bigger than him, and there's nothing saying people who commit fraud can't also donate to good charities. Some of my friends in tech take the Giving What We Can pledge, where they donate 10% of their salary to charities like the Against Malaria Foundation that have a high investment : life-saving ratio and low management costs. Effective Altruism an ethical thought movement heavily influenced by Peter Singer's philosophy. There are legitamite critisisms of it, but those critisisms are more philosophical, not "it's all fraud, actually."

Software is unlike all other major industries before it, at least in one way. For approximately $0 in materials, you can create a product that can be sold to a billion people with no shipping costs. Sucessful software companies are profit printing machines.

AI is a field that is blowing up. Humans aren't done inventing technological revolutions yet (unless of course we start letting AI do it.) And the center of that is still Silicon Valley, the city of dreamers.

But yeah, regulate big tech. AI only makes that more urgent.