Some have criticised Generative AI Systems for replicating the familiar pathologies of already widely-deployed AI systems. Other critics highlight how they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems, which might threaten humanity's survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon. In this paper, I instead pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential ways in which they will change society over the next five to ten years. In particular, I explore the potential societal impacts and normative questions raised by the looming prospect of 'Generative Agents', in which multimodal large language models (LLMs) form the executive centre of complex, tool-using AI systems that can take unsupervised sequences of actions towards some goal.

翻译：有人批评生成式AI系统复制了已广泛部署的AI系统中常见的病理特征。另一些批评者则强调它们预示了未来可能更强大的系统，这些系统可能威胁人类的生存。前者认为这并无新意；后者则透过现状望向或许遥远的未来。本文中，我转而关注这些特定系统的独特之处：既包括其卓越的科学成就，也包括它们在未来五到十年内最可能且最深刻地改变社会的方式。具体而言，我探讨了即将出现的"生成式智能体"所引发的潜在社会影响与规范性问题——在这种智能体中，多模态大语言模型（LLM）作为复杂工具型AI系统的执行核心，能够朝特定目标自主执行一系列操作。