[rmahan]

Great article! Enjoyed the argument but I have a few disagreements

I disagree with the response to objection 1. Look for more than a few moments at the right side picture and the shadows of the chess pieces are low quality, the shadows continue off the table, and the checkers on the board look more like backgammon than chess. The AI generated sites that clutter google are easily identified as low quality GPT 3 nonsense.

I’d also disagree that the AI “understands” the physics of the sun, or that Africa has a lot of desert. The prompt includes the desert, so it pulls from pictures of the desert. It doesn’t understand that people have a face when they concentrate either, it finds a picture of someone playing chess then maps an “African fortune teller” onto that person. Oh, it also has to grab photos of an African fortune teller. The AIs used as examples in this article (DALLE, Copilot) are regurgitated humans. What happens when we have new tasks that we can’t train on? They don’t “understand” things, they recreate them.

Maybe I’m just typically bad at estimating the exponential growth. I’m not optimistic I can replace humans with Copilot authored pull requests anytime soon. It might be good at “write a function to convert ISO date time to MM/DD/YYYY” but we’re decades off of “create an API for managing a warehouses inventory.” Either way, being replaced by copilot would require business partners to be able to explain what they want, so I’m not worried.

[etothepii]

In addition, is it even fair to say, "Africa has a lot of desert." It has the biggest desert, but it's also a very big place.