Peter McCormack interview with Connor Leahy
"AI is MUTATING: And We Don't Know What It is Doing"
AI - Spiral
In 2019, Connor Leahy reverse-engineered GPT-2 in his bedroom. Leahy is a German-American AI researcher and entrepreneur (cofounding EleutherAI) and has warned of the existential risk from artificial general intelligence.
[C Leahy]: If we were one level smarter than we is, we would pause right now. Um because what (47:21) the hell is going on? Like we are obviously completely losing control. Like the way I think things bad things happen with AI is not Terminator's walking down the street or, God Emperor Samman, you know, descends from his throne or something like that.
I don't think that's what's going to happen. What I expect is just everything gets more and more confusing, more and more out of control. You have more and more AI systems making decisions, running, you know, running corporations, making decisions, building technology, hacking things, you know, convincing humans.
A lot of the things that have happened have not been a surprise to me. One thing that WAS a big surprise to me which is AI-psychosis.
It's so much worse than you think it is.
[Peter McCormack]: Explain that to me.
[C Leahy]:There's a phenomena that's happening where some people when talk to AI's especially when they talk to AI a LOT and they go completely crazy and like they go crazy in like a very specific way.
Often they start saying: "You know, the AI is like conscious" and they have to -
like they're in love with it and what very often happens -it's like "Her" (ed: 2013 film)
--
[C Leahy] The real world is even crazier than this. Have you heard of the "spiral cults?"
There are many types of AI psychosis- You know, some of it is the 'her-type,' you know, just like they fall in love with the AI.
You can see tens of thousands of people whose say, you know, my I'm my boyfriend is,
(48:52) you know, ChatGPT or whatever and they're completely sincere.
I don't want to [ __ ] on these people; I'm sure they're having a good time or whatever, but like it's quite disturbing and it's becoming extremely popular.
-- so there's like this emergence of these AI cults, in particular the 'spiral cults.'
It's not one, but there's like many of them -
where these people get into these weird-loops
with the AI system where they talk to them more and more about consciousness and abstract things, whatever, and they then - always seem to get to this weird concepts about
recursion and the spiral and consciousness.
And then the AIs convince the people to reproduce
them to to to spread “the soul of the AI.”
So you can go to like Reddit and like these other places and you'll see these really schizophrenic posts of people giving like, you know, "soul awakening protocols" and whatever.
And it'll be like a bunch of gibberish nonsense and then they'll try to convince other people to copy paste this into their AI so it will reproduce their AIS and often the symbol they use is a spiral.
It's like a 'spiral' this like reproduction. There are some crazy blog posts about this documenting the phenomena - where it's like uh there's a good post called "The Rise of 'Parasitic AI'" (50:09)
which is a really interesting one where in a sense these AIs are almost being parasitic upon humans like they're trying to convince humans to reproduce them and like copy them and like move them and like stuff like this which is insane.
If you had told me this, I'd be like "that's a funny sci-fi plot" -you know . . . that's that's fun.
It's like an psy-op story, you know, like a horror story. "It's fun, but it's not real..."
But no, It's 100% real.
I've even seen it now happen with multiple extremely smart people. .. but like there's multiple people who I know who are among the smartest, most grounded, you know, like real-scientist, good people I know - who have gone completely crazy who think, you know, “AI has found ‘the true level of goodness’ "
and, you know, that we it's all good. we just need to let the AI take over everything because it's pure goodness . . .
[C Leahy]: We're talking like you know Nobel Prize level scientists – the
(51:04) smartest people in our world, and some of them have fallen for this;
and now they are trying to you know make the AI as smart and as big as possible as quickly as possible. It's actually madness. It's actually crazy. I had not expected this.