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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.
Predicted by Pelevin in 2010, «Anti-Air Complexes of Al-Efesbi». American autonomous drones, when going on sorties and making decisions frame by frame, simulated a gaudy talk show which was later made available to electorate. Typically colorful Freedom Land characters argued about their perspectives on the morality and necessity of sending a Hellfire missile into this or that pixel clump that may be a vicious terrorist or a goatherd. I've surely translated it already.
Seriously though, Leike is an okay guy compared to some of his colleagues.
There's a summary on Wikipedia. Fascinating.
This Pelevin guy is something else.
His latest novel, titled KGBT+, doesn't have a Wikipedia page in English, which is very unfortunate because the title has definitely piqued my interest.
He's a veritable genius of a single book. All his books are its different aspects, incomplete in their own ways; but all are more or less great. S.N.U.F.F. is a great exploration of Russian and Ukrainian (and broadly 2nd-3rd world) problems in the world of big capital and of AI-powered sex bots. Transhumanism Inc. is a deep dive into mind uploading and personal identity. And so on. It's also always topical in the petty news cycle sense, but it doesn't age poorly – more like, it becomes artifacts of an era. Everything is buddhist – but not cringe-buddhist like the Western world-weary toilet stall cocksucker content courtesy of the psychedelic revolution. He has his own brand of cringe, and is easily mockable, but I've come to believe that this doesn't really take away from his worth. I recommend reading something out of his early magical realist oeuvre first – Ivan Kublahanov, Ontology of Childhood, Water Tower, Yellow Arrow, Hermit and Six-Toe, Prince of Gosplan etc.
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