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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'll definitely make the accusations of NPC more salient.

But it overly focuses on one target audience, maybe because of the particularities of ChatGPT. But most any type of text can be generated by a LLM; you could just as well have an Angry QAnoner, sino poster (complete with characteristic grammar errors), Tom Friedman, etc. archetype. You'll soon have weaponized bots putting out "Donald Trump's argument for mass amnesty," and it's only a matter of time before GPT5 can generate a comment in the voice of Ilforte. And there's no way, in the medium term, to avoid this. Platforms could try to detect these and ban them, but that's a rearguard action and will increasingly catch flesh GPTs (see the entire Reddit art imbroglio)

More likely than not, any content that's surfaced to you on a major platform should be assumed to be machine generated.

Does anyone know how easy or hard it is for non politically correct actors to get ahold of comparable tech?

Is the actual code to create a LLM simple enough that it could leak? Is the compute necessary to train it limited to commercial scale hardware or can you do it on a PC or small server? Is access to the training data hard to come by? Is the fact that we know it works enough for someone to develop their own models in parallel in a small dev group?

Simply put, can this tech leak to non compromised groups. Or will we only have access to the censored version.

I’m talking in the short to medium term, assuming no major strong ai breakthroughs.

Training the full model is expensive and not (currently) accessible to folks. It will become significantly cheaper over time, though within the next couple years still out of reach of hobbyists.

Fine tuning a model that already exists and is open is relatively cheap.

Having access to sufficient compute and knowing that something can be done and how it's done is 90% of the battle.

For hobbyists, access to compute is a bigger issue than training data.

Multiple large corporations and governments have these models already. It only takes one released or leaked model to open the floodgates.