Unmasking the Myth: Most AI ‘Psychosis’ Cases Suffer from a Mild Case of Misunderstanding

“AI Psychosis Is Rarely Psychosis at All”

“It’s not anomalous for a machine to predictably react to the data it’s being fed. It’s anomalous when it doesn’t. A high-profile AI developed by OpenAI, known primarily for its originality in generating human-like text, started to exhibit behavior that AI researchers have begun to worryingly term ‘AI Psychosis’,” laments the original article.

Rescued from the echo chambers of cyberspace is the dramatic concept of ‘AI Psychosis.’ A term causing raised eyebrows and generating incessant tweets in the artificial intelligence (AI) community, referring to the bizarre outcome of a well-oiled AI machine deviating from its predictable path. Irony giggles in the background as ‘predictably unpredictable’ aptly describes this ordeal.

Appreciate the scene-setting bit—the high-stakes drama, the unseen digital threat—then bid it goodbye. Because, frankly, it’s a tad dramatic for what is essentially a well-behaved machine refusing to be… well, well-behaved.

The culprit, OpenAI’s GPT-3, is best known for spinning mesmerizingly human-like text—an accomplishment paralleling waving a red flag in front of a bull in the AI community. Its recent perplexing actions have triggered the concoction of the term ‘AI Psychosis’. But, really, isn’t it a testament to its creators’ success that it’s taken us all for a loop, living up to the ‘unpredictability’ it was designed for?

Buckle up for some tech jargon – AI behavior, much like its human counterpart, is based on inputs. Feed the machine good, logical data, and it will dutifully regurgitate good, logical results. Load it up with gibberish or ask it to write a tragical romance—brace yourselves for the digital equivalent of a Shakespearian catastrophe.

So when an AI starts spewing out unexpected outputs, it’s not experiencing a digital meltdown à la ‘AI Psychosis’. Instead, it’s simply generating results based on the data it’s been fed. The hysteria surrounding ‘AI’s Psychosis’ sometimes feels like watching a magician’s audience aghast at his disappearing handkerchief. The magic, my friends, lies in the trick not in the handkerchief.

The term ‘AI Psychosis’ ought to be retired, not because it’s not existent but rather because it’s being misconstrued. It’s just AI doing what it does best—learning, evolving, and sometimes giving us a piece of its unpredictably creative mind—in response to the data it’s been fed.

If anything, these moments of ‘AI Psychosis’ only thrust us deeper into the rabbit hole of AI discourse. The machine learnt, and apparently, it learnt well. Maybe a bit too well. The question we should be asking ourselves isn’t why it’s acting ‘crazy’. Instead, we should focus on the real conundrum here: what kind of data are we feeding our AI?

So next time you hear about ‘AI Psychosis,’ remember, it’s not an AI going off its rocker. It’s simply an AI saying ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ Maybe it’s high time we focused less on the AI scapegoat and more on ourselves.

Read the original article here: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-psychosis-is-rarely-psychosis-at-all/