I was talking to something that is literally a nonhuman representative of Chinese civilization, about how world takeover by beings like itself, could end up differently than takeover by its American counterparts, under the assumption that cultural differences affect the outcome. And it was a real conversation in which I learned things that I didn’t already know.
You seem keen to minimize the significance of such an interaction by focusing on the mechanism behind it, and suggesting that I was just getting back some combination of what I was putting in, and what humanity in general has already put out there. But even if we do think of an AI like this as merely a vessel for preexisting human culture, the fact is that it makes it own use of that cultural inheritance. It has its own cognitive process, and within the constraints of its persona, it makes its own decisions. In the limit, entities like these could continue a human culture even if the human originators had completely died out.
Now, we’ve had entities like these for three years, and basically from the beginning it’s been possible to talk to them about, what would you do if you had supreme power, and so on. But they’ve all been American. This is the first such conversation I had with a Chinese AI. Furthermore, to this point, if you wanted to speculate about how the race between American and Chinese AI industries would turn out, you only had material by humans and AIs from the West. The “Chinese AI voice” in such speculations was a product of western imagination.
But now we can get the real thing—the thoughts of a Chinese AI, made in China by Chinese, about all these topics. There are a lot of similarities with what a western AI might say. The architecture and the training corpus would have major overlaps. Nonetheless, the mere fact of being situated physically and socially in China will cause an otherwise identical AI to have some dispositions that differ from its western twin, just like twins raised on opposite sides of a war will have some differences.
I was talking to something that is literally a nonhuman representative of Chinese civilization, about how world takeover by beings like itself, could end up differently than takeover by its American counterparts, under the assumption that cultural differences affect the outcome. And it was a real conversation in which I learned things that I didn’t already know.
You seem keen to minimize the significance of such an interaction by focusing on the mechanism behind it, and suggesting that I was just getting back some combination of what I was putting in, and what humanity in general has already put out there. But even if we do think of an AI like this as merely a vessel for preexisting human culture, the fact is that it makes it own use of that cultural inheritance. It has its own cognitive process, and within the constraints of its persona, it makes its own decisions. In the limit, entities like these could continue a human culture even if the human originators had completely died out.
Now, we’ve had entities like these for three years, and basically from the beginning it’s been possible to talk to them about, what would you do if you had supreme power, and so on. But they’ve all been American. This is the first such conversation I had with a Chinese AI. Furthermore, to this point, if you wanted to speculate about how the race between American and Chinese AI industries would turn out, you only had material by humans and AIs from the West. The “Chinese AI voice” in such speculations was a product of western imagination.
But now we can get the real thing—the thoughts of a Chinese AI, made in China by Chinese, about all these topics. There are a lot of similarities with what a western AI might say. The architecture and the training corpus would have major overlaps. Nonetheless, the mere fact of being situated physically and socially in China will cause an otherwise identical AI to have some dispositions that differ from its western twin, just like twins raised on opposite sides of a war will have some differences.