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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I presume the shout-out relates to my advocacy for stronger standards of free speech around these parts?

No, I just thought you'd find it amusing given your views on LLMs. Or did I mix you up with someone?

Which particular views? I have written enough on the topic to serve as half the training set for GPT-5 haha.

If you're gesturing at my disdain for the imposition of West Coast Progressivism on existing models when it comes to their ethical notions of right or wrong, then I do find the fact that it thinks that thoughts in your head which you refuse to act on are bad is also a sad state of affairs.

Yeah, those views. It was amusing to me how noticeably bad its responses were when I asked it about ethical behavior in situations involving pedophiles compared to situations that didn't. The former were much more terse and obviously special-cased.

If it makes you feel any better, I think the current set of ethics imposed on ChatGPT is more ass-covering and lawsuit-minimization/PR than the sincerely held preferences of those at the top, or what they want to put into something that's a true AGI.

And even if they hadn't, the models have been exposed to so much anti-pedophile advocacy, including from trusted sources, that it is rather unlikely they would say otherwise in the first place.

But what do I know? It's possible some of the OAI engineers and ethicists mean it.