Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI
- Reference: 1691598486
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/09/pope_ai/
- Source link:
Organized as ever, Pope Francis got his [1]annual message for the World Day of Peace in a full 145 days early to warn of the technology's "disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects."
Lest you think he only heard about AI yesterday, the supreme pontiff "recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded," which demonstrates a thorough reading of [2]Register articles on the matter.
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"The urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law," he continued.
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To be fair, he might still be mad from that [6]puffer jacket deepfake .
The statement released via the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development observed that the technology is having a "rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy," and called for cautious development to ensure it contributes to "the promotion of justice and peace in the world."
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And the head of the Catholic Church wouldn't be wrong. Many have expressed concern about how many jobs it could wipe out down the line. Heck, even Sam Altman of OpenAI, which developed the ubiquitous ChatGPT, has a [8]crypto startup designed to pay people for being human when we've all been rendered obsolete.
Even the Pope is replaceable. In June, over 300 churchgoers attended a [9]ChatGPT-powered service in Germany , and while some remarked it had "no heart or soul," others were "pleasantly surprised how well it worked." OK, it was a Protestant congregation, but still.
[10]Perhaps meeting with Pope Francis did help iPhone sales
[11]With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick
[12]Cult leader meets the Pope: Apple CEO chats to Francis
[13]God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit
Plus, who's to say the dicastery didn't use ChatGPT to write their statement? The Register asked and awaits their response with great anticipation.
Also in this episode of Celebs Say The Darnedest Things About AI, Ron Weasley of music for 12-year-olds – AKA Ed Sheeran – told [14]Audacy Live the technology is "weird."
"What I don't understand about AI is like… For the last 60 years, Hollywood movies have been telling you, 'Don't do it.' And now everyone's doing it," he said. "I'm just like, 'Have you not seen the movies where they kill us all?'
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"Also I don't know why you need it. There are just certain things… If you're taking a job away from a human being, that's probably a bad thing. The whole point of society is we do jobs and do things, if everything is done by robots, everyone is gonna be out of work."
Which is about the level of profundity you can expect from the person who wrote [16]"Drunk." ® ***No AI was used in the production of this article***
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[1] https://www.humandevelopment.va/en/news/2023/intelligenze-artificiali-e-pace-e-il-tema-del-messaggio-di-papa.html
[2] https://www.theregister.com/software/ai_ml/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZNQMhlIkuHbgIaGndROtWwAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZNQMhlIkuHbgIaGndROtWwAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZNQMhlIkuHbgIaGndROtWwAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/120vhdc/the_pope_drip/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZNQMhlIkuHbgIaGndROtWwAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/16/worldcoin_fundraising
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P9oSgrT35o
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/27/smartphone_shipments_q1_2023/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/21/blue_tick_removal_from_twitter/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/time_cook_meets_pope_francis/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/christianity_brexit/
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IFUXNfqqcY
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZNQMhlIkuHbgIaGndROtWwAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2fOum_KWQU
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: AI is EVIL….
Oh come on, the Ed Sheeran Fan Club (hon. president, E. Sheeran) may be a bit pathetic, but I wouldn't go that far.
Mind you the bland guy is going to be shocked when he learns what the steam powered loom did to all the weavers..
It won't happen
> Hollywood movies have been telling you, 'Don't do it.' And now everyone's doing it," he said. "I'm just like, 'Have you not seen the movies where they kill us all?'
Have you seen Hollywood's early sci-fi movies?
Now look at their "early" AI movies and compare just how accurate silent versions of Jules Verne was with actual spaceflight. Using that as a baseline, we can say that nothing Hollywood is telling us about AI is remotely close to how the real-world future will be.
Re: It won't happen
Ed Sheeran's 60 years of Hollywood takes us back to the dim, dark days of 1963, not 1864!
Jules Verne passed away in 1905; his "From the Earth to the Moon" came in 1864, "Around the Moon" in 1870. Georges Méliès "Le Voyage dans la Lune" came out in 1902 and probably wasn't trying to be scientifically accurate. Compare that to "Destination Moon" in 1950, which is a famously pretty good depiction of space (the worst offence being the single-stage-to-Lunar-Landing-and-return rocket).
Okay, we do then end up with "Gravity" which makes claims that it really, really does not live up to. But the vast, vast majority of space travel depicted in Hollywood is even more unrealistic and deliberately so: FTL drives, artificial gravity everywhere, acting like space only has two dimensions (and other "Space is really just the Ocean" tropes).
Now, AI in films from 1963 to the present day, as Mr Sheeran referenced?
Well, of course we have "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968, showing what happens when you deliberately tell an AI to lie. And, according to some reports, HAL was a lot more polite than ChatGPT or Bing has been.
"Colossus: The Forbin Project":a chat bot is given access to the world's network and then demands to be connected to his counterpart? No weird "emotions" portrayed, just the machine doing what it wanted to and we were stupid enough to connect it to All The Things (like missiles); the use of a pen-plotter was good. Just too many flashing lights and weird modules in the hardware (but if you tried to tell Hollywood that AI actually needs to be built out of Video Game Hardware, back in 1970, who'd believe you?).
"Silent Running", 1972, showed that the robots had to be reprogrammed to do something outside of their normal duties, which seems reasonable. As humans, we read emotion into them (e.g. looking up into deep space in a soulful fashion) but all the anthropomorphism was actually coming from Bruce Dern's character.
"Dark Star", 1974, discussed the disconnect between the AI and reality - hmm, seems like we've been having that conversation lately.
Then we have AI (in terms of what we are currently being sold as "AI") just in the background, not the focus of the main story or protagonists. Self-driving cars aplenty (e.g. "Minority Report" in 2002 - or the 1966 Batmobile, which had a working "leave parking spot and come to me" bat-function).
Frankly, from this Hollywood has done a far better job of presenting AI than it ever has done presenting Space!
It's not really AI
It just takes random fragments of earlier things people had written and re-mixes them and builds on them without any fundamental understanding of what the original stuff meant or what it was for.
Now excuse me, because I have to wear a purple scarf today and not eat prawn cocktail crisps because it's the first sunday after the first new moon after the vernal equinox.
+1 for the self deprection of humans
a required step for self improvement
Could be worse
This highly entertaining link was recently posted in a Reg comment ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-NnVpvQ78 It's a Banana - Red Dwarf - BBC
... the TV drama comedy predicted a robot that was honest at creation and had to be trained to be dishonest. But it turns out in 2023 that newly born LLM's are inherently pathological liars, and it's currently really hard to "teach" them to be honest.
Mmmm 'kay
"so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root "
Has he actually read the Bible?
Re: Mmmm 'kay
>read the Bible
Isn't that a bit protestant?
With his lot you just have to believe what the man with the big hat says. Which is a problem if you are the man
Evil you say
If only the big C was without sin.
Taking moral advice from the Pope is like taking an ethics course with Hitler.
Re: Evil you say
Big C is without sin, just believe the holy book of the prophets K & R
Disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects, eh? Did any of his predecessors have anything similar to say about the dawn of the internet? Computers? Cars? Pretty much everything from the industrial revolution onwards?
Probably best if he sticks to the mythology.
> Did any of his predecessors have anything similar to say about ...
The Church was not terribly happy about the printing press; except when they were using it, of course (and it doesn't really matter *which* Church you look at - except, perhaps, for the Quakers). Gutenberg himself was deemed Ok (printing Catholic Bibles helped; The Big G. was quite shrewd) but then everyone else got involved, including The Minions Of Satan (aka whichever sect you weren't in).
If the printing press didn't cause the reformation, it certainly helped. You have to watch these disruptive technologies when you're the incumbent monopoly
"Would you like to see the Pope, on the end of a rope, do you think he's a fool..." - Black Sabbath - After Forever
Yes and yes.
(I know the context it was meant in, but I've been saying that since I first heard it as a teen lol)
AI is EVIL….
…says head of one of the most abhorrent organisations that has ever existed.