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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27567 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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is that someone will copy paste lecture transcripts into an LLM and have it find the error and explain it lol. I suppose that does still deserve points for diligence.

Also probably true, but I'll also say that if we have LLMs that are reliably able to spot and correct actual falsehoods we're probably in a world that is a little epistemically safer for the average person than our current one.

But this will tip into my other concern that people will become utterly reliant on AI tools for information, and thus almost ALL of their knowledge will ultimately rest on an appeal to authority. "The AI says this was true, no need to question that."

And finally, I do think relying on authority is not the worst thing people can do! If you've found an actual reliable source of information then you can choose to simply take most of what they say as accurate! I have a handful of people I follow on Twitter who I believe are making a good faith effort to be correct about complex issues, so when they summarize things or make a prediction, I lend them a lot of credence. Because I don't have the energy to assess every single claim I encounter for accuracy, myself.

But there's gotta be some bedrock somewhere where the person(s) making certain claims actually care about getting it right.

Also probably true, but I'll also say that if we have LLMs that are reliably able to spot and correct actual falsehoods we're probably in a world that is a little epistemically safer for the average person than our current one.

Entirely dependent on your standards for "reliability" in my eyes. I have found SOTA models adequate for that purpose in almost everything I've cared to try, and I have checked to see whether they were providing corrections that had a basis in objective fact. It's not perfect, but I say we're past "good enough" to catch anything the teacher says that they already expect diligent students to notice.

I broadly agree with the rest of your comment, I'm happy to defer to Scott for most things, even if I do disagree with certain things he's said, and there are certainly plenty of crime-thinkers on Twitter I follow because I trust them to give me information that's both true and suppressed because it's outside the general Overton Window.

If, say, we had an aligned AGI that proved itself to be smarter and more capable in terms of answering questions I had of it, including taking into account my values where relevant, I'd have few qualms about eventually handing over my decision making to it. But if I had a route to improving my own cognition to the point where I didn't need it, being able to match it myself, I'd prefer that.

I think we should probably continue exercising caution with current LLMs due to their propensity to hallucinate, especially if given a prompt that encourages such.

And since they're able to do internet searches now, we're hinging some of their reliability/truthfulness on the accuracy of the internet at large which... well, you know why we're here on THIS site rather than on Reddit.

I suspect that I won't be ready to accept LLM's as 'oracles'/truth-sayers until they've got the ability to tap into the real world directly and explain their reasoning for their logic.

If I ask ChatGPT "Is the sun currently shining right now"

I don't want it to just say "Based on your location data (which I scraped from your browser) I figured out what your time zone is and based on weather reports for your zip code is appears that it is a bright and sunny day!"

I'd want to hear something like "I've checked several camera feeds from various locations around the globe and it appears the sun is shining brightly in the following areas []."

But if I had a route to improving my own cognition to the point where I didn't need it, being able to match it myself, I'd prefer that.

This is definitely the future I want but ain't sure I'm gonna get it.

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