By Pedro Arizpe
Prometheus didn’t risk anything in the sense one of us would use the term. He has forethought; nothing is a surprise to him. He didn’t take a risk, he traded certain punishment for his children’s enlightenment.
i don’t think this metaphor works…
I think it works pretty well. Any tool will have good aspects and bad aspects, and its functionality will only be as good as our ability to make use of the good aspects while limiting the bad ones.
Humans benefit from fire because the good aspects of warmth, light, and cooking all vastly outweigh the bad aspect of the danger of catching on fire, which can be mitigated relatively easily by not bringing flammable things near it. If we ourselves were highly flammable, fire would be far too dangerous to be useful.
The obvious AI metaphor points out how, just like paper beings covered in gasoline are weak to fire, human beings are weak to a friendly voice speaking with confidence, and will succumb to it just as quickly if exposed. Any benefit it might have otherwise been able to give is outweighed by the danger of our natural affinity for believing what is told to us by a trusted figure and stubbornly treating it as undeniable fact for the rest of our lives.
…so are you saying that the good aspects of ai outweigh the bad, or that the bad aspects of fire outweigh the good?
also what does stealing fire from the gods represent here? what is prometheus’ motivation? is he evil here, or ignorant? what does his eventual punishment by the gods represent? is this saying that humans are naturally susceptible to ai, or that they have been made so by on external process (aka pouring gasoline)? in that context, is “it’s just a tool” a sincere statement, or part of the plan? what even is the plan the author alluding to?
I’m saying the bad aspects of AI outweigh the good. I left out listing any good aspects of AI because I don’t know any. The comic’s version of Prometheus is a metaphor for the tech billionaire, claiming that he’s done this amazing thing for the benefit of the people, but from his action of plugging his ears, we can see that he knew how his “gift” would be received; he, like the tech billionaire, clearly has his own motivations that he’s passing off as charity.
It’s left ambiguous about whether he’s evil or just ignorant, which is itself a good mirror of real life, where we can’t tell if our overlords are stupid, or are actively planning out the downfall of civilization as we know it. Do they think AI is just a tool, and it’s our fault for being so susceptible to its bad aspects, or was it purposefully designed to exploit them, and the “just a tool” excuse is just them passing the blame? Are we being purposefully led off a cliff, or are we simply following a blind leader to the edge?
The gasoline is ambiguous as well - are these people naturally covered in gasoline, as we may be naturally susceptible to AI and its hallucinations, or were they covered on purpose by someone to prepare them for the fire, as we may have been prepared to accept misinformation online well before AI hit the scene? The comic leaves off any mention of punishment from the gods, maybe to indicate that, like the tech billionaire, the governing body meant to keep them in line is in on the scheme. The very fact that both this comic and the real-life situation it’s parodying have the same questions is indicative of the quality of the metaphor.
It’s left ambiguous about whether he’s evil or just ignorant
There’s an interview where Sam Altmann claims that AI will destroy the worl, but will create “awesome tools” before that. Almost a 1:1 copy of the meme
I absolutely hate public facing llms as a product, but, there can be some undeniably good things to come out out of it, just because you said you knew of zero positives, here’s at least a single good one
https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/ ^^ Database of every way (afaik) proteins can be folded and what effect that has on the protein, has already been used extensively to develop new medicine and vaccines.
Edit: Not a database of everything at all, it’s a predictive model. I don’t know that much about this lol. Check out the explanation below, much more in depth
Curing the sick and ill I’m pretty sure we can agree is a positive?
I still think the negatives far outweigh the few positives there might be associated, but it is true that as a tool it can be productive if used correctly.
Folding@Home already existed and does the same thing
Not knowing your expertise, I’ll risk making a fool of myself.
But first, for everyone’s sake: ALPHAFOLD ISNT AN LLM
That isn’t what alphafold is. Under no circumstances is it anywhere near close to a “database of every way … proteins can fold.” At all. And to construe it as anything other than an attempt at a way to predict or simulate the potential three dimensional structure a protein can adopt will mislead people.
A protein does not have one shape. It has multiple. They’re dynamic. They change shape. It’s how proteins represent information. I’d argue that the ability of proteins to change their shape is one of their most important properties. (Analogy: play a song on an instrument with one note. Hard-mode: consider silence a note)
Everything in Alphafold is a GUESSED MODEL and not reality. Crystal structures and cryo-EM structures are also MODELS. But they’re based on empirical evidence.
Alphafold is based on statistical evidence. It is evidence, but it is weaker. If we don’t have an example of how a protein might fold in the structural database, alphafold will struggle to predict the structure. At least not without it sharing some type of sequence similarity.
I see this in the AI drug companies and how they just treat predictive models the same as 2 angstrom crystal structures and it pisses me off.
Not an expert at all, so thanks for clarifying what the alphafold project is in more detail. My bad on the confusing wording as well, i specifically mentioned my distrust of commodified llms to distinguish that from whatever alphafold and similar projects would be (don’t know if that use of ai has a specific term).
From what I know of the project it seems to be nice use of ai tech, am i wrong in that? Genuinely asking :)
It’s honestly a super subtle difference and only structure heads like me care about it. It matters on the edges. My advisor gave sage advice that I think more people should take to heart. To paraphrase: every experiment has limitations and assumptions baked in assumptions. That doesn’t mean their results are invalid/irrelevant, but you need to know what they are so you know when they are violated or don’t apply.
It’s a spin on the "all models are wrong, but not all models are useful
/pedagogical soapbox
It’s a great use of AI / machine learning tech. Incredible. Turns out biology reuses structure a LOT. Structure is function in biology, and there are a LOT of shared, essential functions in Biology. Their models are actually incredibly accurate at predicting the individual atom placement for side chains (the bit of an amino acid that makes it unique from other amino acids). Side chains do chemistry for proteins, so this is highly salient for research broadly. It’s just far from being a “solved problem” like they would have you believe.
The main thing to keep in mind, is that alphafold is not predicting structures based on first principles (that is to say, based on the underlying physics and laws of nature). It uses sequence similarity between proteins with solved structures to make probable guesses as to the structure and how it folds. Solely based off current experimental data-driven structure models.
This works surprisingly well even for proteins that don’t have much actually in common with the amino acid sequence of the protein. But because structure is function, we can still trace and track the divergences in sequence over time while still being confident the overall shape is the same.
But for things that there are not enough sequence diverse examples of, or for things that there are no examples, alphafold regularly just spits them out like a literal ball of spaghetti - because the assumptions it relies on are invalid. There’s not enough statistical evidence - for those examples.
I don’t have a handy reference offhand, it’s been a few years, but there is this image from their blog posts ( ref ) that shows whe I’m talking about. My understanding is that AlphaFold is an incredibly accurate and effective homology modeling strategy (how can we model structures we don’t have data for based off similarity to structures we do have).
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in structural prediction, homology models, machine learning, structural determination via crystallography or cryo-EM. I’m more experienced in consuming them for understanding the structure:function relationship.
i mean, using prometheus in particular has certain connotations that in my mind weakens the metaphor. as does the use of a man-made fuel. that’s why i don’t think in works. there’s also the aspect someone pointed out that he seems to know some people are arsonists despite them never having had access to fire.
The introverts who percieve kindness as a potential threat will inherit the earth.
What is it supposed to be a thinly vailed reference to? Guns?
Because, yeah, it doesn’t work.
I vaguely thought it might be about guns too, and I couldn’t tell if it was made by someone who was pro or against guns. Now people are like, it’s obviously about AI, and the analogy makes even less sense to me.
It’s vague enough that you can fit any social issue of your choice in there.
It’s an obvious reference to <insert thing I don’t like here>.
It’s AI. The author/artist specifies on his page.
ai
With glabal warming and fossil fuels being what they are, this also doesn’t need to be a metaphor. Could be pretty literal.
The absurdity leads to humor.
it tends to lead to overanalysis instead, i find. like, if the fire is ai and prometheus is the companies that brought us the ai, what does everyone being covered in gasoline represent? wasn’t prometheus punished by the gods for bringing fire to humanity? does this imply that indeed it is just a tool and the flammable arsonists are a few bad apples? are they implying that it was wrong of prometheus to bring fire to humanity? or are they implying that prometheus is an innocent party, or to take it further, actively malicious? and if so, again, why is everyone covered in gasoline?
Only if it works, if it doesn’t it just leads to confusion and frustration.
How can they be obvious arsonists if they’ve never had fire before?
I think the implication is that they are too eager to have access to fire. The entire thing is somehow both ham-fisted and arcane at the same time. Quite the line to skirt.
