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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Ban on posts by GPT (specifically, GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT) |
| Nov/2022 | 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?).” |
Nominations
Got a nomination? Fill out this form (nominees with initials ‘GM’ is just cheating…).
Image 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 2.5 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. He is open to consulting and advisory on major AI projects with intergovernmental organizations and enterprise.This page last updated: 16/May/2023. https://lifearchitect.ai/cheese/↑
