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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34441 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Gpt-4 has been released!. Looks like the cat is finally out of the bag. The CW implications of large language models are obvious and have been discussed here, so I figured I would drop a few fun facts.

Also, here's a peek at LessWrong freaking out.

The full technical report gives some fascinating information. Here are some highlights:

  • GPT-4 can pass a bar exam and score a 5 on several AP exams.

  • 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.

  • GPT-4 can accept images as inputs and generate captions, classifications, and analyses.

  • GPT-4 is capable of handling over 25,000 words of text, allowing for use cases like long form content creation, extended conversations, and document search and analysis.

Of all of these, passing the bar exam is the one that sticks out. We'll have to see how much it still hallucinates, but this is clearly a water mark, at least for the legal profession.

I'll go ahead and stake a perhaps dramatic but I believe warranted claim - the culture war is about to get ugly. Creating ads, propaganda, and bots to argue politics has never been easier. Whichever side moves first on scaling and implementing these language models to persuade humans to their camp will own the future.

the culture war is about to get ugly. Creating ads, propaganda, and bots to argue politics has never been easier. Whichever side moves first on scaling and implementing these language models to persuade humans to their camp will own the future.

I don't see why this would be the case.

There's already more anti-leftist material available than anyone could reasonably consume in a lifetime, and yet rightists continue to lose more and more ground to leftists with each passing year. Why would a few more petabytes of propaganda added to the already existing ocean of material move the needle? It doesn't seem like the raw volume of material is the issue.

So your thesis would have to rely on the assumption that GPT-4 is capable of generating uniquely persuasive propaganda, more persuasive than the existing human-generated material, and I haven't seen any evidence for this. If you were to, say, have GPT-4 write an essay arguing for some view that is unpopular among mottizens and post it here, I doubt it would actually change anyone's mind.

The problem is that even if you can generate all these things, you can also use GPT-4 (and equivalent) to detect even veiled, even sneaky, even crudely disguised dissident speech more competently than ever before. That 140 IQ verbal estimate on the bar exam suggests it's much better than any rote internet jannie at detecting intent behind posters with, uh, poor intentions.

I don't think this is the case, but that's because sneaky and even crudely disguised dissident speech is actually so similar to official, allowed speech that I don't think the simplistic kinds of modelling/guardrails used for GPT chat will be able to tell the difference. The Daily Stormer frequently puts out headlines which wouldn't be out of place in The Forward, and there's so little consistency in non-problematic goodthink that preventing false possibles will be impossible. How, exactly, is the AI going to tell the difference between a comment from a brave trans witch talking about how all rich white men need to die and an antisemitic screed talking about how we need to kill all the bankers/grabblers? To a large degree the difference between problematic speech and wholesome regime-defender speech depends on the identity of the speaker, and the moment you make that explicit the game is up and the notion that we aren't just dealing with tribalistic conflict-theorists evaporates into thin air.

I assumed that in this case we're dealing with sneaky, disguised dissident speech, which means that it would be coming from people who are not a-priori assumed to be shitlords. When the system has access to all the data you're describing then you don't actually need the AI - you just round up all the people who go to LightningSpeedEnthusiast.com or read the DailyThunderbolt, and then all the people who start having increases in anxiety after the first purge. If you've already got access to those capabilities, then you don't need the AI. If you don't, then the AI is going to have big problems. That's not to say it won't be tried or attempted, I can already see a project like this being a hilariously embarrassing boondoggle.

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