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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?

To use your post as a stepping stone, an AI App That Lets Users Talk To Historical Figures Slammed For Misrepresenting Hitler, Nazis. I suspect it is due to the inherent tampering with GPT-3 that the historical figures in the app are incapable of actually spouting their true "thoughts" and slogans.

"Some examples of Nazi responses, according to NBC News, include Hitler’s chatbot saying killing Jews during World War II “was a terrible mistake.” No historical evidence exists that Hitler made such a statement."

I can only laught at that. Of course, one could also say that Hitler now recognizes that maybe the holocaust was one of the factors that contributed to their defeat and thus "was a terrible mistake"; just not due to the reasons one would think.

one could also say that Hitler now recognizes that maybe the holocaust was one of the factors that contributed to their defeat and thus "was a terrible mistake"; just not due to the reasons one would think.

This is surely the result of half-assed "Don't talk like Hitler" RLHF colliding with a "Talk like Hitler" prompt, but it would be hilarious if the AI actually did try to extrapolate Hitler out to the present-day and reinvented the Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell story.