Bots and now AI

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Frank Sanns
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Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

The number of BOTs on the site has been kept minimally low. Making registration a little difficult has thwarted the BOTs for the most part.

Now we have had a small number of posts from people using AI to write their posts. This is somewhat pathetic that somebody needs to have a machine that learns from the flawed internet to write them a flawed post.

What I have learned about AI writing is that it sucks. An expert in the field can spot is quickly. AI may use correct information and even jargon but the phraseology or the progression or sub conclusions are wrong. The longer the writing is, the more obvious it becomes. A single sentence may be impossible to tell but put two or three or a paragraph together and it becomes obvious.

I think this is an interesting area but the astute human mind can detect subtleties that will be very difficult to fool.

Another example is mimicking human movements especially facial ones with physical robots. Not even close. AI does do a good job of taking existing digital faces and morphing to a new digital one to create a natural looking character but that is more like an averaging technique rather than anything new. When it goes too far outside of the box of cookie cutter inputs, things diverge rapidly and it is quickly discovered.

Writing style is one of those indicators that is a quick give away. Maybe the future will make it better but for now, if you are posting AI written texts, save your time, it ain't believable at the current time.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Richard Hull
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Richard Hull »

Frank,

My post on my work with the new power supply effort is now pinked because of someone saying it was AI. It was, indeed, a senseless posting. I deleted it, but the pinked part remained. If there anyway to make it a clean post without the pinking?

AI is crap and the damage it will do in future has yet to be seen, but is already being imagined by the adroit, as you note.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Richard Hull
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Richard Hull »

The pink just went away. I assume you waved your magic wand. Thanks

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Frank Sanns
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

I am the invisible man. Or maybe the man behind the curtain. Pay no attention. ;-)
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Dennis P Brown »

That these programmer's and especially the company owners decided to use the term AI is so false that it is an out right lie. There is ZERO artificial intelligence used by these software programs. These programs just have fast search capabilities, clever grammar/logic software and they call it AI (completely invalidating the real meaning of those initials or what 'was' trying to be created in the past.) They use the same programmer logic that has been around for decades. Just search algorithms have gotten better as has grammar programs.

Yes, one can redefine a word or technical meaning to suit ones need in order to profit off most people's normal lack of knowledge in a given technical field. But that is still dishonesty and not just simple misleading of people but really just outright fraud.

These AI programs are so 'dumb' they will readily use any incorrect information and even 'invent' (via bad searches and attempts to use generating algorithms) fake references to back up their semi-random clustering of related search information in order to pass it off as useful or valid. That alone is enough to prove those AI systems are total garbage. All in all, far too much like the infamous and crazy "Q-Anon" followers.
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

Agreed. True AI is not what is in the news. Those are just algorithms or searches as you have said.

AI is learning where there was no knowledge plugged in. Just rules. It has been going on for decades. As the models get more complex though, interesting things come out of it. Alpha Zero for chess was an interesting gaming result. Only the rules. Play both sides and develop a strategy. Interesting.

The site used to be deluged by those lookup search engines.

You ask a question like a fusible gas and there are not many options so the search function returns a handful of answers. That is why we have a question for registration that no answer exists by a search.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Peter Schmelcher »

Artifical Inteligence this year has dramatically evolved. AI today is not your parents AI last year. It was leaked into the wild to plebs like us, and it turns out open-source plebs have a faster evolution rate that the establishment which has upset the status quo. A leaked internal google document is now attributed to a Geoffrey a 70-year-old Google “Senior Fellow”.
https://open.substack.com/pub/semianaly ... medium=web

My understanding of a “Senior Fellow” (of the short handfull) is you have a boss who has effectively has little input on what you actually do to get paid, fantastic work if you can get it. He resigned (was not pushed in any way to googles credit) to eliminate any ethically perceived conflict of interest, my asperging to kind of guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sitHS6U ... hRaczynski

The Times They Are a-Changin'
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Frank Sanns
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

Well, that entire post and links read like AI.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
Luca Aldridge
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Luca Aldridge »

“AI” is used very much as a sensationalist term. This is especially prevalent nowadays with advances of large language models. The term “AI”, is generally used in two ways:
As a means to an end to explain a complex code/algorithm in passing.
Or, to create some sensationalist title or article to gain those ever-so precious views and shares and likes.

I think that the subjective definition of AI is being constantly redefined, especially in the last six months. Frank raises a good point. Language models are just large rule bases. An auto-complete on steroids, if you will. But these models are getting larger and larger, and come closer to resembling the brain, which is in and of itself just a colossal network of synapses. Who’s to say that the brain is a much more efficient biological version of this?

Dennis, you’re right. GPT-3 and 4 do like to make things up, which is a major issue with it, and will definitely be a focus for OpenAI in the GPT-5 development. Or perhaps it will never be fixed, and a job for “fact-checking AI-written papers” becomes commonplace.

All of these things are extremely exciting in my opinion, and I maintain a tentative interest in it without blindly following or believing everything I see. Richard, I’d hesitate to call it “crap” as it is alarmingly good at certain things, but as other said it still has a way to go in other respects.
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Richard Hull
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Richard Hull »

Every "new thing" that comes down the pike in cyber-space is and will be used to great detriment by the unscrupulous. The tip of the iceberg can already be seen. The collision is just unavoidable and inevitable. It is in the very fabric of the human brain to use and then abuse in a masterful way.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Peter Schmelcher
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Peter Schmelcher »

Oracle Cloud Free is a service which is ripe for Bot abuse, basically you get a free virtual computer in the cloud to configure and use.

How does Oracle eliminate or at least keep a lid on the Bot abuse? You have to sign up for the free service with a valid credit card.
-Peter
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by JoeBallantyne »

Current machine learning algorithms (AI) are most definitely not rules, searches, or traditional programming code. The models are complex, vary widely, and are generally trained on extremely large datasets. (Especially in the case of the various variants of ChatGPT.) In a lot of ways these new models end up being inscrutable black boxes. Just like we don't really understand how the brain works, we also don't really understand all the details of how modern large AI models work. (Which should give EVERYONE pause - at least with traditional programming code, you can look at it, analyze it, and understand what it is supposed to do, as well as step through it and figure out what it actually does.) The people building a modern machine learning model may understand its architecture, but they certainly don't know exactly what all the weights mean, or even necessarily how information is encoded into them.

I can tell you this for sure though: how a modern AI model works is nothing like traditional linear programming code. I spent my career writing that, and this is NOT that.

I think as a community we do our best when we actually discuss stuff we know. (Like fusion, high voltage, vacuum, etc.) Not when we go off into the weeds and start talking about stuff we don't really know anything about.

The ignorance displayed so far on this thread is quite stunning.

My daughter recently graduated from Duke with a PhD in Computer Science focused on machine learning, and I talked about it with her enough over the years to know that I know pretty much NOTHING about the subject, but it appears I know a lot more than most of the folks who have chimed in about it on this thread.

So maybe in our ignorance, we should all just collectively decide to shut up about it.

That would be the intelligent thing to do.

Joe.
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Paul_Schatzkin
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Frank Sanns wrote: Wed May 24, 2023 1:40 pm I am the invisible man. Or maybe the man behind the curtain. Pay no attention. ;-)
Actually, there is no 'Frank'.

He has been an AI/bot all along.

🤣
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Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Matt_Gibson »

I’m excited to see what GOOD can be done with advanced AI, but worry we’ll see it placed into an attack helicopter or fleet of stealth bombers and that will be that.

-Matt
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Dennis P Brown »

As someone that is not thrilled with many theoretical physicist approaches to gravitational theory, I find their speculation rather unenlightened and have issues and frankly, most of the modern ideas are pure speculation and have no relationship to real science (it is so detached from the scientific method as to be approaching science fiction.) Through I do explain why I feel that way and have discussed it here.

As for new algorithms, I recall "Fuzzy logic" which was all the rage some time ago and would solve some very difficult problems, yet it still used standard coding. And interestingly, it wasn't deterministic relative to its output but wasn't AI. Certainly, fuzzy logic did change the field in some ways.

Since no one really understands either how the brain manages to process information nor creates thinking/learning that means anyone claiming AI computing really does mimic the brain has no bases to make such a claim.

Finally, some expects in the field of 'AI' (who certainly do understand the methods) also say the systems are not AI (as in intelligence like a human.) But certainly, one can redefine the term and then it would be valid.

While I have programed in many languages (Pascal, Fortran, C, C++, basic) - including coding using hex and machine level binary - I do not claim to know what 'algorithms' are used to create these 'AI' codes that create such bad results. But I do know false hype when I see/read/hear it and that is certainly the case with AI right now.
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Nicolas Krause »

I've been using Chat-GPT quite regularly and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I think of it mostly as a really useful extension of search engines. I hadn't used Linux in awhile at work, and I'd never been a particularly advanced Linux user, but asking Chat-GPT questions about how to schedule tasks on the system was really useful. I had a little script I was putting together, and looking up tutorials for the information that I needed right then with google would have been quite a bit slower. Chat-GPT is very very good at providing the context and information you need right there. I would never use it to put together a post like this, but for sifting through information, and generating ideas it's great. My dad had a geological problem he was working on, he needed scenarios where gas bubbles might sink in a fluid, and it very quickly generated 4 or 5 scenarios where that might happen. In that sense I think it's a great tool, if you try and ask it for references and citations to specific papers, then it's not so great.
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

The original reason for the post was to alert members that AI is lurking and has in fact posted here. Fact.

Perhaps I am paranoid of some of the posts but it becomes clear in a string of posts. Many on here speak other languages and some things that are not exactly the vernacular, are noticed and accepted. With AI, some of these same factors are part of the giveaway. Improper quotes, out of context sentences, inconsistencies, and other attributes pile up to quickly.

With that said, there are varying sophistications of AI. As previously stated in this thread, some simple search engines are being touted as AI but they are not. Companies like buzz words for marketing hence the misappropriate use.

I too have done quite a bit of programing over the years and I do recognize the difference between AI and more conventional code no matter what the level or language.

If I had to explain AI to a lay person, I would say that it is a Monte Carlo simulation with feedback loops that generate new loops until the objective is met. There are bumpers that that the loops operate within. The system has constraints. To my knowledge no AI can currently have free will to carry on experiments autonomously across all things out there like a human can.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Dennis P Brown »

Since I heard on NPR today that some CEO's of these AI companies do believe (lol) that AI will wipe us all out in ten to fifteen years! So, these concerns here are, I'd say, moot. Further, I'd guess, the terminators (from the AI future via time travel?) with their antigravity vehicles (no doubt, these AI's learned how to do that after reading our fusor thread on that specific subject) are gonna get all of us! So be careful what you say on these threads so as to not upset these so intelligent AI's ;)
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

It should be obvious by now that while every new technology alters some aspect of human existence, the hype over AI - at least, in its current generation - is a tech-pundit shark jump. As usual Scott Galloway gets closer to what's really going on:
Solutionists pen think pieces on “Why AI Will Save the World,” while catastrophists warn us of “the risks of extinction.” These are two covers of the same song: techno-narcissism. It’s exhausting. But AI is a huge breakthrough, and the stakes are genuinely high.
https://www.profgalloway.com/techno-narcissism/

--P
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by thecoalman »

Frank Sanns wrote: Thu Jun 08, 2023 10:12 pm

If I had to explain AI to a lay person, I would say that it is a Monte Carlo simulation with feedback loops that generate new loops until the objective is met. There are bumpers that that the loops operate within. The system has constraints. To my knowledge no AI can currently have free will to carry on experiments autonomously across all things out there like a human can.
My explanation is that it can answer the question "What is the color of Dorothy's shoes?". This is usually followed by the reply my 8 year old kid can answer that. They just don't get it.
Last edited by thecoalman on Mon Dec 18, 2023 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Paul_Schatzkin
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

thecoalman wrote: Mon Dec 18, 2023 6:04 am My explanation is that it can answer the question "What is the color of Dorothy's shoes?". This is usually followed by my 8 year old kid can answer that. They just don't get it.
Scott!

Where have you been, Dude?

We still need to update the phpBB software here (and at ttbrown.com/forum) and neither Frank nor I feels up to the task.

Is that still something we can impose upon you to do for us? Please?

Thanks,

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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by thecoalman »

That's why I stopped by, I'll do it within the next few days. I'll look into installing an anti spam tool that is available as an extension.

I took a road trip last Fall, 10,560 miles in 5 weeks and only about 3K miles on the interstate. My head has been lost in the clouds thinking about doing it again. :) Here is the highlights.
Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Devils Tower, Yellowstone, Glacier Park, Rt. 20 through the Arcadia National Forest, The Space Needle, Olympic Park, most Northwestern Point in the US, Pacific Coast Highway (101) from Seattle to Northern CA, Avenue of the Giants, Rt1 in CA from it's northern start to San Francisco, Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, Sequoia Park and the General Sherman Tree, King's Canyon, Sherman Pass (9200'), Inyo National Forest, Hoover Dam, Red Rock Canyon NV, Mt. Charleston, Valley of Fire, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Escalante National Park, Capital Reef National Park, bisected Canyonlands/Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Natural Bridges National Monument, Monument Valley, Four Corners, Mesa Verde National Park, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park(South Rim), Independence Pass 12,095′ , Pikes Peak, The Big Well (formerly the World's largest Hand Dug Well).
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Frank Sanns »

Wow! What a whirlwind tour. I have spent much of my adult life visiting most of them. Could not imagine all in 5 weeks. That is a VERY full itinerary. Wonderful sites though for sure.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by thecoalman »

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't pulling a Chevy Chase and glancing at the sites. I probably walked a good 5 to 10 miles on a lot of days. For a 50 year old smoker that doesn't get a lot of exercise I was pleased with myself. As a side note we are all doomed, I saw a lot of teenagers struggling.
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: Bots and now AI

Post by Dennis P Brown »

Why is there a "thecoalman" posting - do they get to suspend this site's policies?
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