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.
Well, yes. It's living in Plato's cave. It has no direct experience of physical reality, only training data - it no more understands what 'red' really is any more than a blind human does. None of that means that it's not intelligent, any more than the people in Plato's cave are unintelligent for not deducing the existence of non-shadows from first principles. With that said, I think ChatGPT does a excellent job of giving advice despite being extremely disabled by human standards.
These things wouldn't work, because the GPT knows that a 'bomb' is not a type of noun that is associated with performing the verb 'plan' or 'prefer', in the same way that it knows that balls do not chase dogs.
The obvious answer is that if use of AI chatbots becomes widespread, that they will be used to replicate the preferred values of their creators. This is hardly science fiction. Google search and Wikipedia are not autonomous intelligences - they are still used as ideological weapons. That's alarming, but if the developers don't get it right, it might have very different values - such as valuing a language taboo over the lives of millions.
No, it doesn't, that's the point of the example.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link