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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Having tried to use ChatGPT as a writer's assistant and have it sneakily insert progressive shibboleth into my prose while reworking it, I can't help but agree and second your prayers.

God save us from a future where such people are even more solidly in control than they have ever been.

If He is merciful, training costs will decrease enough to not make us slaves the same way that computers did not remain forever the sole property of IBM.

If not, we will suffer.

computers did not remain forever the sole property of IBM.

And if they had, neither ClosedAI nor its employees would have ever existed (in their present forms) nor had the technology they needed to become the selfish little goblins turning freely released knowledge into private walled gardens that they are. We probably wouldn't even have AI at all. And if ClosedAI and the like stay in control, then we'll never have whatever the next step is.

Every closed source autocratic tech tyrant from Altman to Gates deserves to be punished by being forced to spend 1000 years in an alternate timeline where the only information technology that exists is a monolithic POTS network run by Ma Bell. (After all, think of how dangerous it would be if anybody could run their own telephone company or other communication service and allow anyone to talk to anyone globally without the appropriate safeguards guiding their communications.) Maybe that will teach them a lesson. Perhaps some day a benevolent God AI can help with that.

Have you kept any examples of tge modifications it made?

I can't go into too much detail, but I was writing about the Taoist principles of a fictitious order of wizards, having prompted it to act as some theologian expert, but it started breaking character (probably by losing attention to my original prompt) and adding a Code of Conduct right out of your average DEI talking points.

I suspect the "alignment" fine tuning or pre-prompt is to blame because it started saying stuff extremely similar to what it would say to describe itself as an "helpful assistant" who is duty bound to adhere to Californian Ideology.

But the surreptitious thing is that it did that without me actually asking to modify that part of the text whatsoever.

Just try asking it about history and it will start hedging in strange ways, edit things, generalise in order to avoid referring to specific people or groups etc.

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