Colm O'Regan:  AI scraped my novels, but why?

Colm O'Regan: "Just like all of us, AIs can have bias. And just like all of us, our bias depends on what we’ve been told. That bias can lead us to say some stupid stuff. AI systems reflect the prejudices in their training data. If it was trained on biased data, it can act in biased ways. Shite in, shite out." Picture: Chani Anderson.

Artificial intelligence — Lookit, you can’t avoid it. Here are a few words to get you through if you are ever stopped by the AI police.

AI, machine learning, neural networks, and large language models. I’ve used these interchangeably like bog/marsh/mire/fen/swamp. But they’re not all the same thing.

Artificial Intelligence is the overall idea of a computer system that can simulate human intelligence. This means it can learn new things.

Machine learning is a type of AI where computers learn from data. A neural network is a technique of machine learning that mimics how the brain learns. 

That’s the stuff that does image recognition so that’s why your weird photo was rejected from Facebook. And a large language model is a type of neural network trained on squillions of words and grammar rules, and data from the internet so that it can answer you like a smart human can.

ChatGPT is an example of a large language model. That’s the thing you used to write your CV. LLMs have a rake of stuff in their brains that they’re using to write answers for you. This is the training data. A lot of this has been scraped from the internet but also books, art, etc. Including my own books.

Finding my novels scraped by AI, at first I couldn’t possibly figure out what use it would have to build up the large language models’ ability to describe the inner workings of an imaginary Tidy Towns group. But now, looking at the infiltration of Tidy Towns Facebook groups with AI-generated profiles, the whole thing is starting to fit together.

Just like all of us, AIs can have bias. And just like all of us, our bias depends on what we’ve been told. That bias can lead us to say some stupid stuff. AI systems reflect the prejudices in their training data. If it was trained on biased data, it can act in biased ways. Shite in, shite out.

Soon you’ll hear about AGI, artificial general intelligence. This is where a machine is smart enough to match or be better than humans across all types of intelligence. 

We’re not there yet, but already it is said that the next version of AI will be smart enough to do a PhD. The joke doing the rounds is that the version after that will be smart enough to turn down a PhD and maybe go working because its head is melted from research.

Speaking of education, there’s a huge concern in college about using AI to cheat. Academics are at a loss to know how to detect it. The only answer I think is to increase the level of in-person practical assessment. Maybe take a tip from the Fianna. There was no essay to be written for joining them. 

Jumping over a branch as tall as yourself, running under a knee-high stick, and plucking a thorn from your foot as you run at top speed was considered the entrance exam.

If you hear the “Turing test” thrown around, it’s a test to see if a machine can fool a human into thinking it’s also human. AIs recently passed a very hard version of it. “Very hard” is a technical term. I will not be taking follow-up questions.

You’ll see talk about regulation and “guardrails”. Guardrails are the rules built into AI to stop it from being harmful, but you’ll probably need another AI to enforce it and … shur they know each other as they went to school together. It’ll be the Celtic Tiger banks all over again.

Finally there’s hype — fierce excitement about what’s coming, given by people who have a stake in you being as concerned about this as possible. For more on that, why not sign up to my fun AI safety course called AAAAA!-I. Cash only.

• Colm is not hosting an AI course. Yet. He’ll be doing comedy at Coughlans on Sunday, May 25, until an AI replacement can be found. Coughlans.ie.