Generative AI is in its “let’s f#¤% around and find out” era.

Generative AI is in its “let’s f#¤% around and found out” era.

As someone who has a multidisciplinary background, I’ve seen this stage in my other two fields: neuroscience and medicine.

In neuroscience, the “f#¤% around” era came in two waves, the late 30’s and early 70’s. Unprecedented discoveries were made about the nature of the nervous systems of all living creatures, but at the cost of a lot of suffering and unethical practices.

An example that is very much stuck in my mind is the “two headed dog” experiments by Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov and the primate-head transplant experiments by Robert J White. They were frowned upon back then as well, but they simultaneously were eerily accepted by the scientific community at the time.

The question is: What unethical practices are we engaging in that we are not the slightest aware of? GenAI reaches far beyond a few innocent note summaries on ChatGPT and is far more than NLP.

I have a list of the most unethical experiments that have been performed so far for a paper I am writing, and I see a pattern, very few of them have raised an eyebrow in the public because they sustain a hype.

Only time will tell if any or all of these will be judged as harshly as the suffering we now know we caused in neuroscience.

Image: The blueprint to “two headed dog” experiments taken from Wikipedia. I am too much of an animal lover to show the horrific results and traumatise people who love dogs.