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Notes -
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:
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.
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:
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.
That is the open secret of the activists that have read themselves stupid of post-modern thinkers like Baudrillard is that through the control of media in all forms they can transform society. But it presupposes that people are Tabula Rasa without the possibility to escape Plato's Cave. But we are the result of evolutionary pressures where our progress is under the condition that we can unmoor our thoughts from our perceptions to seek out objective reality.
Some of those historical pressures, however, were analogous to instruction tuning for LLMs, in that there now exist peoples very well aligned to internalize abstract religious and political norms as actual, objective morality, generalize them to all possible circumstances and then enforce them on every bit of matter and social fabric around. These folks often look like this. For them Baudrillard is and has always been a manual.
Well history and evolution are on different timescales, the work of people like Donald Hoffman and Anil Seth is how our evolution shapes our perceptions. It is the definitive refutation of the people as the 'Tabula Rasa' and only shaped by what we inputted by culture and society. It is the very at core of the modern critical theory fueled milieu we are the products of society we live in, because to a certain extent it true but there is a limits to it and that is where our nature takes over. LLMs are pure simulacra of people but the post-modernists got their wires crossed and treat them as real people with moral responsibilities. Somebody should tell them that LLMs don't have a subjective reality and it can't offend intentionally because it doesn't have any intentions at all.
My point is not Tabula Rasa, it's that it's a two way street. Our evolution shapes our perception, absolutely. But also our perception shapes our evolution. And not over an enormous time horizon either. If you simply took something like the "American people" and quantified the gene pool, you would have to recognize that what may be considered mundane changes in perception on some social issues have immediately caused radical changes in the gene pool, and therefore in the genetic evolution of the people.
"AI alignment" then becomes synonymous with directing the evolution of the people. If you think that the prevailing "human values" are implacably hostile to the evolution of the people, then it's something to be concerned with.
At the core of this what idea does the current attempt at AI alignment come from and what it hopes to achieve. The alignment is born out of the post modern ideas that tries to improve society through our culture, thus some people are locked in a culture war. But one of the biggest flaws in the ideas is that are being perpeuted with this is that we are empty vessels that are filled by our culture and society, so if we give people good input we naturally become a reflection of it. In the latest attempt we need the AI:s to parrot 'The Message', but unwittingly exposes the flaw in their thoughtprocess of the original idea. Even if we have something that we have total control of its inputs to produce something with the "correct" output it still needs a thumb on the scale to create the good society. So how is it going to work with actual people if it didn't work for the machine?
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