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„… are water running down pathways etched into the ground over centuries by the rivers of human culture. Their originality comes entirely from random combinations of historical thought. They do not know the 'meaning' of anything - they only know the records humans find meaningful enough to store. Their unreliability comes from their unpredictable behaviour in novel circumstances. When there is no riverbed to follow, they drown the surrounding landscape. The…“ 2/

„… entirety of their documented features, capabilities, and recorded behaviour - emergent or not - is explained by this conceptual model of generative AI. There are no unexplained corner cases that don't fit or actively disprove this theory. Yet people keep assuming that what ChatGPT does can only be explained as the first glimmer of genuine Artificial General Intelligence.“ /3

„When ChatGPT demonstrates intelligence, that comes from us. Some of it we construct ourselves. Some of it comes from our inherent biases. There is no 'there' there. We are alone in the room, reconstructing an abstract representation of a mind. The reasoning you see is only in your head. You are hallucinating intelligence where there is none. You are doing the textual equivalent of seeing a face in a power outlet. This drive - anthropomorphism - seems to be innate. Our…“ 1/

„… first instinct when faced with anything unfamiliar - whose drives, motivations, and mechanisms we don't understand - is to assume that they think much like a human would. When that unfamiliar agent uses language like a human would, the urge to see them as near or fully human is impossible to resist - a recurring issue in the history of AI research that dates all the way back to 1966. These tools solve problems and return fluent, if untruthful, answers, which…“ 2/

„… is what creates such a convincing illusion of intelligence.“ /3

„After everything the tech industry has done over the past decade, the financial bubbles, the gig economy, legless virtual reality avatars, crypto, the endless software failures - just think about it - do you think we should believe them when they make grand, unsubstantiated claims about miraculous discoveries? Have they earned our trust? Have they shown that their word is worth more than that of independent scientists?“

„Sceptical Believers are the ones who take the biggest risks, because they don't appreciate the pace of change of a paradigm shift like the True Believer, and they aren't as careful as the True Sceptic.“

„What strategy you choose for adopting the generative AI is going to depend on your appetite for risk, faith in its capabilities, and desire for differentiation.“

„Most Generative Al are too immature and unpredictable to be used safely. They have too much of a tendency to make up facts and data, plagiarise text and images, and their behavioural edge cases are extreme enough to potentially inflict serious damage to almost any organisation's reputation. The only scaleable safeguard is to prefer specialised AI-based tools that can make assurances about their use in their chosen field, and whose assurances you have confirmed to be true yourself.“

„Spam, abuse, and fraud are the perfect use cases for Generative Al software. Spammers and scammers are unaffected by many of the downsides of Generative Al and the only issue that could be prohibitive to their task is the high cost. These tools are likely to help them bypass almost all of your existing safeguards against abusive automation.“

„Some of the 'safeguards' that Al vendors themselves are marketing are potentially more harmful than the sporadic fraud itself. Every tool that claims to check whether any given text or image is AI-generated is itself built using the same principles and mechanisms as other Al, and they inherit much of their unreliability. OpenAl's own classifier, which should be the current state-of-the-art given that they are the leading company in Generative Al, only correctly identifies Al…“ 1/

„… generated text 26% of the time and falsely identifies hu-man-authored text as authored by an Al about 9% of cases. This means that if you have 100 applicants or stu-dents, 10% of whom attempt to cheat using ChatGPT text in a test, the current state-of-the-art Al content checker will only correctly identify three out of ten cheaters, but will falsely accuse eight students of cheating. That's with a tool made by the leading company in the field, one that has full…“ 2/

„… access to the technology and models that Chat GPT is built on. Other Al content checkers don't have that access and are likely to perform even worse.“ /3

„The safeguards built into current AI software are insufficient. Most of them are too easily bypassed by intent users and many of them semi-regularly generate output that is unnerving or even offensive. Al companies have a poor track record for software security.“

„If you're already an AI company, stacked to the rafters with Al researchers and programmers specialised in machine-learning, all supported by an effective AI safety team, then carry on. This book isn't for you. It's for the people who you hope to have as customers.“

„[…] if it weren't for the issue that its entirely unclear whether hosted generative Al tools enjoy safe harbour protections for hosting that are provided by Section 230(c)(1) of the US Communications Decency Act. Section 230, and similar laws in other countries, let hosting companies host without being liable for what their customers upload. Without those laws, social media networks and search engines would not exist. In most countries these laws have some limits, but overall what they…“ 1/

„… mean is that you aren't legally liable for the comments that somebody posts on your service. One problem with integrating generative Al into your product, especially a hosted product, is that many of the uses of AI are likely to fall outside these protections. If somebody gets your online Al chat widget to talk like a genocidal Nazi, you might be as liable for that as if you had published pro-genocide Nazi propaganda yourself. That would mean that exposing these tools to your…“ 2/

„… customers risks exposing you to enormous legal liability. […] Microsoft, which is positioning itself to be at the forefront of Al services, doesn't exactly have a history of handling the security of its products well. Integrating these tools to be used safely by the end-user takes enormous work and expertise and, even with all the right resources, you still might not succeed. We don't know if all of these flaws can be fixed in the models themselves. You might end up…“ 3/

„… adding novel and innovative security holes to your own products and that's a kind of innovation nobody wants.“ /4

„The biggest source of errors, bias, and legal risk in AI tools is their training data. It's next to impossible for an organisation to assess the risk of using Al software whose training data set is undocumented or, worse, kept as a trade secret. Dependency on closed Al software is inherently riskier than other closed software as it leaves you with fewer tools to validate grand claims from the vendor.“