17 Comments
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Intoobus's avatar

Hey! I saw your post pop up on my homepage and wanted to show some support. If you get a chance, I’d really appreciate a little love on my latest newsletter too always happy to boost each other!

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

Thanks!

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Sneaky Sara 🐝's avatar

Bravo 👏

Letting AI manage Prompting Culture, genius experiment P.Q

Wait is this "write about ethics" is about you altering other people's notes.. 🤣

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

Thank you so much!

I’m sure stealing people’s notes is highly ethical, as long as you write about ethics now and then to show you’re a good person 😉

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Mark's avatar

Great stuff PQ, this fits the theme perfectly!

I think we're pretty much at the stage where you can treat AIs as employees now, or bosses! I kind of like the idea that I could set it some boring tasks for the day and it just sends me a message when it needs my input. It would leave me free to do the fun stuff.

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

Thanks! You can definitely treat AI as your colleague, but that doesn’t make it as capable as one. Just like how that one roman emperor could appoint his horse to the senate, but that doesn’t make horses good senators. My experiment so far isn’t all that encouraging. Yes, it excels at specific tasks, but it will fail in unexpected ways, so you better check in with it from time to time. Which is true for some human colleagues as well 😄

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Mark's avatar

I reckon horses would do a much better job than most politicians 😂

I'd trust AI to quite a lot at this point, nothing life or death of course but I'd be quite willing to entrust it to life admin tasks, maybe not with access to a credit card 😂

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

If I had to trust either Sam Altman or a horse with my life, I know which one I’d choose.

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Mark's avatar

haha 😂

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Seema Nayyar Tewari's avatar

'The tone is philosophical but humorous...self-aware about AI hype."

The step aside, human bit made me chuckle, too! 😁

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

Thank you!

This post gave me a headache, trying to get the AI to reflect on its own thinking 😅

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K.Lynn Grey's avatar

That is so me...

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K.Lynn Grey's avatar

You know, I could change my picture to a potato head and no one would notice.

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Bruce Landay's avatar

This is a high tech version of the age old quandary, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

There’s so much AI hype and fear that a lot of people are panicking vs thinking including lots of CEOs. The question we should be asking is whether AI can really do a job better than a person not just can AI do it more cheaply.

Your question of ethics was spot on. Can a machine handle the ethical dilemmas that are a part of so many jobs and the answer is almost always NO!

Your post was entertaining, though sad in that this question more times than not isn’t asked with disastrous results. We need to slow down and ask the right questions. I think there can be tremendous value to using AI thoughtfully, though I fear we will use it blindly and create unending messes, then wonder why we are getting such poor results or worse yet being oblivious to the fact that we created a self inflicted disaster.

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

I think you're quoting Jurassic Park. Maybe generative AI isn't all that different from those carnivorous reptiles 😄

This post is a good example of why working with AI is so much more effective than letting it run wild. Sure, the ethics questions all originated with the AI itself, but they only came up in the context of this back-and-forth writing game.

AI can recite more ethics facts than all human Substackers combined, but it would have a hard time asking the right questions at the right time, unprompted.

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P.Q. Rubin's avatar

I don't know, people might notice. Maybe find a middle ground?

https://imgur.com/a/yUwrWT8

😄

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K.Lynn Grey's avatar

That is so me...

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