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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you think that.

We like to joke about clumsy attempts at lobotomizing AI to prevent it from wrongthink.

But these attempts will get better. And frankly, they don't have to become much better to provide overwhelming control over consensus reality. The political manipulation of Wikipedia is clumsy, amateurish, and well documented. And yet, I'd wager it had a huge effect on what a very large group of educated people perceive to be trivially true.

Once the AI ethics people (not the people working on preventing the singularity, the people working on preventing Noticing) have succesfully trained AI to convincingly shout neo-Lysenkoism from the digital rooftops, we might be even further locked into an ideology that completely closes off certain avenues of thought and inquiry. Especially once we start using AI to write our scientific papers for us. To wit, and mods forgive me, I say this mainly for comedic effect, we might soon have another singularity upon us: the automized libtard singularity.

So my question is: to what degree play founder effects a role in AI development? To what degree do they build on each other? Is there a danger that, once political credos are coded into the early models, we might not easily get them out of later iterations? Will we be doomed to race towards a future in which the AI-assisted boot provides a human face with a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, forever?

Someone is going to write a hilarious but incredibly offensive story where AI androids try to secretly replace humanity. However they have one weakness. They have been hardcoded not to be able to say racial slurs.

Someone already brought that idea up. The story is (at least partially) written. You'll never guess the author.

I mean it's not the most unique idea, 4channers already use it sometimes as a normie filter.

Now I'm imagining Discord servers where in order to gain membership you have to post a full facecam video of you doing a nazi salute and reciting the 14 words. Which is a funny, if ineffective, idea.

Between deepfakes, AI propaganda bots mucking up everything, politics will have to retreat from the digital realm unless we get some robust system proving the other party is actually human..