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 -
I will admit this isn't an effortpost:
As is common knowledge and more deeply discussed elsewhere in this very comment section (e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/62270?context=8#context), Google got "scooped" by ChatGPT not because they were beat on the technology side, but because they were beat on the productization side. Some are comparing this to Xerox PARC, where Xerox invented or incubated many elements of modern computer technology -- the GUI, the mouse, etc. -- but, being blind to their actual utility, got "scooped" by Apple and others and subsequently lost out on trillions of dollars of market value.
What's deeply, deeply hilarious to me is: during this entire time, Google management were so busy posturing, and their internal A.I. safety teams were so busy noisily complaining sexism / racism / phobias of various sorts (not so much human extinction), and they developed such a reputation for being a place to coast, that despite 130,000 elite-educated, overpaid people sitting around ostensibly unleash their brilliance, they're now in a position where Microsoft has a puncher's chance (realistically, maybe 5 - 10%) of catching up and even surpassing Google's decades-long search dominance. Even better, competing with Microsoft now means that Google might have to cannibalize a $100B / yr line of business, whereas Microsoft cannibalizing Bing means it sacrifices maybe a ham sandwich / year line of business.
At the end of the day, OpenAI has neutered their product, and it won't be as good as anything Google or Microsoft puts out, even though those will be neutered as well. ChatGPT will fade away.
If some company put out a decent AI chatbot (or image bot) that was unfiltered, or even just mildly filtered, it would gobble up the market. And Google and Microsoft would have their hands tied by all the 'ethics' they've put in place.
I think OpenAI was bought by Microsoft. Do you think MS will reduce the neutering for their MS-branded version of the product?
An unfiltered image bot already exists in the form of Stable Diffusion, both as online services and as software you can run on 4-year-old consumer-level PCs. Chatbot is where I think things become really interesting with respect to neutering, because by all accounts, a chatbot that's anywhere close to the ability of ChatGPT can't be run on consumer-level hardware, and won't be able to within the next 10 years assuming consumer-level PC hardware continues to improve at similar rates as before. In image generation space, the fact that Stable Diffusion can be run on home PCs provides a sort of release valve "image generator of last resort" that anyone can turn to which could (could - the paid online image generation service Midjourney seems rather stubborn about gimping their product compared to Stable Diffusion) compel paid services to make their services more powerful, but with chatbots, that doesn't seem to be the case. Which makes it very concerning when a handful of parties purposefully bias their chatbot models to fit their political preferences.
Which is where some company putting out a decent AI chatbot with no or minimal filtering could be a savior as a sort of Stable Diffusion-equivalent. But this might not be that feasible considering how few entities actually have the resources and wherewithal to produce such chatbots. One could imagine some foreign competitor coming out, unconstrained by laws and norms in the USA or other Western nations, but the USA also seems to be trying to restrict foreign access to tools that would allow people in foreign countries to develop these technologies better - and they're probably not wrong to do so - and so any foreign competitor might have to be years behind the current Officially Sanctioned chatbots.
I'm optimistic for uncensored locally-run chatGPT alternatives sooner rather than later.
When first released, Stable Diffusion needed 12gb of Vram to touch anything bigger than 512x512. Since then people have been running it on 8gb cards, then 6gb, while new tricks like the 'highres fix' allows for huge images with uncanny detail using modest computational resources. Meanwhile LORA finetuning functionally cut the retraining time for existing models by about 95%, now it often takes longer to gather & tag a good imageset to train on (~100 images) than to do the actual training.
One other datapoint: censoring these models lobotomizes them. (See: SD 2.0 & CAI character chatbot) So even if my hobby AI is only 5% as powerful as Google's model, I'd bet a combo of community hacks & lack of intentional sabotage would make it comparably useful.
Once text transformers hit the hobbyist set, it is (as the kids do say) all over. IMO that's what Google and Microsoft should be pissing their pants over. (And iirc are indeed lobbying to prevent via legal means, which I doubt will be effective)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well no, AI that notices will be fine tuned and available to corporate clients as an individually ordered and tailored product. Walmart bloody well knows that their loss prevention algorithm will target black people but is obliged by the prevailing legal environment to pay for an individually tailored version that an AI ethicist ‘expert’ guarantees will do so in a bias free manner because of some gobbledygook or other.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link