San Francisco expo showcases AI ‘post-apocalyptic world’
3 Min Read
The museum exhibits a "post-apocalyptic world" where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity.
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A photo showing a piece of art with a "Sorry for killing most of humanity" sign above it (AFP)
Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.
"Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache," says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the "Misalignment Museum", a new exhibit on the controversial technology.
"The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity," explained Audrey Kim, the show's curator.
"But then the AI realizes that was bad and creates a type of memorial to the human, so our show's tagline is 'sorry for killing most of humanity,'" Kim added.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a concept that is even more nebulous than the simple AI that is cascading into everyday life, as seen in the fast emergence of apps such as ChatGPT and all the hype surrounding them.
AGI is artificial intelligence that is able to do anything that a human would be able to do, integrating human cognitive capacities into machines.
Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has said AGI, done right, can "elevate humanity" and change the "limits of possibilities."
Read more: ChatGPT-generated pitches prompt sci-fi publisher to close submissions
"Incredible" technology
Weighing the pros and cons of AI is a subject that became close to Kim's heart in an earlier job working for Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company. There she worked on an "incredible" technology, which "could reduce the number of accidents due to human error" but also presented risks, she said.
The exhibit occupies a small space in a street corner building in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood. The lower floor of the exhibition is dedicated to AI as a machine powered by GPT-3, the language model behind ChatGPT, which composes spiteful calligrams against humanity, in cursive writing.
One exhibit is an AI-generated dialogue between the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the filmmaker Werner Herzog.
This "Infinite Conversation" is a meditation on deep fakes: images, sound, or video that aim to manipulate opinion by impersonating real people and that have become the latest disinformation weapon online.
"We only started this project five months ago, and yet many of the technologies presented here already seem almost primitive," Kim pointed out.
She hopes to turn the exhibit into a permanent one with more space and more events.
Read more: Advances of AI in mental health paralleled with increasing concern
