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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.

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

Maybe those protesting Stanford law students should be very concerned; now there looks to be a choice coming between "can do basic legal work" AI and taking on a clerk who last week was in a screaming frenzy yelling at a judge, who is that judge likely to pick? 😁

All this sounds really impressive, but I don't know how concerned, if any, to be. I haven't been playing around with DALL-E or Sydney or any of the versions because I am simply not interested in getting a dumb machine to tell me lies. If the thing really is moving out of the realm of "dumb machine", what should I anticipate using it for? Or will the end result be something that the ordinary joe won't get anywhere near (the 'better search engines' thing was just a blip) and it'll be straight into playing the stock market to make money for the big finance firms?

It'll do everything everywhere all at once. Expect search to include it by default in the next year or so. More spicy take anywhere, especially online, that you interact with a stranger will become an interaction with an ai you are familiar with somehow. There will be continuity with the entity that you interact with on social media to the entity that secures your credit card. This entity will have a name and you will trust it.

This entity will have a name and you will trust it.

Chance would be a fine thing, because I don't trust nobody 😁

Some anonymous fuckface pops up online and is all "Hey there Far, it's me your good old buddy Bill! Remember me from those scented candles you liked?"? They can take a hike, I don't know anybody named Bill and I don't have good old buddies, and hard sell just makes me dig my heels in and balk like a mule.

Do you trust your bank with your money? Part of what will make you trust it is that it won't be doing such hacky shit.

I trust my bank to receive my wages paid in and to let me withdraw money, and only because I have to trust it that much. I don't trust it or any entity popping up claiming to be a real person trying to get me to take out loans, invest in this, have you considered your retirement funds that, and all the rest of the shit they already try to sell me.

So an AI generated "Hi this is Bob, your personal financial adviser" will get treated the exact same way I already treat 'Bob' the real human from the call-centre who cold-calls me and tries to sell me shit. I don't care how friendly AI Bob sounds or how well it imitates "oh but you hurt my feelings by refusing to purchase this" - I have more sympathy for call-centre Bob who I know works on commission and gets dog's abuse yelled at him by supervisors if he doesn't make the set targets of sales from calls, but I'm still not buying.