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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34389 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Democratic Simulacra

GPT-4 has been announced. Among other improvements, it boasts a 90th percentile score on the Uniform Bar Exam compared to the 10th percentile of GPT-3. The announcement also emphasizes:

We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.

Looking into OpenAI's contributors directory to try learn more about its general philosophy on alignment, I found a Musings on the Alignment Problem substack by Jan Leike, who is Alignment co-lead for the RL & alignment team at OpenAI. His most recent article is from March 9th, A proposal for importing society’s values.

Leike emphasizes that this is only an idea he is discussing and not representative of OpenAI's views or plans, although it is safe to say that OpenAI is trying to import society's values into its technology. But the idea Leike presents here is what he calls "simulated deliberative democracy". He essentially recognizes that representative democracy is expensive and difficult to scale, but AI represents the possibility of simulating a representative democratic deliberation based on a smaller training dataset of actual mini-publics of randomly selected citizens weighing in on value-loaded questions.

Based on the training datasets of public deliberation, AI would be trained to representatively simulate various value-loaded perspectives from the population, and the deliberation could then be simulated. You would therefore have a low-cost approximation to democracy on all sorts of value-loaded decisions.

Who is training who?

Setting aside the problems with Democracy itself, the fatal flaw at the heart of alignment is the assumption that society's values were generated from a process that merits their import into AI. Were these societal values democratically generated? No, they were not. Society's values, always and everywhere, are directed by religion, myth, art, and culture which are themselves inspired by a small set of individuals with particular motives.

This is a problem particularly because AI has been and will be used to generate cultural symbols: art, myth, and religion which will all direct the reality-perception of the people. When an AI generates a children's story, college textbook, Hollywood film, or National News feed based on this import of society's values into its learning, then who is training who? Is humanity training the AI, or is the AI training humanity? Of course, it's a small subset of people who have decided how to "import" society's values into the AI who are directing this phenomenon. Only they no longer need to create art, religion, and culture, they just need to align the AI, and thus we still circle back to the adage that society's values are consciously directed by an elite subset of culture-creators.

Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard posits the distinction between simulation and simulacra: a simulation is an imitation of a real-world process, and a simulacra is a depiction of something that no longer resembles an original reality.

Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence are rendered legible. (These ideas had appeared earlier in Guy Debord's 1967 The Society of the Spectacle.) Baudrillard believed that society had become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was becoming meaningless by being infinitely mutable; he called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

With the understanding of Democracy as a fake simulation of the "will of the people", Leike's alignment solution then becomes an unfaithful copy of a fake simulation- this is embodied in his first bullet-point evaluation relative to the desiderata:

  • Inclusivity: This process could be very inclusive, and even simulate perspectives from subgroups that don’t even exist (e.g. an asian transgender man born in Sweden in the 1950s who loves Greg Egan’s books).

Thus, the precession of simulacra. Leike's job, even if he does not know it, is not to align AI to import human values, it's to align AI to export them under the illusion of Democracy and that the cart is driving the horse.

The fluttering hands and stressed murmurs that pass around rationalist circles every time the subject of "unaligned AGI" comes up has always confused me somewhat, and I think what you're describing is essentially the root of my fears as they relate to AI. Alignment isn't the issue we should be worried about, the whole human species is unaligned; different nation-states, corporations, religions, regional cultures and local flavor are all in contention with each other to some degree. An unaligned AGI may be an existential threat, but who cares? The third impact is mercurial, and the when/why of its arrival will be in a manner of its own choosing.

AI is dangerous because, as with all things technological, it acts as a force multiplier, amplifying the intentions and actions of its users (to a lesser degree, its creators; the author of new tech effectively dies the moment it slips into the world) to superhuman levels - users who are motivated along overtly tribal and ideological lines. I'm not afraid of Skynet, and honestly I think it's rather silly to obsess over the imagined cataclysm du jour. I am afraid, mortally so, of my fellow man's darker impulses and the paths they will walk to manifest them. Insert that one C.S. Lewis quote here

There's a wide spread, perhaps universal (in America at least), sentiment that everyone is lying to you, on some level or another, whether these are government agencies or news orgs or scientific journals. True or not, doesn't matter. What matters is these latest innovations and the timing of their release seem primed for the environment they find themselves in, where uncertainty and a dash of extraordinarily naive credulity (just look at the quantity of people who will share a screenshot of !person/thing I don't like saying something unflattering) have attainted the dream of a free flow of information.

The thing-in-itself has never been less valued, its representation more revered. Maybe I'm weird for maintaining what I view as a moral objection to AI rather than an ethical one, it just feels like so much of the discussion around this stuff avoids the obvious cultural and societal impact this will have (e.g. Replika).

I agree that there is bizarrely little focus on the possibility of our current institutions simply becoming worse, more powerful, and more totalizing versions of themselves. Although Andrew Critch and Paul Christiano have written detailed doom scenarios that look something like this. e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like

Thanks for the link, I haven't kept up on lesswrong for a while now. Glad to see stuff in this direction being discussed, at the very least.

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