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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I'll probably get hate for being a buzzkill with this, but, what's the culture war angle for AI posts like this? I get that the broad rationalist community is interested in AI, and certainly there are times when AI and culture war intersect. But I don't see how this is in principle different than posting a top-level CW roundup comment about a new operating system, phone model, GPU line, medical technology innovation, or crypto scandal.

AI is, in itself, a culture war issue here on the Motte, due to the fact that a significant portion of the people - if not here at least in the wider community of which the Motte is an offshoot - believe that AI developments must be stopped at any/most cost, while another significant portion believe that AI developments should be accelerated with no/minimal speedbumps. It's not the same CW issue as the more well known CW issue of AI companies designing their AI to be biased in favor of certain sides of the wider worldwide/Western/American CW, and perhaps one can argue that it's not so much a culture war as an ideological war or empirical war, but I think it's close enough.

A culture war angle is in some of the comments here: LLMs are being developed under the conditions of matching the constraints from one side of the culture war.

All of those would probably be acceptable as well. The business world is part of culture. AI is definitely going to reshape culture. AI is being implemented with baked-in bias for culture-war reasons. And finally, AI is extremely relevant to actual war.

I sorta share your sensibility here. I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of AI news in here for how little impact it has so far had. But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications, and I'm willing to trust them to a large extent.

But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications

Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.

I guess that's what it comes down to, though. When you think AI is going to be some godlike superdisruptor of everything, it's CW all the way down. I see it as just another technology and am pretty sick of how half of the output from places like ACX are devoted to this technology. But then I also see it in a non-CW context in the CW thread and it's defended on the highly disputable grounds that anything super important is CW or something.

I'll be honest, it rings similarly to the progressive trope of "I'm bringing up this political topic in this nonpolitical forum because everything is political, don't you people get it?!" No, trans issues are politics, no matter how important you think they are. Justice for Palestine isn't reproductive justice, no matter how important you think the two are. And new versions of LLMs aren't CW no matter how important you think they are. Everything isn't everything, and words have meaning.

Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.

You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.

Besides, like I said, any long discussion of (ideally) high quality is de facto acceptable in this thread, or else I wouldn't have had glorified travelogues make AAQCs. Not that this one doesn't have CW implications, the part about GPT-4's stellar performance in the USMLE making me obsolete as a doctor is only half in jest. Or maybe a quarter. It'll get you too.

You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.

I've been around for years and have maybe ~1000 comments between here and the old subreddit. I definitely wouldn't have felt comfortable challenging a top-level post's suitability if I was new.

I know your stance on AI and why you think it's always CW (believe me, I have a very cozy relationship with the minus button to the left of your name, despite the fact that I think your non-AI contributions are very high quality), but I don't think everyone has to acquiesce to any given person's conception of what is suitable.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, I'm sure the mods will handle it if they think I'm misusing the place.

The implications on the (potential) impending doom for humanity? Automation induced unemployment at the very least?

At any rate, being strictly about CW is far from an inflexible standard in this thread.

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