The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century

What Hacker News said

Recommends SkeuomorphicBee · 2023-05 · on “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers by Tom Scott”

I'd like to also recommend his other work of speculative fiction: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century [this video] It is a great intersection of copyright maximalism and the dangers of making general purpose AIs without proper care in developing their goal function.

Cites jerf · 2023-01 · on “Microsoft in talks to acquire a 49% stake in ChatGPT owner OpenAI”

I think if you're going to judge the tech, it's important to understand what it is. Basically, in both cases, you are bringing in the context to those questions. You know what those questions "mean" in the collective brain-space, and why they are sensitive. You did not neutrally pick those questions; you know those questions are already loaded. Unsurprisingly, when you bring those pre-loaded questions to an AI whose job it is to continue the text in the way that was the most likely way to see it continued in the training text, you get exactly that. Prompt the bare, unfiltered AI with antisemitic text, get antisemitic continuations. That's unfortunate, but in terms of what was promised and wh

Cites jerf · 2023-06 · on “GPT-4 apparently can't recite the litany against fear from Dune”

Here you see the results of trying to filter a very advanced model with a much simpler one. It can't work, the filter model is too crude. Of course the real goal isn't to prevent copyright infringement but to prevent copyright infringement lawsuits , which is at least a good start. You really need an AI-level model to prevent the infringement... although that can pose it's own risks... [this video]

Cites throw83288 · 2025-02 · on “LLMs can teach themselves to better predict the future”

I think the problem is that from our human scale, mass-killings is the "best" method to eliminate the possibility of another organism causing harm for us. Hypothetically, if there was a more optimal (i.e less costly) method like just introducing some cheap catch-all combined vaccination/antiviral into their feed, we would just do that. We don't have things like that, but that could easily be a consequence of man's limited research capacity, something that an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting

Cites beeslol · 2025-05 · on “Creativity came to pass”

The opening line > This is written of a future. Not the future, but a future – one of many possibilities. reminded me of the opening line from Tom Scott's The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century [this video] > This is a YouTube video from a future. Not the future, just a future. Not sure if intentional or if you're both referencing something else, fun parallel nonetheless.

Cites NooneAtAll3 · 2025-05 · on “What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?”

I don't think it's that bizarre we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs [this video]

Cites perching_aix · 2025-06 · on “Extracting memorized pieces of books from open-weight language models”

You remind me to all the shitty times in literature class where I had to rote memorize countless works from a given author (poet), think 40, then take a test identifying which poem each of the given quotes was from. The little WinForms app I wrote to practice for these tests was one of the first programs I've ever written. I guess in that sense it's also a fond memory. I miss WinForms. Good thing they were public (?) works, wouldn't wanna get sued [0] for possibly being a two legged copyright infringement. Or should I say having been, since naturally I immediately erased all of these works from my mind just days after these tests, even without any legal impetus. Edit: thinking about it a bit