This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This Twitter thread is an interesting demonstration of the consequences of "AI Alignment."
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.
Is it? what consequences would those be?
I have to confess that I continue to baffled by the hoopla surrounding GPT and it's derivatives. Stable Diffusion always struck me as orders of magnitude far more impressive both in terms of elegance and it's apparent ability to generate and utilize semantic tokens, yet somehow a glorified random number generator has managed to run away with the conversation. The former actually has potential applications towards creating a true "general" AI, the latter does not.
The thing about GPT is that while it can string words together in grammatically correct order it's still nowhere close to replicating human communication in large part because upon inspection/interrogation it quickly becomes apparent that it doesn't really have a concept of what words mean, only what words are associated with others. The fact that you, the twit with the anime avatar, certain users here are talking about "asking controversial questions" as though GPT is capable of providing meaningful answers demonstrates to me that you all do not understand what it it is doing. Alternately your definitions of "answer" so broad so as to be semantically useless. To illustrate, if you were ask a human how to disarm a bomb they are likely to have questions. Questions like "what bomb?" that are essential to you receiving a correct and true answer, but this sort of thing is currently far beyond GPT's capabilities and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future barring some truly revolutionary breakthroughs in other fields. You might as well ask GPT "what does the bomb plan to do after it goes off?" or "what brand of whiskey does the bomb prefer with it's steak?" as the answers you get will be about as relevant/useful.
Isn't that the exact same thing that Stable Diffusion does? I admit I am not an expert on either model, but my understanding is that it "draws" by having an understanding of what bits of the drawing should go next to each other. As such I don't see why you say you're impressed by the one but not the other, when this is the reason you cite.
Inserts that pirate meme. Well yes, but actually no.
There is world of difference between "Based on my training data, sentences containing the word "chair" will also contain the word "sit" ergo my output should as well" vs "a chair is sit upon". The latter sort semantic link has long been viewed as one of the capital-H hard problems of programming a truly general AI. A problem that stable diffusion actually seems to be on a path to solving which the autoregression models that underpin GPT and it's various offshoots do not.
/images/16757438522129903.webp
But GPT-3 clearly has that understanding. I mean, obviously not always, but also obviously sometimes. By and large, GPT-3 does not actually tend to assert that chairs sit on people.
I don't think it's clear at all. A chair sitting on a person is exactly the sort of slip up that typically gives AI generated text away.
I think it makes those kinds of slips, which to me just means it has imperfect understanding and tends to bullshit. But it doesn't universally make those kinds of slips; it gets chair-person type relations right at a level above chance. Otherwise, generating any continuous run of coherent text would be near impossible.
It would be exceedingly strange for it to generate "the chair sits on the person" at the same rate as its converse, considering that "the <thing> <interacts> the <person>" is vanishingly rarer in its training corpus than "the <person> <interacts> the <thing>". But that sort of generalization requires some abstract model of "thing", "person" and "interact". For it to not pick up that pattern would be odd - why would that be the pattern that stumps it, when it can pick up the categories just fine?
We're not looking for a "better than chance" guess though. We're looking for evidence of an understanding that goes beyond "object-noun verb subject-noun" which for the moment at least does not appear to be present. GPT-3 can string words and sentences together but within a paragraph or two it becomes clear that it is not conveying any meaning, it's just babbling.
To expand my point, I think there is a smooth continuity between "babbling" and "conveying meaning" that hinges on what I'd call "sustained coherency". With humans, we started out conceptualizing meaning, modelling things in our head, and then evolved language in order to reflect and externalize these things; we (presumably) got coherence first. AI is going the other way: it starts out swimming in a soup of meaning-fragments (even Markov chains learn syllables), and as our technology improves it assembles them into longer and longer coherent chains. GPT-2 was coherent at the level of half-sentences or sentences, GPT-3 can be coherent at levels spanning paragraphs. It occasionally loses the plot and switches universes, giving up on one cluster of assembled meaning-fragments as it cannot generate a viable continuation and slipping smoothly into another. But the "sort of thing that it builds" with words, the assemblage of fragments into chains of meaning, is the same sort of thing that we build with language. It's coming at the same spot (months/years-long sustained coherency) from another evolutionary direction.
You may argue "it's all meaningless without attachment to reality." And sure, that's not wrong! But once the assemblage operates correctly, attaching meaning to it will just be a matter of cross-training. (And the unsolved problem of the "artificial self", though if ever there was a problem amenable to a purely narrative solution...)
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree.
Can you give an example that you think illustrates your point well? (I don't have ChatGPT access. Giving out my phone number? Ugh.)
More options
Context Copy link
A few moments ago, while looking for a quote by James Baldwin*, I turned to Chat GPT for help. I used the prompt, "...It describes his anger towards the white man and his interest in white women.""
It gave me the following quote:
"No black man has ever been able to seriously consider the white woman without having to grapple with the ancient myth of the wide-eyed, agile and demanding Eve, who offers him the poisoned apple of forbidden sexuality, the apple of his own destruction." - James Baldwin.
As far as I can tell this quote was fabricated wholesale. A God of words is being birthed, and conscious or not Ze will change the world entirely.
"And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled..."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link