There are many things that leave me questioning the decisions people make around supporting the current artificial intelligence being unleashed on everyone in this moment, but the dishonesty I feel is a pretty foundational reason why one should stay clear of this shitshow. The dishonesty of the hustlers who have flocked to the space because of the financial opportunity, all the way to the polishing of artificial intelligences images using the word “hallucination” for when it lies sets a tone that deeply concers me. However, I don’t think it is just this moment, and I lying is baked into the DNA of artificial intelligence all the way from the beginning.
The Turing Test is one of the foundational components of artificial intelligence, which according to Wikipedia is:
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).
In short, programming a machine to lie to humans is a foundational aspect of artificial intelligence. No wonder artificial intelligence lies (hallucinates). No wonder those who build and sell artificial intelligence lie (hallucinate). The whole game is about lying to you and convincing you that the machine is human, and if we can’t convince you the machine is human, we’ll grind the humans down until they are more machine like (AI in schools). It is no wonder that we have ended up in the timeline we are in where Trump and Musk can lie like they do. There is a reason that both Trump and Musk are champions of using artificial intelligence. Really this all comes down to honesty, and how truthful we are about who we are, and what really matters to us in the real world.
