Tina Eliassi-Rad
speaker
154 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Tina Eliassi-Rad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so there's this kind of feedback loop that goes on and on. And it's oftentimes not captured in terms of who's influencing who most. And one example that I like here is like think about dating apps.
There was a story recently from Stanford that like most people are meeting on online dating apps these days instead of like through college or through their friends, family, et cetera, or at the local bar. Now, those dating apps have recommendation systems, right? And based on those recommendation systems, perhaps you meet somebody, you partner up, and you have babies.
And so over time, these recommendation systems actually have an impact on our gene pool going forward.
Yeah, but it's like, I suppose, and because these recommendation systems are all about exploitation and not exploration, but maybe you would say like my aunt or my grandmother or my college were also all based on exploitation and not exploration, right? But there is this notion that there are these algorithms that we can't understand what they're doing.
And perhaps 100 years from now, they may influence how our genome is evolving.
Yeah, I don't know, like, how far do we think certain things are going? And society has to decide. Like, for example, New York Times had this article a while back about how there's a person who's trying to set up a company, an online dating company, where, like, on the first or second dates, which are usually...
you know, not very good, my avatar and your avatar will go on the date and then they will report back. And only if, you know, both avatars are happy, then on the third date, we actually go out on the date. And so like how much of actually our human behavior are these things going to take over?
I think like I'm an introvert, so I'm like, oh, and also I'm a computer scientist. I'm like, oh, this is great. Let somebody else do the dirty work. And then maybe, you know, if it's a good day, I'll get out of my cave and I'll like go and talk to. But, you know, I for extroverts, they don't like it at all. So my husband was an extrovert. Like, what is what are you talking about?
Am I just a brain in a vat now? Like what's happening now? So I think it depends on where you are in this extrovert, introvert scale.
Indeed, indeed. For 30 plus years, it's been fantastic.
Yeah, and I think in particular with, for example, generative AI as it's generating content, whether it's text or video or images, there's this notion in the late Dan Dennett, who you had on your podcast, very famous cognitive scientist, called these generative AI models counterfeit people. He had an Atlantic article a few years back about it.
And also because people treat these generative AI systems, these counterfeit people, as if they're more objective somehow. They know more than me. People tend to give their agency to them. And also these AI systems evolve faster than us. And so it's not quite clear, not that it's a race, But it's that they're evolving a lot quicker.
Their objective functions are different, like attention, money, et cetera, than perhaps the objective function of people, like maybe the good of the society or public good or something else than just like money or some like GDP or some measure like that.
I think these days it's too much in flux. But I think, for example, there are certain things that can be done to improve it. Whenever you or another human being asks me a question, perhaps I would come back with another question. I'm like, did you mean this, Sean? Or did you mean that, right?
But for example, with child GPT or these large language models, they never come back and say, like, did you mean this? The reason is that it reduces their utility, right? Me as a human being, when I ask the question, I want an answer and I want it now. Yeah. Right. Or like it never comes back and says, I don't know or I'm not sure of it.
And maybe you would accept that from a human being, but you don't accept it from a large language model. You're like, oh, you're a tool. You need to tell me. Like I asked you about this and I want the answer now. And, you know, and so there's some of that going on. But like the big tech companies could add those features. to make it more equal in terms of this conversation that is going on.
But at this point, utility is winning over all these other things.
Yes, there are actually other generative AI systems, especially for programming, that I've heard where, like, it tells you, like, okay, if you want to code X, this is how you code it. And then you code it and you're like, oh, it didn't work. You're stupid to the generative AI. Like, the human says you're stupid. And then the generative AI says to the human, you're not a good programmer. Yeah.
You know, so then there's some kind of a, you know, then they get at it. Gets in a loop. But that's only like for, you know, specific ones. You're absolutely right. With chat GPT, it's not going to be that kind of antagonistic.
I mean, you can try to find biases. I mean, there's a lot of work in that, like these large language models are sexist, misogynist. We wrote a report for UNESCO for last year's International Women's Day about how sexist and misogynist these large language models are. Um, the problem was that is whenever like I get, uh, somebody asks me that question that, oh, well look, humans are biased too.
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