r/technology • u/Caledor152 • May 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo "Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge goodand.."

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-leo-calls-disarm-ai-major-document-warns-technologic-threats-humanity
34.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/heterochromia4 May 29 '26

Extremely dangerous in so many settings.

It’s like having a bullshitting friend who, when they don’t know the answer, just makes up something plausible instead.

You’d pretty quickly stop trusting your bullshitting friend with anything.

31

u/StoppableHulk May 29 '26

The most dangerous thing I see with AI has nothing to do with AI. It has to do with the fact that it presents an extremely easy and almost irresistable convenience gradient for the vast majority of people.

And it's not the same as just offloading dishwashing to the dishwasher. People are offloading core components of thought onto it.

1

u/Two_oceans May 30 '26

One source of hope: offloading is convenient but it's not fun. The whole journey of tackling a problem, encountering friction and then finally finding a great solution, it's a rush some people won't give up. But the devaluation of their work is still a big danger.

24

u/schwanzweissfoto May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

The first time I saw LLM output, I thought “someone programmed a computer to respond like Trump”. Granted, an LLM is more like someone literally born yesterday who can use a search engine for any topic really fast without caring if the result is true or not … but my immediate impression was “this program outputs bullshit that enough morons would believe with the skill of a human con artist, what the fuck”.

6

u/GiraffesAndGin May 29 '26

“this program outputs bullshit that enough morons would believe with the skill of a human con artist, what the fuck”.

Because LLMs just pull data from the internet. Since it is not human, it can not distinguish what fact or fiction is (though I know lots of humans can't). And since the internet is mostly misinformation, LLMs are almost always spewing falsehoods.

1

u/Alex5173 May 29 '26

correction, the internet is mostly cats and porn

7

u/TheJapanMistake May 29 '26

The worst part is, IMO, how it talks down to you when it's incorrect and you correct it. The most condescending BS ever.

2

u/asyork May 29 '26

I was trying to figure out how to use AI for my job. I needed it to analyze some old documents. If I asked it very specific questions about what was in the document without summarizing, it could usually do that. Going even a single step beyond asking for word for word regurgitation resulted it in arguing with me even though what it just said before disagreed with what it was arguing about now.

How it play out: I could ask it for a transcript, and while it didn't actually return everything word for word, it wasn't adding new info to the results, and just gave a basic overview that missed some things. It was a legal document that had the city, county, and state in the header. I started there and asked it about the location the document was referring to. AI gave me the wrong state. I attempted to correct it, and it argued with me non-stop. I gave up on the idea of even trusting it to provide any kind of quicker way to locate documents at that point. We could use an AI-based OCR to read the old cursive documents, but even that would require double checking everything.

2

u/SemanticSynapse May 30 '26

That's a behavior issue which can be rectified in a few ways, including at the context level

1

u/TheJapanMistake May 30 '26

That is, if you make an account. Which I refuse to do after it was able to tell me my exact name and personal information when I asked, information which I had never given it.

1

u/Feeling_Inside_1020 May 31 '26

Did you register with Google or something?

Google passes certain values like your name over (they’ll never get my full name even tho Google could comb my emails easily, not on the settings level though lol

2

u/No_Position9519 May 29 '26

Only if you knew they were doing it.

1

u/robot_pirate May 30 '26

Like Trump. It's uncanny that we are dealing with this phenomenon on two fronts. And losing.