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Alignment Anxieties & Persuasion Problems
Dónal and Ciarán continue the 2025 season with a second quarterly update that looks at some recent themes in AI development. They're pondering doom again, as we increasingly grapple with the evidence that AI systems are powerfully persuasive and full of flattery at the same time as our ability to meaningfully supervise them seems to be diminishing.Topics in this episodeCan we see how reasoning models reason? If AI is thinking, or sharing information and it's not in human language, how can we check that it's aligned with our values. This interpretability issue is tied to the concept of neuralese - inscrutable machine thoughts!We discuss the predictions and prophetic doom visions of the AI-2027 documentIncreasing ubiquity and sometimes invisibility of AI, as it's inserted into other products. Is this more enshittification? AI is becoming a persuasion machine - we look at the recent issues on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView, where researchers skipped good ethics practice but ended up with worrying resultsWe talk about flattery, manipulation, and Eli Yudkowsky's AI-Box thought experimentResources & LinksThe AI-2027 piece, from Daniel Kokotajlo et al. is a must-read!Dario Amodei's latest essay, The Urgency of InterpretabilityT.O.P.I.C. - A detailed referencing model for indicating the use of GenAI Tools in academic assignments. Yudkowsky's AI-box Experiment, described on his site."The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen" - coverage of the University of Zurich / Reddit study, by Tom Barlett for The AtlanticChatGPT wants us to buy things via our AI conversations (reported by Reece Rogers, for Wired)You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!
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Political Upheaval & Reasoning Models
Dónal and Ciarán start a new season for 2025, with a slight change in format to bring you roughly quarterly updates on the themes and topics required to help you know enough about AI. This first episode of 2025, recorded in mid February, gives a summary of what's happened since last November and answers some of your submitted questions. (Thanks for those!)Topics in this episodeWe can't avoid talking about them: Musk & Trump and some of the effects they've both had on the AI space in the last three monthsRegulatory Developments, and the EU's AI Act starting to come into forceUS - EU relations, and the continued innovation vs regulation chatterDeepSeek and China's bold entry into the contemporary AI model spaceWhat are Reasoning Models and how do they work?Some history and concepts related to machine logicAI Benchmarks - a quick primer as we move closer to "Humanity's Last Exam"Resources & LinksJD Vance's Speech from the Paris AI Conference is here (The American Presidency Project)Details on HLE (Humanity's Last Exam) here, including some sample questions. Let us know how you did!Details on the ARC-AGI here.A graph of OpenAI model performance (and discussion) is here (80,000 hours)You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!
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2024 E6 Doom of Humanity?
Dónal and Ciarán discuss the ways - both real and imagined in fiction - that AI could bring about civilization-ending doom for us all. What can we learn from how sci-fi has treated this topic? What are the distant and nearer potential dooms, and what can we do now, apart from saying thanks to ChatGPT? Oh, and note that listening to this episode may drastically affect your life and cause a future powerful AI to punish you in a psychic prison!Topics in this episodeWhat is p(Doom) and why are we hearing about it from AI researchers and investors?How has AI doom been dealt with in Sci-fi and can this teach us anything useful?What is Dead Internet Theory and why might AI contribute to the Enshitification of the internet?Why has the religious concept of Paschal's Wager found a new form in AI discussions that started on internet forums?Resources & LinksMore on the history of p(Doom) on wikipedia here.An interesting article on Dead Internet Theory & AI Walter, Y. Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory. AI & Society (2024).Read about Roko's Basilisk (if you dare)More on Roko's Basilisk on the LessWrong forum where the though experiment emerged in 2009You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!
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2025 E5 Misinformation and Regulation
Dónal and Ciarán discuss some of the concerns about misinformation and disinformation that have emerged with the rise of impressively capable GenAI models, and provide some detail on what their effects might be. They discuss the calls for regulation and how this has begun to take shape in the EU, Ireland, and elsewhere.Topics in this episodeWhat are the implications for misinformation inherent in the current and emerging GenAI models?Why have there been calls to pause development, and why did this not lead anywhere?How have the various language, image, audio, and video models already been used for problematic content?Is social media ready for the onslaught to come?Can we regulate AI to combat this and how is that beginning?Why should we be critical of offers to self-regulate from the tech companies?What's the EU AI Act? And why is Ireland using the word "doomsayers" in policy documents about AI?Resources & LinksThe EU's AI Act: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/Some of ISD's work on AI & Misinformation: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/disconnected-from-reality-american-voters-grapple-with-ai-and-flawed-osint-strategies/More on the Slovak Deepfake case discussed by Ciarán: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/beyond-the-deepfake-hype-ai-democracy-and-the-slovak-case/GenAI & ISIS: https://gnet-research.org/2024/02/05/ai-caliphate-pro-islamic-state-propaganda-and-generative-ai/?The Irish Government's "Friend or Foe" Report: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/6538e-artificial-intelligence-friend-or-foe/You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!
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2024 E4 Digesting The Data
Dónal and Ciarán discuss the vast ocean of data that Large Language Models (LLMs) depend on for their training, covering some of the issues of access to that data and the biases reflected within it. This episode should help you better understand some aspects of the AI training process.Topics in this episodeWhat data is being used to train models like ChatGPT?What are "supervised" or "unsupervised" machine learning methods?How have the owners of copyright data, like news organisations, reacted to the use of their text?What issues of bias arise in training models based on existing text?What happens when AI models train on AI output?How do we morally and ethically align the actions of AI models, as part of their training?You can get in touch with us - [email protected] - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!
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