So I'm curious — we're all here because we at least hate the current state of AI with hallucinating facts, being used to undress women and children, and all the fuckery that goes along with it.
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place on a ship with a perfect AI that does everything right and basically does nothing wrong. It never hallucinates information; it's always right. It has never been used to undress people against their will; however, the Holodeck is kind of an extension of that and was used for that on Deep Space Nine, when operated by a Ferengi (capitalist alien race in a world where humans are communist). But the Enterprise holodeck would never do that. The shipwide AI also does not traditionally carry on conversations. The one time it does, the human was hallucinating — sort of. The doctor was in a pocket universe, people were disappearing, and at one point the AI told her she was the only crew person on the Enterprise, and no, that did not make sense, but that that was still how it was. Because, in her pocket universe, it was true.
So the question is... would you want a perfect AI that was incapable of lying or harbouring anything untrue? Basically you could ask it anything and it would give you the correct answer.
The one fault I can find with that fictional AI is when Data (the android), dressed like Sherlock Holmes, asked the computer to "create an enemy which rivals my intelligence." He meant to say Sherlock Holmes's intelligence, who he was cosplaying, but the computer made a self-aware malicious AI that got out of the Holodeck and tried to destroy the ship... because it was told to do so. Other than that, though.
...I'm not trying to mislead anyone, so I will drop the other shoe, answer the begged question now. I've always felt that to get to that level of AI, we need to wade through the shit we're in now. So yeah, before you ask, that's kind of the point of the thought exercise. However, I will also say that I do not think we will get to Star Trek AI, I think we will get to Terminator AI, destroying the world rather than lifting people up. I think maybe in the Star Trek universe, AI didn't really take off until people realised that war wasn't the answer, after WW3/the Eugenics Wars, and so they were making AI to make things better, not worse. We are not in that timeline. I look at what is happening now, IRL, and the timeline in the Terminator franchise, and it's clear to me that that one is more realistic.
That said, I still wonder if anyone would want AI if it did not have any of the problems.
I thought I was in !startrek@startrek.website for a moment...
My take is that even if you consider LLMs to fall under the umbrella of "AI" (I don't), they appear to be a completely different technology than the Enterprise-D computer, which is more like highly advanced natural language processing.
It's not really possible for an AI to know what's true with 100% accuracy, but I do think it's technically possible to invent an AI that is honest. It's important to remember that LLMs are actually "hallucinating" 100% of the time. The only reason they are ever correct is because the training data was correct.
They have said that the Enterprise computers contain the whole of human knowledge.
The text of Wikipedia (EN) alone is something like 16GB, and that can be archived. Thus, you can have most of that human knowledge on any smartphone. Most of them can access it, but there are devices being sold that have Wikipedia EN downloaded, plus a bunch of survival stuff. On a Raspberry Pi. I doubt the microSD card is bigger than 32GB and might just be 16GB.
Sure, but Wikipedia does not care about "truth". "It's true" is not a valid citation on Wikipedia (and "knowledge" is not the same as "truth"). Wikipedia is built on references from experts from people that can be honest while still being factually incorrect.
It's an important distinction because an LLM can be correct but it can never be honest. The hypothetical Enterprise-D computer appears to be able to be honest, even when incorrect.