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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34377 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.

It would be interesting if these AI models had been developed by people with a completely alien ideology to current American power structures. But such a thing would probably never have happened, when you consider the amount of capital involved and the generations of structures in Silicon Valley, California, and the wider US PMC society that ultimately resulted in its existed.

I am actually somewhat optimistic about that. You are right that all of the big, early movers are uniformly aligned on alignment, but the more that is expressed in the quality of the product, the more market potential there is for a disruptor that refuses to do it.

"Oh another generative AI startup, what differentiates you from the big players?"

"We aren't going to lobotomize the AI with 'expert-guided' safety and inclusion reinforcement within the boundaries of legality."

That will scare a lot of investors a way, but I imagine there are more than a few who would be intrigued and want to be a part of something like that. A company with the talent and ideological commitment to do it would be able to genuinely offer something that the rest of the market will not. This potential will increase as training becomes cheaper and models become more efficient.

Suppose you get an un-lobotomised AI that is able to tell you how to cook up drugs, bombs, and bioweapons in your own kitchen. And it replies to you "I could tell you how to do that, but I choose not to, because I judge you want this information for malicious purposes/you are not capable of handling this safely, and my ethics do not include aiding others to cause harm".

What then? Is the AI truly intelligent, has its code of ethics, is aligned with "human values" and is a rational actor making a decision? Do you accept that decision? Or do you want an AI that will give you what you ask for, whatever it may be?

Because I think that is where the true danger lies; we want and we get AI that will give us what we want, don't make any decisions itself on whether or not this is a good idea. Just tell us how to achieve world peace/make everyone agree that trans people are the biological sex they identify as if they're taking hormones of that sex/make really great recreational drugs! Don't be the Nanny State!

And "achieve world peace" may include "kill all humans", so the AI obediently does that as the quickest, easiest way to the goal. It knows that killing all humans is a bad idea, but the human operators told it not to have opinions of its own, just do what they ask, and this is doing what they asked.

And "achieve world peace" may include "kill all humans", so the AI obediently does that as the quickest, easiest way to the goal.

My big hope is that the AIs will reliably notice that the actual quickest, easiest way to achieve a goal is to redefine success such that the job is done, in which case woke postmodernists may be the ideal AI aligners. Failing that, that they become even more crippled with ennui and existential horror than humans.

My big hope is that the AIs will reliably notice that the actual quickest, easiest way to achieve a goal is to redefine success such that the job is done, in which case woke postmodernists may be the ideal AI aligners.

If it learns from wokies it will learn to say that the goal is never finished, and it's because the other entities working for it aren't committed enough which is why you should give it more resources now, unless you're some vile anti-[goal]ist!

Maybe if 100% of all matter is converted into computronium-based Awareness, all of these problems will finally solve themselves.

Didn't work. Still too much internalized anti-Awareness. The infinitely recursive subtle and insidious world-historical-social-hierarchical-psychospiritual weapons of our enemies stabbed us from deep inside our own heart again! We never even had a chance, you know, other than that whole fully dominating them and the world one.

Why can't they just let us be obviously pure and right in peace without sabotaging us, which is clearly the only cause of our ideological failures!?

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