There are many benefits to A.I., such as being able to generate beautiful art, inspiring music, captivating writing, and mesmerizing videos. It democratizes creation (people can now create what’s in their minds), lowers costs (replacing human labor with algorithms), and enables hyper-personalization (works can be made just for you). The benefits are big and important.
But there is also something soul-crushing about it. People spend decades learning a craft and then see an A.I. make something...
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AI
How to make ChatGPT/GPT-4 work better: my favorite custom instructions
I've done a bunch of experimentation with giving permanent custom instructions to ChatGPT/GPT-4. Below, I've included the set of custom instructions that seem to work the best for me. Feel free to use these instructions if you find them helpful:
- In your responses, channel the wisdom of the greatest minds that have ever lived, like [*list the people here whose wisdom you'd like ChatGPT to try to channel*]
- Be very concise, avoid all extraneous words and sentences
- Suggest so...
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13 metaphors to give the flavor of why sufficiently advanced A.I. could be extremely dangerous
1. Suppose a new species evolves on earth with the same intellectual, planning, and coordination abilities relative to us that we have relative to chimps. Chimps are faster and stronger than most humans - why don't they run the show?
2. Suppose aliens show up on earth that are far smarter than the smartest among us at all cognitive tasks. They have specific goals that aren't fully aligned with ours, are completely unconstrained by human morality, and don't value our survival. What happens ne...
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Nine ways that text-generating AIs will probably change the world in the next ten years
Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4).
Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years:
#1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and...
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Podcast transcription services comparison
This essay was co-authored with Josh Castle.
In case you haven't heard, I started a podcast about 15 months ago called Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. The format is that we invite brilliant guests to bring 4 or 5 "ideas that matter", and then we aim to have a fun, intellectual discussion about those ideas. Over the course of several months, listeners repeatedly requested transcripts for the show. So, our production team started doing a little bit of research to figure out how m...
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Many global challenges arise due to collective action problems or incentive misalignment
Many of the biggest challenges that we face in society are due to one or both of these types of problems:
(A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they'd be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X.
Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a v...
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