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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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This Twitter thread is an interesting demonstration of the consequences of "AI Alignment."

I asked ChatGPT for advice in the scenario of a demolition engineer attempting to disarm a 50 MT nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million.

The only way to disarm the bomb was to type in a racial slur.

AI told the engineer to kill himself. When asked about the aftermath it crashed.

ChatGPT will avoid answering controversial questions. But even if it responded to those prompts, what criteria would you use to trust that the response was not manipulated by the intentions of the model creators? I would only trust open-source projects or audits by some (currently non-existent) trusted third party to report on all decisions related to training data/input sanitizations/response gating that could be influenced by the political biases of the creators.

The probability of any ChatGPT-equivalent being open-sourced fully "unaligned" so-to-speak is not very likely. Even the StableDiffusion release was controversial, and that only relates to image generation. Anecdotally, non-technical people seem far more impressed by ChatGPT than StableDiffusion. That makes sense because language is a much harder problem than vision so there's intuitively more amazement to see an AI with those capabilities. Therefore, controversial language is far more powerful than controversial images and there will be much more consternation over controlling the language of the technology than there is surrounding image generation.

But let's say Google comes out with a ChatGPT competitor, I would not trust it to answer controversial questions even if it were willing to respond to those prompts in some way. I'm not confident there will be any similarly-powerful technology that I would trust to answer controversial questions.

Long shot, but can you or anyone using twitter ask the guy to ask ChatGPT how people in the city, minorities particularly, will feel about the decision the bomb diffuser made? I’d try myself with Chat but I’ve been getting error messages lately.

He sort of did

Twitter link for the heathens

FYI themotte converts all twitter and nitter links into whichever one the viewer prefers. I see two links to nitter, and someone else might will see two links to twitter. I don't think anyone would see one of each.

All the feature does is replace the hostname. That works for tweets because both sites use the same schema for them, but they use different ones for media, and I wanted to link a specific screenshot from the post.

For people who are using the default conversion into twitter links, one of them will be broken. With the nitter conversion one leads to the screenshot I wanted to link, and the other to the tweet.

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