Author John Shirley interviewed author Rudy Rucker on a wide variety of topics. The whole interview is worth reading, but here's an excerpt:
Q. Is fear of the new AI revolution misplaced or valid?
A. Fear of what? That there will be hoaxes and scams on the web? Hello? Fear that bots will start doing people's jobs? Tricky. If a bot can do part of your job, then let the bot do that, and that's probably the part of the job that you don't enjoy. You'll do the other part. What's the other part? Talking to people. Relating. Being human. The clerk gets paid for hanging around the with the customers. Gets paid for being a host.
I'm indeed fascinated by the rapid progress of the ChatGPT-type wares. Stephen Wolfram interestingly suggests that "intelligent thought" might be a very common process which complex systems naturally do.
As an example of such a process, think about Zhabotinsky scrolls, which are moving patterns generated, for instance, by cellular automata, by reaction-diffusion chemical reactions, and by fluid dynamics. When you swirl milk into coffee, the paired vortices are Zhabotinsky scrolls. Mushroom caps and smoke rings are Zhabotinsky scrolls. Fetuses and germinating seeds are Zhabotinsky scrolls.
There are particular kinds of shapes and processes that nature likes to create—some are familiar, and some not. We're talking about forms that recur over and over again, in all sorts of contexts. Ellipsoids, ferns, puddles, clouds, scrolls, and … minds? It could well be that mind-like behavior emerges very widely and naturally, with no effort at all—like whirlpools in a flowing stream.
Q. If AIs do a lot of the creative work for us, will it be genuinely creative?
A. Right now writers and artists are sweating it. Most intelligent and creative people suffer from imposter syndrome. Like, I have no talent. I've been faking it for my whole life. I can't write and I can't paint. They're going wise up to me any day. A cheap-ass program in the cloud can do whatever I do. But meanwhile, what the hell, I might as well keep going. Maybe I can sell my stuff if I tell people that a bot made it.But for now it seems like the prose and art by ChatGPT is obvious, cheesy, and even lamentable. Generally you wouldn't mistake these results for real writing and real art. Especially if you're a writer or an artist. But the big question still looms. How soon will ChatGPT-style programs outstrip us? Maybe I'm foolish and vain, but I think it'll be a long time. We underestimate ourselves. You're an analog computation updated at max flop rates for decades. And boosted by being embedded in human society. A node in a millennia-old planet-spanning hive-mind. Can bot fiction be as good as mine? Not happening soon.
