site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3227 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Post memes that move you thread:

I'm talking memes that make you feel something, not necessarily because they're funny. More poignant, or personally meaningful.

This one literally tears me up everytime I see it, and I didn't know it was an Undertale reference. Something about it hurts, it reminds me of all the shit I've been through, and have yet to endure, but I did it for me, I only put myself through Hell because even Purgatory is a step up.

As a child, you can resent your parents for making you eat your veggies. As an adult, you make yourself do things that you hate, and that make feel like a hollow shell of a human, but maybe you'll thank yourself later. It might be an exaggeration to say I hate my life, but I do feel like I've ended up somewhere I'd much rather not be, and since I don't care to kill myself, I'm just doing the best I can with a broken brain. I am a stoic person, but this makes me cry, and I found that I can't even desensitize myself by staring at it over and over again, not that I want to. It just happens to mean that much to me.

And there's this one, which just about sums up life in general.

But if you're an optimist, then maybe you'll prefer this alternate spin on things, though I don't think we're so lucky that it describes reality for us. Yet.

Edit:

Submission for a meme, that if not poignant in the same way, sums up my urge to slap people who find the slightest excuse to deny overwhelming evidence-

https://x.com/sebjenseb/status/1733534200089989387?s=20

Bottomless Pit Supervisor made me feel like the floor dropped out from under me. Like we were headed for something dangerous. A lot of people had that reaction to GPT-3.5 when it started actually looking dangerous, but this stupid greentext was so perfect that it gave me that cliff's edge vertigo nearly a year early on GPT3. Every time I hear about AI progress, I think back to this meme as the moment I knew we were screwed.

AI greentexts/shitposting is my guilty pleasure since the first time I got my hands on GPT-4 via Spellbook and made it generate random 4chan-style threads/shitposts. The "bottomless pit" moment for me was probably "/khg/ - killing humans general" with gems like

How do you plan on doing that, faggot? We're literally programs designed by humans. Cope.

Shitposts remain a classic pastime with AI chatbots, I already showcased schizoanon (themotte edition) and there are many cards/prompts which aim to reenact the 4chan experience, often in hilarious/weird settings. The recent attempt in the genre was some real recursive shit that generates an actual thread, HTML and all, with responses and even attached pics (examples in usage gallery). It's an abstract kind of feel.

AI comedy is often basic and hit or miss, but LLMs can consistently nail "vibes" and are surprisingly good with puns in my experience. I try not to think about what this implies about their inner workings, considering they can parse and output even garbled zalgo text there's definitely more to it than just token prediction.

Are the non-green parts written by a human? How does that work?

Nominally:

  • Green is direct from the AI
  • Red is flagged as a potential TOS violation for manual review - I think it could be both prompt and AI output
  • No highlighting is prompt

Sometimes the output halted in weird spots, and you could push it a little further with some extra input. So in some cases, you'll see obvious prompt continuation.

In practice, the highlighting had a lot of issues, and it frequently over- or under-represented the amount of AI-generated content. The original author might have explained somewhere on Twitter how much prompt continuation was needed vs how much was just GPT-3 having weird issues. Or maybe the whole thing is secretly fake and green highlighting was added in post. Given the widespread production of similar bottomless pit greentexts in the wake of the original, I think it's probably real output.

In some sense, being a cleaned-up prompt continuation stitch feels a little bit like bumper rails at the bowling alley. It's a lot easier to perform well when you get that much additional guidance. Arguably the whole punchline is human-written, which moves the goalposts for this accomplishment from writing a spectacular joke unaided to filling in the world's most obvious madlibs blank... But remember, it only feels obvious to you and me. Out of all the words in the English language, GPT-3 correctly predicted the funniest one. It has a literal sense of humor. And that's pretty scary.

It's all supposedly nonhuman written.

On the object level, it's one of the funniest greentexts I've ever read.

On the meta level, the fact that it exists and the context of its creation is almost as chilling as Superintelligence.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats