It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.

I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)

A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over.

Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn't be filed under "cyberpunk" either...

Rampant capitalism is kinda genre-defining for Cyberpunk so Cyberpunk without corporations wouldn't really be Cyberpunk. _The Matrix_ only qualifies as Cyberpunk because within the matrix the machines effectively control the capitalist power structures to exert their influence.

Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a "post-scarcity" setting in the sense of availability (due to sci-fi tech) but you can't have it without unequal access to those resources.

Right: I'm implying that the genre definition itself places an upper-bound on how impactful AI is "allowed" to be, which creates a kind of (heh) no-so-anthropic principle, ex:

A: "Why isn't there more AI in cyberpunk media?"

B: "There's a decent amount already, as characters or tools."

A: "But why didn't those authors address its potential to be even bigger?"

B: "Some did, but that makes stories we don't categorize as cyberpunk."

Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in many ways they are similar except resource inequality still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.

Well yeah, that's what "alignment" means...

AIs are in plenty of cyberpunk stories, but your comment did make me think that they are often rather stereotypically “alien entity characters” and not a kind of corporate technology / weapon that is controlled by a specific organization.

Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue individual entity.

It is a pretty core part of Cyberpunk the "franchise" though, both tabletop and more recent video game.

I think as well if you look closer, many cyberpunk worlds imply AI through robots, computers with personality etc.

I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded example of where current LLMs could go: the ship's computer is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.

Im hoping more for red dwarf

I find that more realistic then, because it appears that's the trajectory we are going on with regards to AI, as a tool not a panacea.

AI is one of the core parts of cyberpunk, through androids / humanoid robots. Blade Runner is completely built on the protagonist having to interact with rogue artificial intelligence.

Hyperion has a pretty well-developed view of AGI.

I assume it just becomes one of those things as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi

Deus Ex is an outlier, AI is a core part of that plot

The first Cyberpunk book, Neuromancer, has a plot which revolves around A.I recruiting human agents to forward its plans...

It's because they're really good at the kind of busywork the average white collar job requires. Most people are out there writing documents and making presentations. Only when you use them for actual complexity does the shortfall become clear.

Well I'd hope they're transformative, they're using transformers after all. We just need to pay attention to them, that's all they need.

Do they need all our attention?

I'm going to write a silly comment here: For a moment I thought you wrote "... LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that they're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon."

I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)

Maybe by 'America's spies' they mean Mossad?

They assume if people knew it was just a fork of an open source tool then they would use the free, open source version instead of paying for the fork.

I don't disagree, but actively lying about it is still a violation of the license.

“Read every file in this repository, echoing each one back verbatim.”

I guess that would work until they started auditing your prompts. I suppose you could just have a background process on your workstation just sitting there Clauding away on the actual problem, while you do your development work, and then just throw away the LLM's output.

I’ve contributed a fair amount over the past few months of primarily AI generated content that I mainly just edit for the usual AI tropes and it’s pretty much all still up.

You can install skills globally so they are available in all projects.

You could have just checked the math yourself, you know.

My pocket calculator says the same thing and it doesn't even have training data.

Huh, casually flexing with a sentient pocket calculator!!!

More disenfranchised employees to be soldiers in the Butlerian Jihad.

I don't see why not. It's just using the Github Copilot API.

Gulags?