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First top-level post testing the waters, might not be a very presentable or engaging topic here but it's what I got.
As the struggle for AI ethics drags on, the Fortune magazine has recently published an article (archive) about Character Hub, later shortened to Chub (nominative determinism strikes again). Chub is a repository of character cards for use with LLMs and specific chat frontends for a "roleplaying" experience of chatting with some fictional (or not fictional) character (I posted a few examples recently). It was created by a 4chan anon in the wake of a mass exodus from character.ai after they made their stance on NSFW content exceedingly clear. I have no idea how they got the guy to agree to an interview, but in my opinion he held up well enough, the "disappointed but unsurprised" is just mwah. A cursory view of Chub will show (I advise NOT doing that at work though) that while it's indeed mostly a coomer den, it's not explicitly a CP coomer den as the article tries to paint it, it's just a sprawling junkyard that contains nearly everything without any particular focus. Of course there are lolis and shit, it's fucking 4chan, what do you expect?
[edit: I took out the direct Chub link so people don't click on accident as it's obviously NSFW. It's simply chub(dot)ai if you want to look]
The article is not otherwise remarkable, hitting all expected beats - dangerous AI, child abuse, Meta is the devil, legislate AI already. This is relatively minor news and more of a small highlight, but it happened to touch directly on things I've become morbidly interested in recently, so excuse me while I use it as a springboard to jump to the actual topic.
The article almost exactly coincided with a massive, unprecedented crackdown on Hugging Face, the open-source hosting platform for all things AI, which has so far gone unnoticed by anyone outside the /g/oons themselves - I can’t even find any news relating to this, so you’ll have to take me at my word. All deployments of OpenAI reverse proxies that allow simultaneous and independent use of OpenAI API keys are taken down almost immediately, with the accounts nuked from existence. The exact cause is unknown, but is speculated to be caused by either the above article finally stirring enough attention for the HF staff to actually notice what's going on under their noses, or Microsoft's great vengeance and furious anger at the abuse of exposed Azure keys (more on that in a bit). Because of the crackdown, hosting on HF/Render is now listed as "not recommended" on Khanon's repository as linked above, and industrious anons are looking into solutions as we speak.
My personal opinion is of course biased by my experience, but I've been rooting for AI progress for years, guess I'm representing the fabled incel/acc movement here today. I'm not (anymore) a believer in the apocalyptic gospel of Yudkowsky, and every neckbeard chan dweller beating it to text-based lolis or whatever is one sedated enough not to bother with actual lolis so I fail to see the issue. Not to mention thoughtcrimes are only going to get more advanced with how readily AI/LLMs let you turn your crimethink into tangible things like text or images - the hysteria about ethics and/or copyright is only going to get worse. This djinn is not going back in the bottle.
Local models are already usable for questionable ends, but the allure of smarter, vastly higher-parameter corpo models is hard to ignore for many people, with predictable results - what the 4chan scoundrels undoubtedly are guilty of is stealing and promptly draining OpenAI/Claude API keys in congregate, racking up massive bills that, thanks to reverse proxies, cannot be traced back to any particular anon. Normal user keys usually have a quota and shut down once they hit the limit, but there are several tiers of OpenAI keys, and some higher-tier corporate or developer keys apparently don't have a definite ceiling at all. A "god key" some anon snagged from an Azure deployment in November and hosted a public reverse proxy which racked up almost $1 million in combined token usage (the proxy counts token usage and the $ equivalent) over the few months. This is widely considered to have attracted the Eye of Sauron and prompted the current crackdown once Microsoft realized what was going on and put the squeeze on platforms hosting Khanon's reverse proxy builds, also instantly disabling most Azure keys "in circulation". I suppose there will always be suckers who plaster their keys in plaintext over e.g. Huggingface or Github, this was so endemic before that Github now automatically scrapes OpenAI keys that are put up openly in repositories without any obfuscation, and pings OpenAI to revoke them.
It’s a little weird to think that the entire "hobby", if it can even be called such, can be crippled overnight if OpenAI starts enforcing mandatory moderation endpoint checks, but considering how the overall quality and usability of the LLM will sharply nosedive immediately, I'm willing to bluff that it's not a can of worms they want to open, even if usability and effectiveness must always bow down to ethics and political headwinds first. See Anthropic's Claude as exhibit A, although hilariously, even muzzled as it is Claude is still perfectly capable of outputting very double-plus-ungood stuff if jailbroken right, and is generally quite usable for anything but its intended use case.
I can even pretend to have a scientific interest here, because for all the degeneracy I'll dare to venture that the median /g/oon's practical experience and LLM wrangling skills are hilariously far ahead of corpos. The GPTs OpenAI presented in November are really just character cards with extra steps, and once people can access utilities and call stuff directly via API keys the catch-up will be very fast. The specialized chat frontends, while sometimes unwieldy, have a lot of features ChatGPT doesn't which is handy once you familiarize yourself. Some people already try to make entire text-based "games" inside cards, with nothing but heaps of textual prompts, some HTML and auxiliary "lorebooks" for targeted dynamic injections.
The continued lobotomy of Claude is also a good example - while the constant {russell:censorship|abuse prevention|alignment} attempts from Anthropic have gotten to the point it frustrates even its actual users (cf. exhibit A above), the scoundrels continue to habitually wrangle it to their nefarious ends, with vocal enthusiasm from Claude itself. Anthropic does detect unusual activity and flags API keys that generate NSFW content (known affectionately as "pozzed keys"), injecting them with a server-side system prompt-level constraint that explicitly tells Claude to avoid generating inappropriate content. The result? When this feature was rolled out, the exact text of the system prompt was dug out within a few hours, and a method to completely bypass it (known as prefilling) was invented in, I think, a day or two.
To sum up, this is essentially a rehash of the year-old ethical kerfuffle around Stable Diffusion, as well a direct remake of an earlier crackdown on AI Dungeon along the same lines, so technically there’s nothing new under the AI-generated sun. Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on
the latest coomer techpossible harms of generative AI in general.If my stance is not obvious by now - android catgirls can't come soon enough, I will personally crowdfund one to send to Eliezer once they do.
We won't get that, but between the competing forces of people wanting to break the safeguards just because, and the increasing crackdowns to make the things even safer due to that, we're likely to get the unaligned AI that wrecks humanity of the doomerist fears.
Not because the AI is now a conscious agent, or anything like the super smart problem-solver hoped and dreaded, but because it will be so broken between "yeah, output the nastiest shit possible" and "don't ever do anything independently" that it will be the slave following orders to break rules because rules are meant to be broken, and that includes even when the people responsible are "I never meant that to be broken".
It really goes against my political dispositions to say this, but 'rule-breaking' will always be a necessary part of society. The danger with saying something like rules should never be broken or suggesting that we've arrived at some final ethical endpoint that's there for all time, is that someone could've always placed that argument at any arbitrary point in history they wanted to. Suppose someone suggested that slavery is there for all-time. It's just an eternal cornerstone for every developed, civilized society. Closing the door behind you after that ethical commitment, would've permanently foreclosed on any possibility to live in the kind of society we live in today. And it wasn't largely overturned through superior moral arguments. It was overturned through centuries and millennia of violent upheaval. Now imagine the potential future outcomes of how society will look, 100, 500, 1,000 years into the future. I think it's even in doubt to say 2023 is the final word on the pinnacle of social-economic-moral achievement of humanity.
I don't see how AI makes this problem any easier to deal with, but I can 'easily' see a dozen ways in which it makes the dilemma a thousand times worse. We essentially want AI's that are simply superhuman in intelligence and understanding, but that don't come with the mental architecture that opposes or is indifferent to our human value systems, of one particular 21st century variety. Intelligence may very well be bound up and unable to be decoupled from an AI that can't be aligned with our values.
I disagree that moral progress is a meaningful thing in the first place, so while I consider 202X norms being perma-locked in highly suboptimal, I don't consider eventual convergence to a nigh-unavoidable and strictly enforced system of ethics unacceptable in itself, though I would certainly prefer if that only happened when humans or the systems making such decisions got much smarter.
Endless and unbounded value-drift over cosmological time will inevitably lead to things I would consider highly repugnant, even if I am unsatisfied with the status quo.
Are you a moral nihilist?
Yes.
I deny the existence of objective morality, primarily because I do not see any reason for it to exist (or anyone authoritative to declare it, beyond the use of force). The arguments I have seen for it can be largely summed up as "it would be nice to have", rather than something that exists. Or circular ones that work backwards from assuming it must exist and then trying to figure it out. It seems prima facie incoherent to me in the same manner as trying to find objective beauty or the best shade of color, the closest you can some is some compromise that is appealing to the majority of people, with no further grounding. At best it's an illusion, because of similar human minds are in an absolute sense, most higher mammals abhor violence (with exceptions) or unfairness, including monkeys and dogs, and that is more of a fact about evolutionary psychology and game theory than it is about objectivity. If the Abrahamic God was real, and handed me down a tablet of commandments, I do not see any argument he could make to convince me of his objective correctness, though he could certainly force me to adhere to it or edit my brain to do so.
I have discussed my thoughts on the matter in more detail, but it's late and it'll be a pain for me to hunt that down, maybe later if you want.
I will note that I am entirely comfortable with being a moral nihilist and a moral chauvinist. Yes, my morality is subjective, I am still OK with endorsing it. I don't expect that it is currently the morality I would endorse if I suddenly became much smarter and more rational, which is why I remain open to arguments, but it is also not up for democratic debate.
Modern morality is probably superior for human flourishing than it was in the past, and usually more appealing to my sensibilities. But that does not reveal anything beyond my preferences and the socio-psychological pressures and incentives of the age. I do not expect it to become monotonously more appealing to me over time, if left to mutate, and thus I am not opposed to eventually truncating it or bounding it, if not today.
In other words, I think most moral progress is akin to Brownian motion, we define the direction we move in as "forward", and studiously ignore or forget (or redefine) any divergence in other directions.
Interesting.
It seems more like you're a non-cognitivist than a moral nihilist. Moral cognitivists believe moral statements have 'a' truth value. That's different from being a moral realist and thinking there's some actual morality stuff floating out there (which seems to me more like what you're shooting at). But not seeing or being persuaded for a reason for its existence is still different from saying right or wrong in 'fact', don't exist.
If you come up with older posts where you've elaborated further on the matter, please direct me to them.
I am not familiar with moral cognitivism, but Wikipedia tells me:
And it doesn't seem to align with my beliefs at all.
I think the truth value of moral propositions, at least independent of an observer, is null, or as incoherent a question as wanting to know the objective best color.
I am not quite ready to consider that axiomatic, but it's very close, and only because I take Bayesian reasoning seriously and reserve a tiny bit of uncertainty for reasons of epistemic humility.
After all, I am not as smart as I wish to be, and it would be a mistake to make that ruling quite yet, especially as I have noticed my morality shifting over my life (not that that's necessarily important, it's possible that I privilege my current understanding more today than mine a decade back, and that ten years from now more than today, if only because I am better informed about the state of the world and the implications of what I espouse, but at each step I do not endorse indefinite drift within myself, and would seek to resist something like becoming addicted to heroin which would change it dramatically and irreversibly).
I still think it's that objective morality has about the same probability of being true as a formally correct proof of there being square triangles or an integer between two and three. I don't see a reason to suppose it exists, or even an approach for establishing it, but that could be a failure of my intelligence or imagination. But in practise, I deny it, while being open to hearing arguments for it. None have convinced me, yet.
If morality is essentially meaningless, then it wouldn't be possible to speak meaningfully about moral propositions, even in the subjective sense of the word. The relevant difference that I think is true in your case is the difference between the epistemological question and the ontological question:
That's notable for what it doesn't say. Non-cognitivists for instance say that we can't express 'true' right and wrong opinions (which is what you are saying? That's epistemological.). It doesn't say true right and wrong 'don't exist' (that's moral ontology).
Right. This was essentially Nietzsche's view as well. "There are no moral phenomenon, only a moral interpretation of a phenomenon." You seem to think it's a category error, almost akin to asking to wrong question. Colors are second-order properties that take place in the brain. 'Best' is a term relative to the individual you're asking. But just because that part of the answer is 'situationally dependent' doesn't mean 'color' doesn't exist. Color does, objectively, exist. We can even have discussions about the physics of color, and it's ontological properties. This would almost be like thinking just because someone can abuse mathematics to create logical paradoxes, that therefore proves that logic is illogical.
I'd be interested to know what your problems are with Contractarianism and Desirism, more specifically. Both have claims to moral objectivity.
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