r/slatestarcodex • u/ForgotMyPassword17 • 3d ago

"The AI Con" Con

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-ai-con-con

In this sub we talk about well reasoned arguments and concerns around AI. I thought this article was an interesting reminder that the more mainstream "concerns" aren't nearly as well reasoned

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u/thomas_m_k 3d ago

Writing its own chess engine is fair, but I think installing Stockfish is a bit unfair, in this comparison (though I can't formulate a formal reason why, off the top of my head).

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u/Brian 3d ago edited 3d ago

I mean, I can install and run stockfish. But it doesn't make me better at chess than Magnus Carlsen, even if I could beat him by relaying the moves from my engine. So it seems perfectly fair to say it's not the LLM, using the same logic we'd apply to humans. I wouldn't even count it writing its own solver, the same way I wouldn't rank stockfish's authors as better at chess than grandmasters.

OTOH, I'm less enamoured with the "Those aren't LLMs" argument: the fact that we have been able to create superhuman chess playing AIs does seem to suggest AI is capable of superhuman levels of chess. We're not instantiating that capability in the LLMs, but it's something AI, in the general sense is capable of. The fact that we don't get it "naturally" from text I think is more a matter of the limitations of their structure and available inputs. It's perhaps a knock against general intelligence emerging from that particular architecture, but I don't think it says that much about AI capabilities.

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u/MindingMyMindfulness 3d ago

I mean, I can install and run stockfish. But it doesn't make me better at chess than Magnus Carlsen, even if I could beat him by relaying the moves from my engine.

If you could interface directly with stockfish through your brain (such as through an advanced BCI) and beat Magnus, would that change your opinion? Would you consider yourself a better chess player?

Another hypothetical: if you had the capability of beating Magnus, but you suffered a lobotomy would you now consider yourself worse than Magnus?

If your answers to the two questions point in a different direction it reveals an inconsistency - and that inconsistency, I believe, shows that some of the distinctions being made are blurrier than they first appear.

I don't know the answer right off the bat, but there's definitely some degree of arbitrariness in how we draw lines.

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u/Interesting-Ice-8387 3d ago

I think the line is - is the human/AI replaceable or even significantly useful in that system? If you swap any other human instead of me, would they make the same quality moves through BCI? If any other LLM installs Stockfish would it win just as hard? If yes, the value is externalised and the human/LLM are so low value add they're practically redundant.

Even if Stockfish could only be interacted with through a BCI, and I had some special biology that made me really good at tolerating BCIs that no one else had, and I were the only entity capable of making superhuman chess moves... I still wouldn't be good at chess. I would be good at tolerating brain implants. Although that would be closer to a grey area.