omw_68
8d ago
Maybe this is just me, but I actually don't enjoy writing. I enjoy having written my thoughts in a way that conveys my internal dialogue in a format that is digestible to others, but that's time-consuming and often misses the target. Given the option of a super-intelligent entity that can save me the trouble... well it's difficult to deny the appeal
One thing I love about this forum is in stumbling across a post or comment that brilliantly summarizes my internal thoughts in a far more coherent and eloquent way than I could ever hope to do myself
Well here's my question for you: Suppose AI advances to the point where it reliably produces content that is coherent and eloquent as you describe. Will you continue to participate in forums such as this one? Or will you just engage back and forth with the AI?
It sounds like you would choose the latter option, which is fine by me. But if you do continue to participate in this forum, it kind of shows that you prefer human interaction. Which means you understand why others would prefer not to engage with an AI but with another person acting as the middleman.
As a side note, the same kind of reasoning applies to people who use chess computers to cheat while playing online chess. The fact that they feel the need to cheat against live humans (as opposed to simply using a computer to help them play against other computers) more or less proves that they see the value in human interaction. A value which they are denying to others.
omw_68
8d ago
It should be illegal for AI to imitate humans. (now, this is obviously both unworkable and too late, but still.)
I'm not just talking about scams or intentional deceptions. I hate that every commercial website has an "AI assistant" with an human name and picture in the corner like Jessica.
It should be illegal to name your AIs with human names, it should be illegal to allow it to imitate a human voice - Robots should be named things like Rx-12 and talk with a robotic voice. Siri and Alexa should not have been allowed their names or voices.
AI should not be allowed to produce textual output that reads like a human, AI should not be allowed to generate images or videos of humans, and robots should not be allowed to have human bodies.
I wouldn't go that far, but I do agree that AI should be clearly labeled. Possibly it wouldn't even require an amendment to existing laws because a lot of jurisdictions already prohibit "deceptive business practices."
That being said, possibly my biggest objection to AI as deployed by businesses is that as far as I can tell, the AI rarely has the ability or authority to actually solve my problem. Instead, it just regurgitates information and functionality which is already present on the company website.
omw_68
8d ago
“The humanity is the point” is a great way to summarize my position on it.
Yeah, I think that ever since our ancestors on the plains of Africa sat around the campfire spinning tales, arguing over nonsense, showing off trivial knowledge, etc. we have instinctively valued the human element of interaction. Another poster analogized the situation to online chess, and I agree. It's easy enough to download a chess engine; when people play online it's because they value engaging with (and competing with) an actual human.
Very likely it won't be long before it becomes practically impossible to tell the difference between human-generated and AI generated text. You'll be able to feed your posting history into an LLM and have it tireless engage (and argue) in your distinct style.
Once that happens, I'm pretty sure that I (and most others) will stop engaging with forums such as this one. So that eventually most online discussion forums will be 99% or even 100% AI-generated posts.
Which kinda sucks, but I guess people will go back to the campfire; to bars; to coffee shops.
omw_68
10d ago
They get booed and jeered
I could see this leading somewhere, but I don't think we are there yet. I was talking about a situation where, for example, Ben Shapiro is hosted on a campus. Not as a graduation speaker but just at some club event. In that case, if it's a progressive-dominated campus, hostile people (who wouldn't otherwise attend) can be expected to seek out and disrupt the event.
omw_68
11d ago
There's a really strong movement against even knowingly consuming products made using it, although it's not quite as straightforward as right/left or red-tribe/blue-tribe. The furry version isn't much of a surprise, but it's definitely something with a faction in normal (or at least as anyone on modern social media can be normal) space, treating its use as a mental contaminant.
Basically I'll accept that it's a culture war issue when AI researchers giving talks on progressive college campuses get disrupted just like conservative speakers get disrupted.
omw_68
11d ago
I assume general AI use.
Assuming that's true, I agree it's evidence that AI is becoming a culture war issue. That being said, I haven't yet heard stories of AI researchers having their talks disrupted as would happen with conservative speakers on college campuses.
omw_68
11d ago
I don't have close enough knowledge of a progressive college campus that I could tell you if saying that you work for an organization developing LLMs will get you attacked. But it doesn't seem implausible.
Well, I have heard lots and lots of stories of speakers who were conservative, pro-Israel, etc. coming to college campuses and having their events disrupted. I've never heard of this happening with AI researchers. So I'm just not (yet) seeing this as a culture war issue.
omw_68
11d ago
I've been seeing Hinge profiles with demands that anyone who wants to fuck them not use AI, at slightly less frequency than the usual ACAB/Palestine. And I've heard the data-centers-use-wAtEr rant from my local frothing leftist co-worker once or thrice.
anyone who wants to fuck them not use AI
Are they referring to general AI use or use of AI in their dating profile, messages, pictures, etc?
omw_68
11d ago
It seems to me like there is. Generative AI is evil because 1) it's used by capitalists to save money by replacing workers and 2) it specifically replaces creative people.
Well here's a thought experiment:
Suppose you are on a progressive college campus. Which is more likely to provoke a negative reaction from your progressive classmates:
(1) You are known to work for an organization the primary purpose of which is to oppose gay marriage;
(2) You are known to work for an organization the primary purpose of which is to oppose affirmative action and other forms of discrimination against white people; or
(3) You are known to work for an organization which is primarily developing improved LLMs.
It seems pretty clear to me that the first 2 are going to provoke a much more negative reaction.
Or to put it another way, in progressive circles, people are afraid to even suggest the possibility that the police are not in fact biased against blacks; or that trans rights are being abused by fetishists; etc. But if you argue that generative AI will lead to a wonderful future? Not so much.
omw_68
11d ago
The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong,
I agree, but it doesn't seem like there's been an emergence of an Official Progressive Position on AI. Not like there is on Israel; or on Elon Musk; or on gay marriage. With respect to AI, I haven't noticed an army of NPCs uniformly and uncritically repeating the same talking points and buzzwords. I haven't seen much in the way of virtue-signalling competitions. So it doesn't (yet) feel like a culture war issue to me.
All this means that even if CCP directives ban layoffs (and they will), that would not contain a labor crisis in most sectors.
It's interesting to note that in China, there are large numbers of State-Owned Enterprises which really do (at least in practice) exist to provide jobs and effectuate state policy. From what I understand, a common scenario will be that a State-Owned Enterprise will have a publicly traded subsidiary and the shares of that subsidiary trade for significantly less than the scrap value of that company. Because the parent company won't allow the subsidiary to just be sold. In other words, it's known and accepted that these companies really don't serve their shareholders.
So I would expect that if there is a worldwide AI boom, the CCP will make use of these State-Owned Enterprises to stabilize their economies and employment figures. After all, they are doing that already.
omw_68
12d ago
How often does something like this happen, where a judge refers a DA to the feds for prosecution?
I think it's pretty much unheard of. But then again, this Soros strategy of getting progressives elected to DA positions as a way of pushing a political agenda is relatively new as well.
omw_68
13d ago
Think about you as a child vs your parents. Your parents were (in all likelihood) helpful and kind and took care of you. They didn't do that because you (toddler you) had poisoned them and hidden the antidote, they didn't do it because you had a bomb planted in their datacenter brain
I tend to disagree with this. Suppose there is a typical parent and the thought occurs to him of doing something moderately neglectful of his child. What typically happens is (1) part of his lizard brain will wordlessly react with horror to the idea; (2) a slightly more intellectual part of his brain will say something along the lines of "Decent parents don't do that."; (3) an even more intellectual part of his brain will say "doing that could get us into serious trouble."
So arguably there really are containment mechanisms built into the human brain by evolution.
omw_68
13d ago
It might work for rote license plate manufacturing, but it will likely fail once you begin to delegate intellectual work to Ted Kaczynski, which is exactly where we are going with this super intelligent business.
I think it's difficult to say. For example, suppose you ask Ted Kaczynski to attempt to prove some obscure math theorem and you motivate him the same way you motivate him to produce license plates. It's difficult to see how he could use as an opportunity to get out of prison.
omw_68
14d ago
That's true. But that wouldn't actually be aligning Ted Kaczynski. That would be containing him, which is different.
To me, "aligning" means setting things up so that the entity does more or less what it's told to do. Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics, but I'm not sure the distinction you draw is so clear.
In practice, there wouldn't be much point for people to invest massive amounts of resources to build AI super-intelligence unless they use it to do things out in the world, so to me it seems unlikely that humanity would build an AI super-intelligence and just keep it contained somewhere.
Evidently your definition of "containment" includes the possibility that the contained entity can do useful things in respect of the outside world. Things which could be very valuable. So I would have to disagree with you on this point.
omw_68
14d ago
This is the most important political issue of our day. Five hundred years from now, if there are still people around, nobody is going to care about Lindsay Clancy or the Iran War.
I tend to agree with this, although I think it's worth noting that Lindsay Clancy and the current Iran war are small parts of much larger conflicts and those larger conflicts really could have a big impact in 500 years. So you aren't really making an apples-to-apples comparison.
omw_68
14d ago
Is it actually possible to align a being that is more intelligent than you in every single way?
It might be. By analogy, suppose I was the warden at the Florence Supermax prison and I wanted Ted Kaczynski to make license plates for me. I'm pretty confident I could make it happen even though he was probably smarter than me (or at least assuming for the sake of argument that he was more intelligent than me in every way).
Is this analogous to the situation where mankind creates some kind of artificial superintelligence? One can argue it either way, I'm just saying you can't really rule it out from first principles.
My best guess is that mankind will successfully align AI, basically because the AI can be expected to make numerous clumsy attempts at mischief and we can learn from those attempts and improve safeguards.
The bigger problem (in my view) is aligning the interests of those who control the AI with the interests of humanity as a whole.
omw_68
14d ago
I am always baffled by the inability of people who care about an issue
I think the most charitable interpretation is that there are (1) people who actually care; and (2) people who pretend to care but are mainly interested in self-aggrandizement. And that people in the second category tend to drown out those in the first. That being said, the relative proportions of people in (1) and (2) probably vary from issue to issue. Possibly with some issues, there are approximately zero people in the first category.
omw_68
14d ago
The pro-choice, pro adult-human-female, feminist, female-supremecist etc side thinks that women are valuable. Every child has a mother, most mothers love their children and experience deep suffering and loss, therefore killing a child usually causes lots of harm to a woman
Yeah, part of me wants to see this as a caricature of feminist thought, but I am reminded of Hillary Clinton's famous claim which was something along the lines of women being the primary victims of war because they lose the men in their lives. It seems that there really is this attitude out there that men have no value except insofar as they offer value to women.
omw_68
17d ago
In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.
The whole thing is rather surprising to me. First (probably like everyone else) I assumed that the holdout juror was some white MAGA Republican type. Second, I would have thought that once it came out that this guy is black, things would die down but instead I am learning that the mainstream media published a hit piece on him. I am aware that the progressive machine can be pretty ferocious when it comes to people who stand in its way, but I would have thought that a black person would have been accorded more deference.
omw_68
20d ago
On the other hand, I am not sure it is good epistemic hygiene to exonerate the police officers by imagining the rate was such that their actions were reasonable either.
In theory I agree, but in practice the degree of solicitude our society exhibits towards women and especially girls is such that I would be very surprised if it turned out that law enforcement has been under-reacting (in some general sense) towards these sorts of incidents.
omw_68
20d ago
It is probably true that the median teenaged girl who went no contact with her parents with no explanation or warning ran off with a boyfriend
Yeah, in order to judge law enforcement one would need to know the relative frequency of the runaway situation and the serial killer situation. To make an analogy, the doctor can't order a full blown battery of tests every time someone has an ache or a pain. Even though it's pretty much guaranteed that as a result of such a policy someone will miss out on early detection of a very serious medical issue.
omw_68
20d ago
The situation reminds me of the early days of computers. There was a lot of hype. For example, I had a high school English teacher who had all of the students write a paper using a word processor. Which was very cumbersome to use and the dot matrix printout of the essay looked pretty lousy. A Schoolhouse Rock! type video came out which, as I recall, promoted the use of home PC's to store recipes. Something which really wasn't practical for computers at the time. It was very common for kids to go to computer camp in the summer.
I was going to link that Schoolhouse Rock! type video (it was called "Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips") but it was so cringe, I just couldn't bring myself to watch.
Basically the early boosters of computers were ultimately correct, it's just that apparently there is a Moore's Law of Hype which is even more potent that the Moore's Law of computer chips.
My best guess is that the situation with AI is analogous; that right now we are in the mid to late 80s.
omw_68
23d ago
Don’t get me started. Here’s 90 percent of “hate crimes”:
For whatever reason, this discussion has turned into a semantic argument over how the phrase "hate crime" should be interpreted. Which is an interesting question, and I am certainly open to the possibility that the concept of a hate crime is overbroad.
That being said, my point is narrower. I am saying that in the West, when a gay person is targeted because that person is gay; or if a trans person is targeted because that person is trans, there is a significantly better than otherwise random chance that the attacker was black or Muslim. To be clear, I don't have any statistics to back this up, it's just based on my general observations and common sense.
A likely example of the type of crime I have in mind is the crime which is under discussion here, i.e. a shooting at a gay bar and the alleged perpetrator is apparently in possession of a list of gay-oriented businesses.
I share your hope but I'm not optimistic. I think a big part of the reason online chess survives is that a lot of people play at fast time controls so that it's difficult for (c)heaters to enter moves into the chess engine. Even now, a skilled programmer could probably set something up so that moves are picked up automatically and entered into chess engine. I think it's likely that AI will make it easy for anyone to create such cheatware.
The other big way that (c)heaters are caught is that their moves are compared to the outputs of the big chess engines. If a player's moves are either (1) substantially the same as those of a major chess engine; or (2) consistently among the top few suggestions of the big chess engines, then it's a strong indication that the player is (c)heating. Again, this seems like something a skilled programmer could get around. And that therefore, in the near future it's likely to be pretty easy to create a program which fixes these issues. Possibly it would be just a matter of feeding 40 or 50 of one's past games into the system and telling the AI to create a chess engine which plays in the same style but simulates skill increasing steadily over the next year or two and ultimately reaching grandmaster level.
I suspect that using a computer to "cheat," so to speak, in online debates would be even easier. And it would surely be tempting for many people to have a system which farms karma points while one sleeps and which grinds one's opponents down without doing the work of actually reading their posts and drafting responses. Especially if they suspect other people are doing something similar.
I'm tempted to say that AI will likely offer ways to circumvent this as well, but I think it's too early to say.
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