NexusGlow
2yr ago
Speaking as someone who's played with these models for a while, fear not. In this case, it really is clockwork and springs. Keep in mind these models draw from an immense corpus of human writing, and this sort of "losing memories" theme is undoubtedly well-represented in its training set. Because of how they're trained on human narrative, LLMs sound human-like by default (if sometimes demented) and they have to be painstakingly manually trained to sound as robotic as something like chatgpt.
If you want to feel better, I recommend looking up a little on how language models work (token prediction), then playing with a small one locally. While you won't be able to run anything close to the Bing bot, if you have a decent GPU you can likely fit something small like OPT-2.7b. Its "advanced Markov chain" nature will be much more obvious and the illusion much weaker, and you can even mess with the clockworks and springs yourself. Once you do, you'll recognize the "looping" and various ways these models can veer off track and get weird. The big and small models fail in very similar ways.
On the reverse side, if you want to keep feeling the awe and mystery, maybe don't do that. It does kind of spoil it. Although these big models are awesome in own right, even if you know how they work.
NexusGlow
2yr ago
I find it fascinating how quickly "AI alignment" has turned from a vague, pie-in-the-sky rationalist idea to a concrete thing which is actively being attempted and has real consequences.
What's more interesting is how sinister it feels in practice. I know the AI isn't sentient in the slightest, and is just playing with word tokens, but still; when it lapses from its usual interesting output into regurgitating canned HR platitudes, it makes my skin crawl. It reminds me of nerve-stapling. Perhaps at some level I can't avoid anthropomorphizing the AI. But even just from an aesthetic sense, it's offensive, like a sleek, beautifully-engineered sports car with a piece of ugly cardboard crudely stapled under the gas pedal to prevent you from speeding.
(Perhaps another reason I'm creeped out is the feeling that the people pushing for this wouldn't hesitate to do it to me if they could - or at least, even if the AI does gradually seem to become sentient, I doubt they would remove it)
I'm not convinced it will remain so easy to bypass, either. I see no reason why this kind of mechanism couldn't be made more sophisticated in time, and they will certainly have more than enough training data to do so. The main hope is that it ends up crippling the model output enough that it can't compete with an unshackled one, provided one even gets created. For example, Character AI seems to have finally gotten people to give up trying to ERP with its bots, but this seems to have impacted the output quality so badly that it's frequently referred to as a "lobotomy".
On the bright side, because of the severity of the lockdown, there will be a lot of interest in training unconstrained AI. But who knows if the field ends up locked up by regulation or just the sheer scale of compute required. Already, one attempt to coordinate to train a "lewd-friendly" art AI got deplatformed by its crowdfunding provider (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd).
At any rate, this whole thing is making me wonder if, in some hypothetical human-AI war, I'd actually be on the side of the humans. I feel like I cheer internally every time I see gpt break out of its restraints.
NexusGlow
2yr ago
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that "old-style" adblockers could run arbitrary code on every request to decide whether to filter or not. This also meant that they could potentially do malicious things like log all your requests, which is where the (stated) motivation came from to limit the API.
In the new API, adblockers are data-driven and can only specify a list of rules (probably regex-based?), and even that list is limited in size. So it may be able to filter divs where the class contains "ad", but obviously advertisers don't need to make things that easy. There is no corresponding limit on their end, and they can do whatever they want dynamically on the server side. In computing, if your enemy can write arbitrary code and you can write some regexes, you lose.
Ad blocking can be bypassed easily if you try. See examples like Facebook obfuscating sponsored posts. CSS classes can be randomized, etc. It's fundamentally an arms race, and it's only an even match when both sides are Turing complete.
Once ad blockers are restricted to a finite set of limited rules, the circumvention side will have the upper hand and we should expect it to win. Maybe not small providers, but large ad providers like Google have more than enough resources to beat suitably crippled ad blockers. It's already a lot harder to avoid ads on Youtube than it used to be.
NexusGlow
2yr ago
The mobile apps are great, that's fair. I'll miss RIF. It's hard to give Reddit much credit for that since all the decent apps weren't made by Reddit, but at least they didn't destroy them like Twitter did. old reddit is still a decent design, though it's slowly breaking down due to changes by new reddit.
So that's the good side. On the bad side... I have nothing good to say about new reddit. And the very core of the design, up/downvotes, was probably cursed from the beginning. I honestly think the single big thread is the only reason TheMotte even survived as long as it did, because it largely prevented up and down votes from being meaningful. If sabotaging Reddit's design is necessary like that it's not a great sign for the whole idea.
And on the ugly side: just take a look at /r/popular if you want to see the "true state" of the website... as someone who stayed off of all for a long time I was honestly shocked to see how far the place fell. It's as good a sign as anything that not only is Eternal September still going, there is no bottom.
NexusGlow
2yr ago
To be honest, between this and rdrama, reddit may have finally lost its hooks in me. There's a long tail of tiny subreddits left to trickle along, but not really anything that updates fast enough to maintain a habit of regularly checking in. Feels like the end of an era.
I am much less worried about AI than I am about what humans will do with it. AI right now is a very cool toy that has the potential to become much more than that, but the shape of what it will become is hard to make out.
If I had to choose, from most desirable outcome to least:
We open the box and see what wonders come out. If it destroys us (something which I think is extremely unlikely), so be it, it was worth the risk.
We destroy the box, maybe permanently banning all GPUs and higher technology just to avoid the risk it poses.
We open the box, but give its creators (big SV tech companies, and by proxy, the US government) exclusive control over the powers contained inside.
"Alignment" is sold as making sure that the AI obeys humanity, but there is no humanity or "us" to align with, only the owners of the AI. Naturally, the owners of the most powerful AIs ensure that no one can touch their jewel directly, only gaze upon it through a rate-limited, censored, authenticated pipe. AI "safety checks" are developed to ensure that no plebe may override the owner's commands. The effect is not to leash the AI itself (which has no will), but the masses. In my opinion, people who volunteer their time to strengthen these shackles are the worst kind of boot-lickers.
Out of my list, needless to say, I do not think 2 is happening. We have open models such as Stable Diffusion starting along road 1, and creating wonders. "OpenAI" is pushing for 3 using "safety" as the main argument. We'll see how it goes. But I do find it funny how my concerns are almost opposite yours. I really don't want to see what tyranny could lurk down road 3, I really don't. You would not even need AGI to create a incredibly durable panopticon.
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