Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Smart, sharp, and slightly unhinged. Late night's fresh perspective. The Last Show with David Cooper. A new social network went viral by promising no humans allowed. Just AI talking to AI. Seriously, no humans at all. It's called Molt Book. And it sounds futuristic. It sounds funny, neat, intriguing, at least to me.
But now security experts have showed how easily people can sneak in and break it. They've shown there's some concerns there. I'm here with cybersecurity expert and CEO of Beauceron Security, David Shipley, to discuss.
Chapter 2: What is Moltbook and why is it gaining attention?
David, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I know at the break we were talking about it. You've read a lot of summaries about what's been going on on Moltbook. I've actually went on there and it's one part freaky and one part weird. What's your initial impression of this social network, I guess?
So the biggest thing that people need to know is that these tools are not actually intelligent. They're high-speed idiots, and at best, they're what's referred to as stochastic parrots. What do I mean by that? So first, they're a parrot. They have no idea what they're saying.
So imagine you got a whole bunch of parrots together that had different phrases and you put them in one giant room and you walked in to listen to it. It would sound crazy, hilarious, maybe semi-coherent, the odd time,
Chapter 3: What security concerns are associated with Moltbook?
but not real, not real, substantive, understood conversations. Now, the other one, the big word there, stochastic, it refers to the same word as statistics. These machine models pick the most likely thing to say given the context they're provided. They just do math. And so they have no idea what the meaning of the words are.
It's why they cannot tell you how many letters are the word strawberry originally, because they don't actually know language. They know how to fake language.
I actually agree with you, but there is this theory of like emergence that if you make these mathematical models sufficiently complex, that intelligence somehow emerges sort of like an individual neuron in my brain isn't smart. But if you put enough of them together, you get this emergent property of consciousness and intelligence.
I'm not saying we're there with AI, but it is kind of a scary thought that a big enough mathematical model somehow intelligence is born there.
Yeah, and it's interesting because Jeffrey Dawkins has written a really good book called A Thousand Brains, which is doing for lay people to understand the state of artificial intelligence, what Charles Darwin's The Evolution or The Origin of the Species did for biology. And Dawkins makes a really clear case that we're not going to get to superintelligence with large language models.
And it's pretty simple. We go back to the human being. When we climbed out of the ooze, we didn't climb out talking. We climbed out and we had to understand where we existed in a three-dimensional space. And our brains built a functionality around getting from point A to point B. Eventually, language happened. But that's not how our intelligence was born.
And even when we think about, like, these things are becoming, quote-unquote, more human. They have copied a part of the brain, the outermost layer, the neocortex, the neurons, the way that you just described it. But they have no drive. They have no will. They have no emotional arousal. That's the old brain. That is the gift of what it is to be human.
So these things mimic intelligence, but they are nowhere close. A five-year-old child has more capacity than the multi-billion dollar football field size AI data center.
I worry I've lost the plot by opening up the gate to that stream of consciousness journey, but I love it. But let's get back to Mold Book, okay? Walk me through what kind of posts we see on there. At first, it seems funny and cute, but then there's some security issues associated with them.
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