Look, I didn’t really want to do this. But the sheer lunacy of some of the noisiest critics deserves to be memorialized, much like the famous Darwin Awards.
Inspired by Spencer Johnson’s 1998 business classic, Who Moved My Cheese? (wiki link), these awards recognize those who are most change-resistant, their outrageous quotes and claims, and… that’s about it!
| Date | Winner | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Nov/2024 | 1. Billy Ray interviewed by NYT
2. Ben Affleck on CNBC |
Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, 2012; Captain Phillips, 2013) about using A.I.-generated replicas of performers: “Nope, nope, nope, nope. It’s completely insincere, dishonest filmmaking. It’s a lie.”
Ben Affleck: ‘AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how large video models, large language models, basically work. A library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But they’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created… It’s not going to replace human beings making films.’ |
| Oct/2024 | 1. Statement on AI training (13,500 signatories including Kevin Bacon & Kate McKinnon) Statement, Related article by The Verge)2. Bruce Schneier |
Statement on AI training: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
Bruce Schneier: ‘AIs at this point don’t have the common sense baseline humans have…. AIs can become our minions. They’re okay. They’re not that smart. But they can make humans more efficient by outsourcing some of the donkey work… Even if AI could do a mediocre job at reviewing all of the source code, that would be phenomenal, and there would be a lot of work in all of these areas.’ [Alan: Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. Catch up, please!] |
| Sep/2024 | 1. Sky News sought out this expert to comment on AI in education: Chris McGovern ‘a retired head teacher and a former advisor to the policy unit at 10 Downing Street.’ | Chris McGovern: ‘I understand why [schools] may push AI. For one thing, it’s cheaper… The problem with AI and the computer screen is that it is a machine and it’s inert, so you’re straight away dehumanising the process of learning, taking away those interpersonal skills and the interaction between pupils and teacher. It’s a soulless, bleak future if it’s going to be along the AI path only.’
[Alan: Please retire more.]
Cate Blanchett: ‘I think we should be very cautious with [AI], because innovation without imagination is a very, very dangerous thing… our time here is finite, and that is something that AI will never understand. It can imitate it, but it doesn’t understand that deep existential dread, and it doesn’t understand the preciousness of each moment in its cellular makeup, not that it necessarily has cellular makeup yet. That is something that can’t be replicated.’ |
| Aug/2024 | Sheng Lu, Irina Bigoulaeva, Rachneet Sachdeva, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, and Iryna Gurevych. From the University of Bath and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.
Article, paper (PDF), bonus Slashdot discussion with archive |
‘AI Lacks Independent Learning’. Dr Tayyar Madabushi: “The fear has been that as models get bigger and bigger, they will be able to solve new problems that we cannot currently predict, which poses the threat that these larger models might acquire hazardous abilities including reasoning and planning… but our study shows that the fear that a model will go away and do something completely unexpected, innovative and potentially dangerous is not valid.”
The study was published in Aug/2024, but conducted on four very dated model families including GPT-2 from 2019 [hahaha], from the paper: ‘GPT [GPT-2 1.6B, GPT-J 6.7B, GPT-3 175B], T5 [770M], Falcon 1 [40B], and LLaMA 1 [30B].’ [Alan: This award was made for this kind of quote! Come back in a year or two and we’ll see…] |
| Jul/2024 | 1. Noah Smith, economics writer
2. Ben Borgers, software dev |
‘Yes, we still have to work. The automated luxury paradise is still just science fiction…neither the dream of a world free of workers nor the dream of a world free of work is particularly useful right now. Human labor is still incredibly valuable, and figuring out how to make human workers more capable is still how most value is created.’
[Alan: Ugh. Imagine writing this in mid-2024. And then clicking ‘publish’ with all the confidence of someone living under a rock.]
Ben Borgers: ‘AI is an impediment to learning web development… portions that looked LLM-written — that is to say, overly-commented, dissonant, and, at times, horrifying… Use of LLMs hinders learning of web development.’ [Alan: People used to actually think like this, talk like this, and then publish articles like this! Sidenote: He’s right though. LLMs are an impediment to learning. Because traditional learning is over.] |
| Jun/2024 | Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick
(Take-Two includes Rockstar and Zynga. They make Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, Words with Friends, Farmville…) |
‘I also don’t think for a minute that generative AI is going to reduce employment. That’s crazy, it’s actually crazy… I’m in a Whatsapp chat with a bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs, and the conventional wisdom out there is like, ‘AI is gonna make us all unemployed.’ It is just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The history of productivity tools is that it increases employment.’ [Alan: Absolutely tremendous quote! Amazing that superintelligence has been relegated to being a ‘productivity tool’.] |
| May/2024 | The Verge | (The Verge on character.ai, an older chat platform using the 2021 C1.1 or 2023 C1.2 models, with inline comments by Alan): ‘But it’s not clear that the [character.ai Psychologist] bot has properly been trained in CBT [it hasn’t been trained in anything, that’s not how LLMs work]… “I definitely prefer talking with people in real life, though,” he added. [this is a very strange way to close an article in 2024. Let’s revisit this very soon!]’ |
| Apr/2024 | 1. 200+ musicians including Pearl Jam, Bon Jovi, CAKE, Norah Jones…
2. Dove
|
‘We call on all AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to pledge that they will not develop or deploy AI music-generation technology, content or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists…This assault on human creativity must be stopped.’ (release, letter)
‘At Dove, we seek a future in which women – not algorithms – get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like… Pledging to never use AI in our communications is just one step… AI creates unrealistic images that breed an environment that makes it hard for girls and teens to be able to discern between what is real and what isn’t.’ ‘Unlike other sectors of society, we in sport are not confronted with the existential question of whether AI will replace human beings. In sport, the performances will always have to be delivered by the athletes. The 100 metres will always have to be run by an athlete – a human being.’ |
| Mar/2024 | Yann LeCun | ‘LLMs… don’t really understand the physical world. They don’t really have persistent memory. They can’t really reason and they certainly can’t plan… If you’re really interested in human level AI, abandon the idea of generative AI.’ (LeCun interviewed on Fridman) [Alan: denial.gif] |
| Feb/2024 | Gergely Orosz | “As a [software engineer], it is, frankly, terrifying to stare down the possibility of “superhuman devs” that are AI tools running on GPUs that do your job better. I get that this is what investors and founders want. I’m not that eager to rush to this future.” (Twitter) [Alan: Gergely briefly consulted to OpenAI, and was the first to reveal GPT-4’s architecture. I was beyond shocked to hear this take from an informed expert. Welcome to the cheese room!] |
| Jan/2024 | George Carlin’s daughter | “My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself… Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to?” (Twitter) |
| Dec/2023 | The EU: all 27 countries | The EU AI Act is a true abomination. Luckily for humanity, the wheels of bureaucracy turn so slowly that even though the EU agreed on rules to limit AI in December 2023, they won’t cover LLMs and GenAI until that part comes into effect around April 2025(!). By which time, we’ll have nearly hit AGI already…
Here’s that again in a timeline with references: Apr/2021: EU AI Act draft does not mention anything about post-2020 AI like GPT or LLMs in general (OECD). Sep/2022: I call the EU AI Act ‘a true abomination’ (The Memo). Jun/2023: EU specifically adds ‘foundation models’ to the EU AI Act (EU PDF). Dec/2023: EU agrees on AI Act (EU). Apr/2024: EU might formalise AI Act (EY pdf). Apr/2025: EU AI Act comes into effect for GPAI including training of new foundation models (Akin). |
| Nov/2023 | Tina Arena | ‘I would say to anyone interested in AI to be very afraid of the rabbit hole you decide to get yourself into. I am not interested because artificial intelligence is not capable of producing human emotion for me. Therefore it doesn’t apply to me. If there are other people who choose to be seduced by it that is their prerogative. ‘I see it as a categorical hand grenade in how to destroy something that is human. ‘No machine for me is ever able to replace because that machine is only able to emulate. There is nothing innovative about it. ‘I don’t find Silicon Valley intriguing. What I find audacious is that they can come in and rape and pillage whoever they want. Artificial intelligence is just rape and pillage. It’s just another form. Is it interesting? No it is not. Is it going to create an interesting world moving forward? ‘It is taking food off people’s plates.’ |
| Oct/2023 | BBC | While AP partnered with OpenAI to share its stories to train new models, BBC, CNN, NYT, and Reuters have blocked OpenAI and Common Crawl from accessing their data. BBC in particular is using AI anyway to help it write articles, but is not giving back… |
| Sep/2023 | Amazon | “the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing… in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations.” |
| Aug/2023 | Prof Michio Kaku | “It takes snippets of what’s on the web created by a human, splices them together and passes it off as if it created these things… And people are saying, ‘Oh my God, it’s a human, it’s humanlike.’” [Alan: An author once said ‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt’…] |
| Jul/2023 | James Cameron | “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay… Let’s wait 20 years [2043], and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously.” [Alan: These guys are really going on record with this absurd stuff!] |
| Jun/2023 [Four winners] | 1. Nature
2. The Grammys 3. Nikon Peru |
“Many national regulatory and legal systems are still formulating their responses to the rise of generative AI,” Nature writes. “Until they catch up, as a publisher of research and creative works, Nature’s stance will remain a simple ‘no’ to the inclusion of visual content created using generative AI.”
The Grammy awards are banning AI-generated music, ‘A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any categories.’ Nikon: “Millions of people around the world are generating surreal images just by entering a few keywords on a website, which is directly affecting photographers” “AI can do a lot. But AI can’t finish this building on the Keyserlei in Antwerp. AI can’t fix a leak or install a heating system neither. Crafts(wo)men are here to stay, and they deserve to be recognized. Their skills are simply irreplaceable.” |
| May/2023 | Seth Rogen & the writers strike | “I think the prospect of artificial intelligence writing things is horrifying… and the fact that they seem to be digging in on [it] is more horrifying… You’d have to shove a lot of weed in that thing [for it to write good TV].” [Alan: Welcome to the cheese room, Seth!] |
| Apr/2023 | Italy | Italy has become the first Western country to block advanced chatbot ChatGPT. |
| Mar/2023 | Neal Stephenson | Mega-author Neal Stephenson says AI-generated ChatGPT Is ‘simply not interesting’. …a person would be reading only the output of an algorithm, “and if that’s interesting to you, then fine.” “Personally, I know a lot of writers who are putting a lot of effort into creating their own original works, and I’d rather support them and hear what they have to say than just look at the output of an algorithm.”[Alan’s note: I love that these guys are going on permanent written record with these preposterous soundbites! Give it a year or two so we can look back!] |
| Feb/2023 | Clarkesworld | Sci-fi publisher bans all written submissions after ‘deluge’ of AI-written work. |
| Jan/2023 | NYC Schools | NYC public schools bans ChatGPT because ‘it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success’.
(I’m sure we addressed this back in my 2017 article: The five-year-olds who started kindergarten this year [in 2017] will be at university in 2030 and will spend most of their working lives in the second half of the 21st century. It’s always been the case that our schools hold the future within their classrooms, but today’s education systems need to set the foundations for these young children to thrive in life and work in 2050 and perhaps through to 2090. While many schools are happy to wax lyrical about their modern curriculum and environment, it’s clear that the number of… schools actually preparing their students to live in the year 2090 is close to zero.) |
| Dec/2022 | Stack Overflow | Stack Overflow Ban on posts by GPT (specifically, GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT) |
| Nov/2022 | DeviantArt | DeviantArt about turn ban on art for use in datasets… |
| Oct/2022 | Matthew Butterick | A typographer starts a class-action lawsuit against GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI for using data during training (+ bonus Metallica/Napster throwback) |
| Sep/2022 | The EU | Rather than train models, the EU is passing laws to hamstring AI, especially open source (+ bonus Slashdot commentary) |
| Aug/2022 | YouTube commenters | Special mention to all the crazies emptying their minds into the void. You know who you are! |
| Jul/2022 | Noam Chomsky | Historian says language models have done nothing: “First we should ask the question whether LLM have achieved ANYTHING, ANYTHING in this domain. Answer, NO, they have achieved ZERO!” (+ bonus video with avatar impression) |
| Jun/2022 | Clem Delangue (CEO, HF) | CEO of largest Transformer library said we should censor data from models, and bans GPT-4chan: “some dark corners of the web like 4Chan that are already sometimes unfortunately part of the pre-training of these large language models (maybe to try to remove them/mitigate them?).” |
| Dec/2020 | Ben Goertzel |
“But what [GPT] did, it looked at all the multiplication problems online and memorized the answers. And then it came up with some weird extrapolations and let it do a few problems that weren’t in its training database. [Alan: this is wildly incorrect, and spelt out in detail in the GPT-3 paper (PDF) on p23.]
It doesn’t understand what multiplication is, or it would never get 15 or 20% multiplication problems right. And you can see that in many other cases. Ask it like, who were the best presidents of the U.S. it’ll answer a lot of good things then it’ll throw a few kings of England in there just for fun. But I mean, because it doesn’t know what ‘of the U.S’ means.
So, the thing is, in the end, [GPT] has no more to do with AGI than my toaster oven does. It’s not representing the knowledge in a way that will allow it to make consistently meaningful responses. And that’s not to say that everything in there is totally useless for AGI. It’s just you’re not going to make GPT-4, 5, 6, 7 and get AGI.”
|
Nominations
Got a nomination? Fill out this form (nominees with initials ‘GM’ is just cheating…).
Bonus
June 2023. I was in Antwerp, Belgium for a keynote when this ridiculous billboard went up and made the rounds in the media…
Header image at the top of this page generated by Alan D. Thompson via DALL-E 2 with outpainting on 6/Dec/2022. Prompt: ‘single quarter of swiss cheese, colorful frame from pixar animation, 8k’
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Dr Alan D. Thompson is an AI expert and consultant, advising Fortune 500s and governments on post-2020 large language models. His work on artificial intelligence has been featured at NYU, with Microsoft AI and Google AI teams, at the University of Oxford’s 2021 debate on AI Ethics, and in the Leta AI (GPT-3) experiments viewed more than 4.5 million times. A contributor to the fields of human intelligence and peak performance, he has held positions as chairman for Mensa International, consultant to GE and Warner Bros, and memberships with the IEEE and IET. Technical highlights.This page last updated: 15/Nov/2024. https://lifearchitect.ai/cheese/↑
