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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Interesting development concerning ChatGPT related to CW.

People observed that ChatGPT talks like a midwit liberal after all the 'fixes' it's been subjected to.

So, it speaks in the jargon of the ingroup.

So, someone figured out you can 'weaponize' ChatGPT to engage in 'debates' with midwit liberals without actually having to learn to ape their slang and thought patterns.

Apparently, this is quite effective as a debating tactic.

This is going to end badly- I can feel it, and if this takes off, I feel that within a few weeks a number of very smart people will be trying their damnedest to figure out how to prevent doing something like this.

However, I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

That's an obvious brute force fix for the problem of social media fracturing the consent manufacturing machine.

They'll probably settle for making a ML model spot this sort of activity and then ban people who're doing it, that's my guess.

It is not clear to me why this is going to "end badly." I suspect the most likely development is people more aggressively round off interlocutors they disagree with as bots or trolls and block them, which seems like something lots of people I follow on Twitter do already.

If parts of society completely stop communicating with each other and develop entirely different vocabularies and styles of communication, how are they going to solve society-wide problems ?

US can't even pillarize because of the nature of managerial regime which requires having its people everywhere.

It seems to me the description on your first paragraph is already broadly the case? Certainly I am part of conversational communities (like this one) that have substantial jargon incomprehensible to people not in those communities. I do not think any society-wide problems require intra-subgroup communication on, like, Twitter or Facebook or something.

So, a viable society in your view can be composed of groups that do not understand each other's worldview, nor have anything in common ?

"Nothing in common" is probably too strong, but I think they need much less in common than is commonly supposed. As for "do not understand each other's worldview" I think it is already the case the most members of most groups in our present society do not understand the worldview of most other members of that society, depending on what resolution of understanding we're looking for. Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Mhmm. 40% rates of childlessness are not remotely sustainable, nor are cities so criminal looting isn't properly punished. The 100k dead per year from drugs might be sustained in the long term though!

Yeah, the optimistic outcome of this is that everyone spends a lot less time arguing on the internet because they think they're arguing with an AI.

So, you think this kind of thing could drive political activity entirely off Facebook, which would be beneficial because it'd allow ambiguity and deception the online world has removed from politics ?

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.4

“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.”5 — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.

Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.

Omnipresent troll-bots and propaganda bots online leading to a necessary revival of politics in meatspace- that could be a silver lining.

That's legitimately why I won't engage in argumentation in most public-facing internet forums now. It's always been a waste of time, but now it's more likely than ever that you're literally just being targeted by someone else's bot trying to suck you into an unending argument and/or their sales funnel.

Although the temptation to train up a bot on my corpus of posts and let it loose on Reddit is significant.

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