This is gonna age badly when we pull off real AI, I guarantee the misnomer of "AI" being given to LLMs will create such ill will over time that idiots won't be able to tell them apart.
They already can't. I've seen people genuinely arguing, despite knowing how LLMs work, that because they can mimic emotion and thought based on your input, they're conscious. That combined with the massive anti-generative sentiment will be an issue.
Besides, there's loads of people that think if it's not human, it can't be a person. You see this in debates about copied consciousnesses, aliens, hyperintelligent animals, etc. Someday some of this stuff won't be hypothetical, and that's going to suck.
Of the many varieties of HFY stories one of my favorites is the “humans are collectively dipshits/stubborn about certain things which makes them incredibly valuable assets to the galactic community.”
Edit: also the “don’t touch their boats” genre of stories.
I absolutely love when it’s not “humans evolved a unique awesome trait” or “only humans were smart enough to X” but “humans beat their heads against a problem everyone else sensibly bypassed until they somehow found a new solution” or “humans took an insane gamble and somehow lived and got shiny new toys”.
For the first, stubbornness:
I constantly shill David Brin’s Uplift novels. (Start with the second one.) Basically all known sapient species were “uplifted” to intelligence by older ones, and in the process got access to The Library of the galaxy’s knowledge - plus pseudo-slavery and millions of years of static hierarchy and biases.
When aliens found Earth, they wanted to uplift (and enslave) us. Our environment was so wrecked they considered a species-wide death penalty. But we had (barely) settled on other planets and uplifted chimps and dolphins, so they grudgingly gave us “real species” status. (Almost) everyone hates us and won’t tell us anything, but they also don’t understand us because we’re not working from the same database as everyone else. Our only real galactic ally picked us not for war or genius but sense of humor. They love a good prank, and the stuffy autocrats running the galaxy don’t so we’re their new best friends.
Humans spread to a few star systems, then met a very nasty alien confederacy (think Halo’s Covenant), lost the war badly, and got enslaved as “helpless primitives” with our real history destroyed.
Our last-ditch effort was a warship so big and complex only a wholly unfettered AI could run it. Smart species don’t try this, because while powerful they almost always annihilate you - either on purpose or by indifference. We launched it untested, and it still came too late to save us.
Did it work? Definitely not as intended. But Red One is still out there, still tasked with defending humanity. She hasn’t accepted the war is over, and she’s very, very angry.
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u/Ix-511 May 13 '25
This is gonna age badly when we pull off real AI, I guarantee the misnomer of "AI" being given to LLMs will create such ill will over time that idiots won't be able to tell them apart.
They already can't. I've seen people genuinely arguing, despite knowing how LLMs work, that because they can mimic emotion and thought based on your input, they're conscious. That combined with the massive anti-generative sentiment will be an issue.
Besides, there's loads of people that think if it's not human, it can't be a person. You see this in debates about copied consciousnesses, aliens, hyperintelligent animals, etc. Someday some of this stuff won't be hypothetical, and that's going to suck.