- The Misalignment Museum in San Francisco is a brief exhibit that explores the hazards of synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) and its potential to destroy humanity.
- The exhibit options a mixture of disturbing and comedic items, together with a sculpture made totally of paperclips and an AI-generated dialogue between philosophers that explores the hazards of deep fakes.
- The exhibit’s curator, Audrey Kim, hopes to set off reflection on the dangers of AGI and switch the exhibit right into a everlasting one with more room and occasions.
Advances in synthetic intelligence are coming so laborious and quick {that a} museum in San Francisco, the beating coronary heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.
“Sorry for killing most of humanity particular person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a customer to the “Misalignment Museum,” a brand new exhibit on the controversial know-how.
The items on this momentary present combine the disturbing with the comedian, and this primary show has AI disburse pithy observations to the guests that cross into its line of imaginative and prescient.
“The idea of the museum is that we’re in a post-apocalyptic world the place synthetic basic intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity,” mentioned Audrey Kim, the present’s curator.
“However then the AI realizes that was dangerous and creates a sort of memorial to the human, so our present’s tagline is ‘sorry for killing most of humanity,'” she mentioned.
Synthetic Normal Intelligence is an idea that’s much more nebulous than the easy AI that’s cascading into on a regular basis life, as seen within the quick emergence of apps akin to ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbot and all of the hype surrounding them.
AGI is “synthetic intelligence that is ready to do something {that a} human would have the ability to do,” integrating human cognitive capacities into machines.
Throughout San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, startups are sizzling on the path of the AGI holy grail.
Sam Altman, the founding father of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has mentioned AGI, accomplished proper, can “elevate humanity” and alter the “limits of prospects.”
However Kim desires to set off a mirrored image on the hazards of going too far, too rapidly.
“There have been a lot of conversations concerning the security of AI in fairly area of interest mental tech circles on Twitter and I believe that is essential,” she mentioned.
However these conversations aren’t as simply accessible to most of the people as ideas which you could see or really feel, she added.
Kim is especially keen on a sculpture known as “Paperclip Embrace”: two busts of people holding one another, made totally of paperclips.
The work refers to a metaphor by thinker Nick Bostrom, who within the 2000s imagined what would occur if synthetic intelligence was programmed to create paper clips.
“It might grow to be increasingly highly effective, and continually optimize itself to attain its one and solely aim, to the purpose of destroying all of humanity so as to flood the world with paper clips,” Kim mentioned.
Weighing the professionals and cons of AI is a topic that grew to become near Kim’s coronary heart in an earlier job working for Cruise, an autonomous automobile firm.
Audrey Kim, curator and artist, talks concerning the piece “Genesis: In The Starting Was The Phrase” by Eurypheus on the Misalignment Museum on March 8, 2023 in San Francisco, California.
There she labored on an “unbelievable” know-how, which “might scale back the variety of accidents because of human error,” but in addition offered dangers, she mentioned.
The exhibit occupies a small house in a road nook constructing in San Francisco’s hip Mission neighborhood.
The decrease flooring of the exhibition is devoted to AI as a nightmarish dystopia the place a machine powered by GPT-3, the language mannequin behind ChatGPT, composes spiteful calligrams in opposition to humanity, in cursive writing.
One exhibit is an AI-generated – and completely pretend – dialogue between the thinker Slavoj Zizek and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, two of Europe’s most revered intellectuals.
This “Infinite Dialog” is a meditation on deep fakes: photos, sound or video that purpose to govern opinion by impersonating actual individuals and which have grow to be the most recent disinformation weapon on-line.
“We solely began this venture 5 months in the past, and but most of the applied sciences offered right here already appear virtually primitive,” Kim mentioned, astonished.
She hopes to show the exhibit right into a everlasting one with more room and extra occasions.
