Sunday, March 12, 2023

At San Francisco expo, AI 'sorry' for destroying humanity

AFP
March 12, 2023

A new exhibition titled the Misalignment Museum opened in San Francisco on March 9, 2023, featuring funny and disturbing AI art works

San Francisco (AFP) - Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.

"Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache," says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the "Misalignment Museum," a new exhibit on the controversial technology.

The pieces in this temporary show mix the disturbing with the comic, and this first display has AI disburse pithy observations to the visitors that cross into its line of vision.

"The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity," said Audrey Kim, the show's curator.

"But then the AI realizes that was bad and creates a type of memorial to the human, so our show's tagline is 'sorry for killing most of humanity,'" she said.

Artificial General Intelligence is a concept that is even more nebulous than the simple AI that is cascading into everyday life, as seen in the fast emergence of apps such as ChatGPT or Bing's chatbot and all the hype surrounding them.

AGI is "artificial intelligence that is able to do anything that a human would be able to do," integrating human cognitive capacities into machines.

All around San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, startups are hot on the trail of the AGI holy grail.

Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has said AGI, done right, can "elevate humanity" and change the "limits of possibilities."
Paperclip AI

But Kim wants to trigger a reflection on the dangers of going too far, too quickly.

"There have been lots of conversations about the safety of AI in pretty niche intellectual tech circles on Twitter and I think that's very important," she said.

But those conversations are not as easily accessible to the general public as concepts that you can see or feel, she 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 could become more and more powerful, and constantly optimize itself to achieve its one and only goal, to the point of destroying all of humanity in order to flood the world with paper clips," Kim said.

Weighing the pros and cons of AI is a subject that became close to Kim's heart in an earlier job working for Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company.

There she worked on an "incredible" technology, which "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 San Francisco's hip Mission neighborhood.

The lower floor of the exhibition is dedicated to AI as a nightmarish dystopia where a machine powered by GPT-3, the language model behind ChatGPT, composes spiteful calligrams against humanity, in cursive writing.

One exhibit is an AI-generated -- and totally fake -- dialogue between the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, two of Europe's most respected intellectuals.

This "Infinite Conversation" is a meditation on deep fakes: images, sound or video that aim to manipulate opinion by impersonating real people and that have become the latest disinformation weapon online.


"We only started this project five months ago, and yet many of the technologies presented here already seem almost primitive," Kim said, astonished.

She hopes to turn the exhibit into a permanent one with more space and more events.



"Museum of the future AI apocalypse" opens in San Francisco
BOING BOING
SUN MAR 12, 2023

The Misalignment Museum opened yesterday in San Francisco. The museum describes itself on its website this way:

The Misalignment Museum is an art installation with the purpose of increasing knowledge about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its power for destruction and good. Our hope is to inspire and build support to formulate and enact risk mitigation measures we can take to ensure a positive future in the advent of AGI.

The development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has dramatically accelerated scientific and technological advancement, and is rapidly bringing humanity to an unfamiliar future. As a society, we are becoming more beholden to interfacing with machines to operate and to make decisions that affect people's lives (e.g. computer aided decision-making in healthcare, criminal justice, lending). If this technology is not developed in alignment with human values and judgement, the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AI that can understand or learn any intellectual task that a human-being can) could destabilize civilization and even lead to a destruction of humanity. It also has enormous potential to radically improve life and evolve civilization.

We are in a position to have a huge impact on the future of humanity through developing the technology and the appropriate safeguards against misaligned goals in artificial intelligence to harness its amazing possibilities. We hope to elevate public discourse and understanding of this powerful technology to inspire thoughtful collaboration, appropriate regulatory environment, and progress towards a hopeful, vibrant future.

On its opening day, WIRED published a great article about the museum, which author Khari Johnson describes as the "museum of the future AI apocalypse" and "a memorial to an imagined future in which artificial general intelligence kills most of humanity." Johnson explains the vision of the museum:

The Misalignment Museum imagines a future in which AI starts to take the route mapped out in countless science fiction films—becoming self-aware and setting about killing off humanity. Fortunately, in Kim's vision the algorithms self-correct and stop short of killing all people. Her museum, packed with artistic allegories about AI and art made with AI assistance, is presented as a memorial of humankind's future near-miss with extinction.

"It's weird, because it's such a terrifying topic, but it makes me happy people are interested," [exhibit curator Aubrey] Kim says from a coffee shop across the street. As we talk, we watch passersby peer into the gallery space—fittingly located eight blocks from the offices of OpenAI—that has a prominent "Sorry for killing most of humanity" sign along one wall.

Johnson further describes the exhibit:

The project started five months ago, shortly before ChatGPT sparked expectation in the tech industry and beyond that we are on the cusp of a wave of AI disruption and somehow closer to the nebulous concept of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. There's no consensus about the definition of AGI, but the museum calls it the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can.

Kim says the museum is meant to raise conversations about the destabilizing implications of supposedly intelligent technology. The collection is split across two floors, with more optimistic visions of our AI-infused upstairs, and dystopian ones on the lower level

AI is clearly one of today's hottest topics of debate, intrigue, praise, and fear. This exhibit sounds terrific, and I'd love to get to San Francisco to see it. If you're in the area and want to check it out, the temporary exhibit is funded until May, 2023, and is located at 201 Guerrero St, San Francisco, CA 94103-2312. You can find out more at their website and on their socials.

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