The pieces in this temporary show mix mischief with humour.
San Francisco:
So rapid is progress in artificial intelligence that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the technological revolution, has envisioned a monument to humanity’s demise.
“Sorry to kill most of humanity man with the smiling hat and moustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum,” a new exhibit on the controversial technology.
The pieces in this temporary show mix mayhem with humor, and in this first performance the AI makes pithy observations for onlookers who cross its line of sight.
The show’s curator Audrey Kim said, “The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity.”
“But then the AI realizes it was bad and builds a kind of monument to a human, hence the tagline of our show ‘Sorry to kill humanity’,” she said.
Artificial general intelligence is a concept that is even more nebulous than simple AI that is spreading into everyday life, as seen in the rapid emergence of apps like ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbots, and all the hype surrounding them .
AGI is “artificial intelligence capable of doing anything a human would be able to do,” integrating human cognitive abilities into machines.
Startups are hot on the trail of the AGI holy grail, all around San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley.
Sam Altman, founder of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has said that AGI done right can “elevate humanity” and change the “range of possibilities”.
Paperclip AI
But Kim wants to make a reflection on the dangers of going too far, too soon.
“There has been a lot of conversation on Twitter about the security of AI in very niche technical circles and I think that is very important,” she said.
But those interactions are not as easily accessible to the general public as concepts you can see or feel, he added.
Kim is particularly fond of a sculpture called “Paperclip Embrace”: two busts of humans holding each other, made entirely of paperclips.
The work refers to a metaphor by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who in the 2000s imagined what would happen if artificial intelligence was programmed to create paper clips.
“It can grow more and more powerful, and continually adapt itself to achieve its sole goal, to flood the world with paper clips to destroy all of humanity,” Kim said.
Weighing the pros and cons of AI is a topic that became close to Kim’s heart in her previous job working for Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company.
There she worked on an “incredible” technology that could “reduce the number of accidents due to human error” but also presented risks, she said.
The exhibit occupies a small space in a street corner building in the hip Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.
The bottom floor of the exhibit is dedicated to AI as a sinister dystopia, where a machine operated by GPT-3, the language model behind ChatGPT, composes malevolent calligrams against humanity in cursive writing.
One exhibit is an AI-generated — and completely fake — dialogue between two of Europe’s most respected intellectuals, philosopher Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Werner Herzog.
This “infinite conversation” is a meditation on deep fakes: pictures, sounds or videos intended to manipulate opinion by impersonating real people and which have become the latest weapon of online misinformation.
“We only started this project five months ago, and yet many of the technologies presented here already seem almost primitive,” Kim said in amazement.
She hopes to permanently replace the exhibit with more space and more events.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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