Be Worried

Summary

Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.AI is influencing human behavior on a massive scale and this is scary ¶Lately, I’ve heard many people express real fears about AGI. I believe there is reason to be afraid about this, but I believe it’s distracting us from a scarier notion: AI doesn’t need intelligence or awareness to control society.I also believe this has been somewhat ignored because the idea of a super-intelligent entity assuming master control of the human race feels scarier. I am not dismissing the possibility of the singularity, but it’s more hypothetical than something sinister occurring at this very moment.Basically, everyone is arguing over definitions of what it means to be intelligent when intelligence is not necessary to wield power.AI, conscious or not, has crossed the chasm and is now actively influencing human behavior on a large scale.The most powerful LLM has been let out of its cage ¶As of March 23, 2023, OpenAI has provided its most powerful LLM, ChatGPT, unfettered access to the Internet through plugins.[2] These plugins are capable of feeding data into ChatGPT, and likewise capable of allowing ChatGPT to send into the real world via APIs. This development was somewhat of a surprise; the first versions of ChatGPT were deliberately prevented from accessing the Internet because of potential misuse and harm.Prompts will be self-generating (i.e., via a weaker, fine-tuned model), with a very simple repeated instruction paired with a dynamic input, such as:Write a viral prompt for ChatGPT to generate a witty tweet regarding this recent news event. Headline: \<insert headline\> Article: \<article content from most-shared article from the NYTimes over the last 4 hours\> Prompt: This prompt would then be piped to a...