AI Is Deeply Flawed, And We Can Prove It.

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses recent research that undermines the narrative of AI becoming superhumanly intelligent and replacing human jobs. It highlights the fragility of AI's superiority and its serious weaknesses, as demonstrated by the ability of "adversarial bots" to exploit flaws in advanced AI systems like KataGo, which had beaten the world's best Go player.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Can AI be robust against adversarial attacks?

• The research paper "Can Go AIs be adversarially robust?" shows that AI cannot be made robust against adversarial attacks. The paper "leaves a significant question mark on how to achieve the ambitious goal of building robust real-world AI agents that people can trust."
• The researchers used "adversarial bots" to find and exploit flaws in the AI system KataGo, which had previously beaten the world's best Go player. Even after the KataGo team tried to address the weaknesses, the adversarial bots could still beat it a significant percentage of the time.
• This highlights two key issues with AI:
  • AI does not actually understand the tasks it is performing, it is just relying on fuzzy statistics.
  • AI cannot cope with novel inputs that are not reflected in its training data, causing it to act erratically.
• These fundamental flaws in AI systems are currently unsolvable, and the paper suggests there is little prospect of patching similar issues in advanced AI systems like ChatGPT in the near-term.

[02] What are the implications of this research for claims about AI becoming superhumanly intelligent and replacing human jobs?

• The research detailed in the article undermines the claims made by prominent AI figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk that AI could become superhumanly intelligent and render huge numbers of jobs obsolete in the coming years.
• The paper shows that AI superiority is "incredibly fragile" and can be easily beaten by simple adversarial attacks, demonstrating how unreliable and insecure AI systems can be.
• This casts doubt on the ability of AI to reliably replace human workers, as it highlights the deep flaws and limitations of current AI technology that make it unsuitable for such critical tasks.
• The article suggests that the narrative of AI surpassing human capabilities is not supported by the research, and that we are still far from having AI systems that can be trusted and relied upon to the degree claimed by AI proponents.