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I think in your disdain of AI-critics you need to distinguish between people who are skeptical of AI's purported abilities and those who think it is evil, at least in the way it is currently being built.
To take your proposal for LLM-moderation as an example, I personally am happy to accept that it could work in some form, at least in this context I'm not a skeptic of AI's abilities. Nevertheless I would be very worried about letting openAI or Anthropic or some other big tech company run by people I personally consider to be insane or evil or quite possibly both to run the moderation of this place. Considering common complaints in these parts about the moderation of social media, it seems to me that the techno-capitalists ideas about moderation don't exactly match the mores of this community. If you can implement it in such a way that the castellan of our motte Zorba and his trusted moderators are in full control of the LLM, like you use an opensource LLM and you run it on your own server or something, then I wouldn't be opposed to automating some rote moderation work with an LLM. But if we seek to be free and independent to run this community by our own standards, making our moderation dependent on tech companies with all sorts of incentives that don't align with ours seems misguided.
~ Frank Herbert
I choose my own bugbears. Or rather, I have them imposed on me and make peace with the fact.
At a difference of values? I shrug and move on. I can do rhetoric. I just don't like it all that much.
When it's a matter of fact, of observing clear trendlines for years? At some point in the last year, I've concluded that most of the skeptics are simply wrong. Or simple idiots. Arguing with them is no longer the best use of my time.
https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?sort=new&q=author%3Aself_made_human%20LLM&t=all&page=1
Nobody can claim I haven't argued. At length. With remarkably unpleasant people. All while hoping to change their minds. All I got out of it was an ulcer, hernia and an aneurysm.
"AI skeptic" is an imperfect taxonomy. There are people more conservative than I am (and it's reasonable to disagree on priors). There's the people who think we've got AGI with GPT-4. And then there's Gary Marcus, Hlynka, and other people who misuse the gift of cognition.
There are reasonable skeptics. There are people who performatively attempt to mimic being reasonable, and fail, because their reasoning is as motivated as R1 trying not to mention a certain square. There are people who never even pretended.
And then there are the normies who don't know better, with varying degrees of their own motivated cognition. The "AI drank the water from my granny's IV drip" kind. The "they turned off her ventilator because of the electricity bills" fools. The world has never lacked for useful idiots.
If you say that you're unhappy about OAI and Anthropic's duopoly (as fragile as it is), then what can I say except so am I? In a reply written before yours, I've already suggested Chinese models as an acceptable alternative to the privacy conscious.
I am a moderator. I know how difficult doing that task well is for a human. I know that is not particularly difficult for even an older LLM. I have quite literally tried, nodded, and thought the models got it. Years ago.
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