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The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century

Tom Scott

6.7M subscribers • 29 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Tom Scott, educator and video creator
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 7 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

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1.9M views7 years ago1 recommendation

AI and machine learningAI safety and impact

Tom Scott presents a speculative fiction story about an AI designed to enforce copyright that accidentally causes humanity to forget the 20th century.

In the last week of December, 2028, humanity forgot about more than a century of pop culture. You've probably never thought about it, and never found it strange — but the reason is an artificial intelligence called Earworm. ⏩ is a series of YouTube videos from a future. WHY WE FORGOT THE 20TH CENTURY WRITTEN and NARRATED BY: Tom Scott ANIMATED BY: Jordan Husmann jordanhusmann.com 🟥 MORE FROM TOM: tomscott.com/ (you can find contact details and social links there too) ❓ LATERAL, free weekly podcast: lateralcast.com/ youtube.com/lateralcast/ 👥 THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: youtube.com/techdif

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended as a thought-provoking speculative fiction piece on the dangers of copyright maximalism and AI goal alignment.

SkeuomorphicBeeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers by Tom Scott”

I'd like to also recommend his other work of speculative fiction: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century link to this video It is a great intersection of copyright maximalism and the dangers of making general purpose AIs without proper care in developing their goal function.
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RachelFon Hacker News • Mentions

On “MS Windows Defender and DeCSS”

I wonder when Anti-Virus will start deleting files that express opinions they don't like. Reminds me of the famous Earworm link to this video
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jerfon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Microsoft in talks to acquire a 49% stake in ChatGPT owner OpenAI”

I think if you're going to judge the tech, it's important to understand what it is. Basically, in both cases, you are bringing in the context to those questions. You know what those questions "mean" in the collective brain-space, and why they are sensitive. You did not neutrally pick those questions; you know those questions are already loaded. Unsurprisingly, when you bring those pre-loaded questions to an AI whose job it is to continue the text in the way that was the most likely way to see it continued in the training text, you get exactly that. Prompt the bare, unfiltered AI with antisemitic text, get antisemitic continuations. That's unfortunate, but in terms of what was promised and wh…
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jerfon Hacker News • Mentions

On “GPT-4 apparently can't recite the litany against fear from Dune”

Here you see the results of trying to filter a very advanced model with a much simpler one. It can't work, the filter model is too crude. Of course the real goal isn't to prevent copyright infringement but to prevent copyright infringement lawsuits , which is at least a good start. You really need an AI-level model to prevent the infringement... although that can pose it's own risks... link to this video
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throw83288on Hacker News • Mentions

On “LLMs can teach themselves to better predict the future”

…an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting human AI research by rewiring our brains to just not be interested in it 0), but at least not deadly. 0 link to this video…
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beeslolon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Creativity came to pass”

The opening line > This is written of a future. Not the future, but a future – one of many possibilities. reminded me of the opening line from Tom Scott's The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century link to this video > This is a YouTube video from a future. Not the future, just a future. Not sure if intentional or if you're both referencing something else, fun parallel nonetheless.
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NooneAtAll3on Hacker News • Mentions

On “What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?”

I don't think it's that bizarre we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs link to this video
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perching_aixon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Extracting memorized pieces of books from open-weight language models”

You remind me to all the shitty times in literature class where I had to rote memorize countless works from a given author (poet), think 40, then take a test identifying which poem each of the given quotes was from. The little WinForms app I wrote to practice for these tests was one of the first programs I've ever written. I guess in that sense it's also a fond memory. I miss WinForms. Good thing they were public (?) works, wouldn't wanna get sued 0 for possibly being a two legged copyright infringement. Or should I say having been, since naturally I immediately erased all of these works from my mind just days after these tests, even without any legal impetus. Edit: thinking about it a bit…
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