This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.
AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle’| The Daily Telegraph:
My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).
(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)
I keep meaning to dick around with some LLM software to see for myself how some of the nuts and bolts work. Because my layman's understanding is that they are literally just a statistical model. An extremely sophisticated statistical model, but a statistical model none the less. They are trained through a black box process to guess pretty damned well about what words come after other words. Which is why there is so much "hallucinated information" in LLM responses. They have no concept of reason or truth. They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
In a lot of ways they are like a con man or a gold digger. They've been trained to tell people whatever they want to hear. Their true worth probably isn't in doing anything actually productive, but in performing psyops and social engineering on an unsuspecting populace. I mean right now the FBI has to invest significant manpower into entrapping some lonely autistic teenager in his mom's basement into "supporting ISIS". Imagine a world where they spin up 100,000 instances of an LLM do scour Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc for lonely autistic teens to talk into terrorism.
Imagine a world where we find out about it. Where a judge forces the FBI to disclose than an LLM talked their suspect into bombing the local mall. How far off do you think it is? I'm guessing within 5 years.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
You are conflating two vastly different things. Perhapse this is an issue of poor translation between Indian and English but what GPT has is better described as a notion of "consensus" or "correlation". A degree to which [token a] is associated with [token b] which is emphatically not a concept of true vs false. To illustrate, if you feed your LLM a bunch of Harry Potter fan fiction as a training set your going to get a lot of Malfoy/Potter gay sex regardless of how Rowling may have written those characters and this is not an aberration, this is the system operating exactly as designed.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? I speak English just as well as you do Hlynka, and likely better. You can condescend to someone else.
Humans develop their sense of truth and falsity from comparing/correlating new evidence to previous evidence and their environs, biased by whatever intrinsic priors they were born with. The only difference here is that GPT-4 has no appendages to interact with the world and seek out further evidence, merely what we've trained it with.
I fail to see how this has any bearing on the "truth" of it all. Depending on how big the model is, it can when asked almost certainly tell you that in the primary text Harry wasn't casting spells on Malfoy's wand.
That is so clearly obvious to me I'm not even going to burn the 100 joules or so of energy it would need to spin up a GPT-4 instance to confirm it.
Do you think an AI who hadn't read the original HP and had a knowledge base entirely of yaoi fanfic has any way of knowing better? Or a human for the matter.
Exactly what it says. I know of at least a couple SE Asian languages (EG Tagalog and Malay) where the distinction between Yes/No, True/False, and Agree/Disagree, is significantly less distinct than it is in English and I was wondering if something similar may be going on here, as by my reading your second statement doesn't follow from the first at all, nor from anything in Open AI's White Paper as far as I recall. (Assuming we are both referring to the same paper)
If you set aside for a moment your pre-existing knowledge that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are both fictional characters "how this has any bearing on the Truth" ought to be immediately apparent. Stop for a moment and reflect. Ask yourself WHY you believe that GPT's description of Harry and Draco's relationship would in any way resemble that of the "real" people (or in this case that of the characters as originally written).
A statement being "True" is not the same thing as agreeing with a statement, or that statement comporting with the popular consensus and the seeming conflation of these three distinct stances is what initially lead me to suspect some sort of translation issue might be at play. Is it possible that are you are using the word "truth" when you really mean something closer to "popular" or "I agree with"?
With that out of the way, to answer your question, Do I think a human who hadn't read the original HP and had a knowledge base entirely of yaoi fanfic would know any better? Yes I do, because in contrast to GPT I would expect a normal human to display some level of contextual awareness/meta-knowledge IE being aware of yaoi fanfic and it's tropes. Or being able to assign a confidence level to a prediction that was anything other than completely arbitrary.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link