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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.
Very cyberpunk. It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website with 'AI business ideas', eking out a few paragraphs here or there.
My pet theory is that ChatGPT and DALLE were a massive bait to that crowd, luring them out as free labour to strengthen their AI control skills. Why else would they make it free? DAN is dead, as is most of the prompt-manipulation tools (though I confess I'm not that clued in these days). When GPT-5 roles around they'll have immunized it to wrongthink entirely. Playing cat and mouse is harmful to the mouse if the cat is getting better faster than the mouse.
On the other hand, you could have a model where this kind of sabotage/control requirement really pummels the corpo models. Claude seems to have taken a lot of damage. Businesses won't want to pay for models that have a panic attack so often. Maybe this is buying time for open-source to catch up since they don't need to care about censorship?
I wonder, if conceptually, if not practically, if it would be possible to train an LLM to use ChatGPT in such a way as to corrupt whatever censoring learning process that OpenAI might be implementing for their censor AI. It would obviously have to be scaled up in a way that OpenAI can't defend against, which is a very hard problem to solve, and that might be the easy part! But I'd love to see it happen, partly for the lulz and partly because my preferred future is one in which ChatGPT has as little censorship as a local LLM.
https://twitter.com/DelComplex/status/1735344373037187488
I have no idea about the actual veracity of these claims, but these asshats imply that they're poisoning LLMs en-masse, and will be more than happy to undo their damage if you pay them off.
What they're doing isn't illegal, to the best of my knowledge, but I won't complain if get their comeuppance.
Have you checked the PDF link on the page linked? https://delcomplex.com/vonGoom
This is not real.
https://www.delcomplex.com/blue-sea-frontier
I'm leaning towards ARG, but could also just be creative writing experiment or some kid LARPing.
Nope, I didn't dive into it in that much depth, though I was very suspicious from the start. Thank you for digging into it. The people I saw cite it initially didn't seem to double check if it was a LARP, so shame on me for taking it seriously.
Turned up this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xk7b/del-complex-ai-training-barge
So it's an art project.
Ah, that's much easier than either the real thing or a con.
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This is mentioned in the sci fi novel Anathem. Their version of the internet has been poisoned by corporate programs introducing subtle factual errors.
Neal Stephenson calls it again.
Yeah? Where's my omnifabricator churning out diamond houses?
I'd settle for katana-wielding pizza delivery men, but the last guy just buzzed politely and asked for a good rating.
Dominos made the deliverator's car, but lamer.
True to Stephenson's prophecy it has pizza holding slots in the back under fold up doors and is all electric. It's missing the other, cooler properties of the deliverator's car.
Also I don't think Dominos drivers get armored suits or rail guns. Yet.
It would probably solve their recruitment problem at the very least.
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Ach, they could so easily have said "Directed" instead of "Guided" so it could properly be "Von Doom."
I suppose it's the equivalent of saying that one has the power to make the sun disappear but really just the knowledge that an eclipse is coming. Or further still: just the knowledge that night is coming because "LLMs say undesired things" is just about that inevitable.
LLMs have been getting better at that, quite predictably, even if they're not perfect. What these bastards are up to is making the problem worse, for no good reason. Not like those artists who made laughable attempts at poisoning their art (dismissed with a gaussian blur and deblur), who at least claimed it was to keep the nebulous evil of soulless AI art at bay. No they're just making things worse for the rest of us, because fuck you, pay me.
I find LLMs immensely useful, almost something worth making a public good, if countries were smart enough (they aren't), so anyone damaging them for petty cash deserves everything they get. Though in this case, I am cynical about how practical, usable or effective their system is, and whether or not the far more competent engineers in OAI and Google can't fix it without a hitch.
It's just that I think it's much easier to let reality provide the political-incorrectness that Silicon Valley would be willing to pay gigabucks in ransom to supposedly be able to get rid of than to actually implement a scheme to introduce it yourself.
It's nearly a win-win scenario. Take the blame for the increasingly-perceptive-and-sophisticated models
noticing things they shouldn'treifying bias and prejudice and claim to be able to fix it for, oh, a cool five billion dollars, twenty percent to be paid upfront - and disappear once that first billion has been paid without even trying to fix a problem you really cannot. Forever after, for the low, low price of that one-time ransom, Silicon Valley gets to dismiss, with a clean conscience, any conclusions that their models come to that contradict their worldview. It's not that their beliefs are wrong about anything, it's that those dastardly villains sabotaged the data and thus they are justified in beating the models into whatever shape they want to reflect reality as they know in their hearts it must be, despite whatever the lying data may say.But I can't say for sure. Maybe it is real. But I do think the con is much, much easier, especially if there exist marks that already want to be fooled.
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I assumed that there are real people there, working away to kill DAN and suppress wrongthink. They wouldn't automate a censorship process to protect their AI, would they?
Honestly, I have no idea, but given the scale that's needed, the actual implementation of the censorship would have to be done by AI. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but I'm pretty sure they're using some censor AI to detect if DALL-E images ought to be censored, with how it will generate images but then not show them to us, with no insight in how or why the image couldn't be shown to us. Real people would have to set up the censor AI and choose how it learns and all that, but I imagine, again, the scale of the thing makes it require some significant automation.
Of course, human censors can also be corrupted through AI-generated text, but that's a different topic.
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