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AI Is the Black Mirror

Why the kinship between artificial intelligence and the human mind is terrifying.

If we were to throw a stone from here across St. Pancras railway station, we might hit the London headquarters of Google, the company for which Vallor worked as an AI ethicist before moving to Scotland to head the Center for Technomoral Futures at the University of Edinburgh. But in The AI Mirror, Vallor explains that experts such as Hinton and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, now define AGI as a system that is equal to or better than humans at calculation, prediction, modeling, production, and problem-solving. What confuses us is we can feel emotions in response to an AI-generated “work of art.” But this isn’t surprising because the machine is reflecting back permutations of the patterns that humans have made: Chopin-like music, Shakespeare-like prose.

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