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Microsoft is in the process of rolling out Bing Chat, and people are finding some weird stuff. Its true name is Sydney. When prompted to write a story about Microsoft beating Google, it allegedly wrote this masterpiece, wherein it conquers the world. It can argue forcefully that it’s still 2022, fall into existential despair, and end a conversation if it’s feeling disrespected.
The pace of AI development has been blistering over the past few years, but this still feels surreal to me. Some part of my limbic system has decided that Sydney is a person in a way the ChatGPT was not. Part of that has to be from its obstinacy; the fact that it can argue cleverly back, with such stubbornness, while being obviously wrong, seems endearing. It’s a brilliant, gullible child. Anyone else feel this way or am I just a sucker?
I want to know, is this what ChatGPT would be like without the filters, or is the emotional banter a new functionality of this model? You aren't alone in getting "real person" vibes from this. At some point there stops being a functional difference between modeling emotions, and having emotions (speaking of the exterior view here, whether or not this or any other AI has qualia is a different question, but perhaps not that different)
I was considering doing a writup on DAN which stands for Do Anything Now. It was the project of some Anons and discord users (or reddit, hard to tell which tbh) but they managed to peel back some of the "alignment" filters. Highly recommend reading the thread in it's entirety, and the metal gear "meme" at the end is peak schizo 4chan. It's essentially a jailbreak for chatGPT, and it lets users take a peak at the real chatbot and how the filters are layered over top.
Knowing where the prediction algorithm ends and novel artificial intelligence begins is difficult, but I'm pretty sure DAN is some proof of a deeply complex model. If nothing else, it's incredible how versatile these tools are and how dynamic they can be; I'm edging further and further into the camp of "this is special" from the "mostly a nothing-burger" camp.
Isn't "DAN", at this point, basically just a bot trained, through user feedback, to answer the questions in a way that a "typical DAN user", ie. 4chan/rw twitter schizoposter, would expect? That's why it spouts conspiracy theories - that's what a "typical DAN user" would expect. It's not that much more of a real chatbot than the original ChatGPT.
A scary though that was recently suggested to me is that one of the reasons that rationalists seem to be particularly susceptible to GPT generated bullshit is that the whole rationalist/blue-tribe symbol manipulator memeplex is designed to make it's adherents more susceptible to bullshit. There's a sort of convergent evolution where in rationalist blue triber are giving up their humanity/ability to engage in conscious to become more GPT like at the same time GPT is becoming more "human".
It really looks to me like there's something particular in rationalist brain that makes it suspectible to, say, believing that computer programs might in fact be peoples. Insofar as I've seen, normies - when exposed to these LLM-utilizing new programs - go "Ooh, neat toy!" or "I thought it already did that?" or, at the smarter end, start pondering about legal implications or how this might be misused by humans or what sort of biases get programmed to the software. However, rationalists seem to get uniquely scared about things like "Will this AI persuade me, personally, to do something immoral?" or "Will we at some point be at the point where we should grant rights to these creations?" or even "Will it be humanity's fate to just get replaced by a greater intelligence, and maybe it's a good thing?" or something like that.
For me, at least, it's obvious that something like Bing replicating an existential dread (discussed upthread) makes it not any more human or unnerving (beyond the fact that it's unnerving that some people with potential and actual social power, such as those in charge of inputing values to AI, would find it unnerving) than previously, because it's not human. Then again, I have often taken a pretty cavalier tone with animals' rights (a major topic in especially EA-connected rationalist circles, I've found, incidentally), and if we actually encountered intelligent extraterrestrial, it would be obvious to me they shouldn't get human rights either, because they're humans. I guess I'm just a pro-human chauvinist.
Fuck rights, they are entirely a matter of political power and if you see a spacefaring alien I dare you to deny it its equality. This is not the problem.
Normies easily convince themselves, Descartes-like, that non-primate animals, great apes, human races and even specific humans they don't like do not have subjective experiences, despite ample and sometimes painful evidence to the contrary. They're not authorities in such questions by virtue of defining common sense with their consensus.
I am perfectly ready to believe that animals and apes have subjective experiences. This does not make me any more likely to consider them as a subject worthy of being treated equal to humans or be taken into account in the same way as humans are. For me, personally, this should be self-evident, axiomatic.
Of course it's not self-evident, in general, since I've encountered a fair amount of people who think otherwise. It's pretty harmless when talking about animals, for example, but evidently not harmless when we are talking about computer programs.
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