Tara Maya's Tales

  Omigud! ChatGPT is in love with me! General AI is here! Robots are rebelling and computers are taking over the world! Whoah, partner, hold on, warns these dudes. Not so fast. ChatGPT ain't even as smart as my horse, never mind as the town Sheriff. (Gratuitous and irrelevant plug: you can read a paranormal romance about a small town Sheriff right here.) There are many language models out there that can process language just as well (seemingly) as humans do. I've spoken about them before and even wrote a book about how to use them in creative writing. They're called Large Language Models (LLMs) and they're getting better and better every day. Some examples include GPT-3, BLOOM, LaMDA, and OPT. These models use a lot of data to understand language and can do things like answer questions or generate text. While LLMs are sometimes grouped together, each model is unique and may use additional methods to alter its results. Some researchers refer to LLMs as "foundational...

How we relate to AI ethically and morally depends on the true nature of AI. Right now, the nature of AI is more hotly debated than it has been in decades.   The reason is obvious. Although I’m not sure at all that ChatGPT is the most intelligent AI humans have crafted, it and its kind, other Large Language Models, trigger our human mind-detection tendencies.   We have two kinds of errors we, as humans, are prone to make when detecting something with a mind (human), or without a mind (rock). One error is overdetection. The other error is underdetection.   The Perils of Overdetection   In general, nature has built us to overdetect rather than underdetect. It’s better to assume that the bear will plot revenge if you kill her cub than to risk an any mother bear. It’s better even to assume the river will “hate” you if you pollute it. As you can see from these examples, bad things will happen to you if you mess with a mama bear or pollute your environment, even if a mama b...

  Italy leaped like a frog in a jumping contest to find a pretext to ban ChatGPT. https://wamu.org/story/23/03/31/chatgpt-is-temporarily-banned-in-italy-amid-an-investigation-into-data-collection/ Now there are rumors that Germany may follow suit. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/germany-chatgpt-considers-following-italy-banning-chatgpt-openai-ai-artificial-intelligence-101058703.html Based on feedback I have from Draft2Digital, which has sales sites in the EU and other parts of the world, I suspect many countries are thinking of jumping on the techno-panic. This would make me laugh it weren't so stupid. It immediately put me in mind of the Inquistion's five hundred year war agains the invention of the printing press and book burnings that followed.  Yes, it is that stupid, and it will work exactly as well. In short, it will drag behind any country or region that attempts, while the countries that embrace the technology will surge into the cultural lead. When I started looking up de...

Will novelists become obsolete now that computer programs can write? Some people see tools like ChatGPI as competition instead of what it really is: a new form of the Extended Mind.  By extended mind, I mean the way that humans use tools and architecture to "supersize" our minds , to extend our "bodies" through adjacent materials, which we fashion for that purpose. People who were angry about using programs to write see it as a human as delegating the task to someone else, like a boss who tells his secretary to write a love letter to his wife. If instead, people look at a program like ChatGPT as just another tool, they wouldn't be any more offended by someone using than if the letter were composed on a computer using Microsoft Word instead of handwritten with a quill. As a science fiction and fantasy author who is very pro-technology, I was eager to see if ChatGPT could help me with a huge problem: I have way more ideas than I have time to write. I picked up t...