Speaking of Douglas Adams, Starship Titanic would be the perfect game to try reimplementing with a modern LLM. It already runs on a primitive chat AI system.
In a way the intelligence of the AI itself allows them to offload responsibility to the AI. As you say, if one was simply writing software that did all this due to some insane programming decisions you'd be in big trouble.
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
It's just a funny little thing but I love how in a world of "megapixel" and even "gigapixel" space images we have here a "multipixel" imaging of planets, due to achieving a resolution of several pixels.
Though the 25km resolution mentioned actually sounds far, far better than the very pixellated planet in the "artist’s depiction". I suppose it depends how small and far away the planet is.
Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.
I'm surprised how much of the discussion here is taking the angle of "Anthropic pretended this model was soooo dangerous for months as marketing, and it seems like someone decided to believe them!"
First, Anthropic was founded by people who we know were worried about AI safety and signs point to that still being the case. It's really cynical to say it was all an exaggeration for marketing.
Second, this isn't Moller promising a fantastic working flying car next year. The model did what Anthropic said it could do.
I realise that ruling out "they bought Anthropic's scaremongering" brings up the question of why the government would block Mythos/Fable, but not the roughly-as-capable and less restricted GPT5.5. However we do know for a fact that they dislike Anthropic more than OpenAI right now.
> In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive
This has already been common in the audio engineering world for some time, as home demos of music approach professional quality. As you forsee here, people get used to what they have and become even less inclined to accept changes in a new professional mix.
Most people want to spend time with others in the same kind of way they want to eat food or sleep or watch a movie. It just seems to be built in. People who appear to have ulterior motives are treated suspiciously. Some people seem to need a lot more social time than others, but most people desire at least a little bit of human contact.
I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.
But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.
Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.