Computer Dreams
You know you’re a Big Deal when the TV show 60 Minutes pays attention to you. And now that 60 Minutes has devoted two segments to it, we can rest assured that artificial intelligence (AI) is officially a Big Deal.
Depending on your mood, AI either marks the beginning of a bright future, or the final step over the line as we as a species descend into our own destruction. This is quite an ambition for a computer program that everyone agrees amounts to very fancy estimations about what words come next in a sequence. This is why skeptics view the programs, also known as large-language models (LLMs), as little more than hyped-up text autocompletion. Most, however, find there is a lot more to it than that. In fact, if you interact with an AI, you do sometimes get the sense that there is a recognizable person behind it, a ghost in the machine.
An AI like ChatGPT is so good at predicting what words come next that it feels human. The method produces language so familiar, in fact, that you might wonder if this is how humans generate language: stringing word upon word into thoughts as we go along. Our consciousness makes us experience and interpret the process as if we always had these thoughts fully formed in our minds before we started expressing them. Modern research, after all, supports the idea that we make decisions before the fact for reasons of neurochemistry, and our minds then make up reasons for our thoughts and actions after the fact.
In the case of LLMs, when pushed, they will continue to string words together until the meaning becomes fantasy-like: an hallucination or dream rather than reality. Is it possible that they are just dreaming, since they are modeled on how the mind works? After all, we aren’t entirely clear exactly what dreams are, other than something our brains do when disconnected from our senses.
Kevin Kelly thinks that the LLMs exist in a dream world, because they don’t have the sensory experience of living in the real world to know what reality is. They differ from us by existing in a dream state all the time, whereas we experience long periods of time awake each day when our senses force our mental and linguistic hallucinations into the background.
Kelly has been playing with AI that generates art and images from words instructing it what to draw. The output has a dreamy quality to it. The art has many elements familiar to human experience, but combined in ways that we might expect to recall after waking up from a dream.
I’ll leave it for him to introduce the idea he examines in this short, thought-inducing essay:
I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.
For an idea of the kind of art he has been generating, take a look at his Twitter feed with the hashtag #ImadeAIart at this link. It is aesthetically enjoyable—and very hallucinatory.
RE: 60 Minutes & the Big Deal
I hate to quibble with you here, Gnito (hope you don't mind me continuing to call you that; it's easier to type than Marque or your other alias, and, I believe, a lot snappier as well), but you err on the number of times 60 Minutes has done something with AI. They recently did an interview with MTG. So that makes three, by my count.
Speaking of which (or whom?), I don't have time right now to read that essay, so does that Kelly guy have any thoughts on "the foundational mode of intelligence" being nightmares in some folks?
Morning all...
Today is; Nat'l Banana Day, Nat'l Garlic Day, and Nat'l Amaretto Day...all good things....( IMO), I have always eaten a lot of garlic stuff and have ben doing bananas more often for the Potassium and fiber...( I have trouble with toe cramping at night, the potassium prevents it)
Those pictures are awesome and look a lot like the pictures in my brain. I have been experiencing something odd...( I have always been an all night dreamer, and very vivid and in color dreams) , when I close my eyes to go to sleep now...I do not see "black", I see pictures and sometimes video like moving stuff...some are things or people I am familiar with some, some are strange and some I have no idea...lol..it is both fascinating and concerning and maybe even a little creepy, I haven't looked it up, because I am not sure I want to know...lol...and it stays that way until I fall asleep
I am glad I got gas Monday after work, because yesterday it went up 20 cents a gallon, from $3.58 to $3.78...the former is close to what was normal around here before the inflation thing...I stayed just under my budget , so all good
It is more like spring gain here today. and overnight we got dandelions, so there is that sign of spring...( unlike many, I like dandelions...lol)
Happy Hump Day!