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Notes -
Against Large Language Models as an Archive
Much of the recent discussion regarding token-predicting AI such as LLMs has revolved around the intentional (and often-hilariously heavy-handed) political and social modification of these tools, their inputs, and their outputs, and there's a lot of interesting questions there. Separately, though, one space that appears under-examined is what, exactly, LLMs do when handling questions that aren't the hottest topics at the time the LLM was trained.
There's a lot of people who think, at some level, of LLMs as a .zip file++, where material is stuffed in somehow and the core meaning is pulled out from the text. Even fairly technical people sometimes fall to treating them like lossy compression, and there's already an active lawsuit caused in part by people expecting a ChatGPT to act as one. They do better when told to reparse existing information, but the people advocating that also promote LLMs as providing "pre-digested" Google answers. But in theory, these tools have been trained on a large portion of text from a massive variety of sources, and they can sometimes embed even tiny historical details.
Though you sometimes have to handle seers huffing fumes, the 12v universal akasha sometimes works. In reality, LLMs are token predictors, and they've been trained, and sometimes they just do that well instead. And sometimes it doesn't at all.
And I think that's going to augment forces that already turn memories to dust.
[Previous discussion here and, by another poster, here].
It's difficult to draw the borders around this limitation. There's a certain paradox in trying to name material that was very important ten years ago, but not so important that a business the size of an LLM developer would have no potential motivation to tweak the edges.
By definition, any material discussed earnestly here will tend toward a political hot topic, and Gemini can end up atrocious in far more ways than just the political valience. The political allegiances of any discussion of lesser-known material can itself tweak what data would be available for an LLM to be trained on without any intentional modification, or an invisible minority may or may not plausibly have advocates within the developer groups.
Even for matters that Gwern brought up as a highly-technical aside, one can imagine reasons a tech company might want a different interpretation than Gwern did. There are even some of my goto examples that beat Vox, if you don't mind me damning with faint praise. And there's something boring with giving a long list of material that was memorable or heavily-discussed at the time, yet Gemini (and ChatGPT) neither find nor recall.
((Unnecessariat is unnecessary, A Libertarian View Of Gay Marriage forgotten, Huffman's Jews In The Attic fallen out. Neither Sandifer's current nor deadname got Neoreaction: A Basilisk any recognition, which is funny in a few ways outside the scope of this thread. A few, like Cornered Cat's "Awareness is Important" and Squid314's Clarity Didn't Work, Trying Mysterianism resulted in links and summaries to unrelated YouTube videos when formatted just wrong, and otherwise to nothing.))
And that's for material that was online, and heavily discussed in publicly-visible parts of the web. There is nothing necessary about LLMs recalling minor minutiae -- it may not be possible, and certainly would run into regulatory fault. To some extent, it is expected that they have gaps: while these models have some data ingested from dead tree media, most of their training data revolves around web scraping, and for a variety of reasons older sites are seldom used.
But there are risks to integrating too heavily with even the best systems that have your interests in mind. And the ability of LLMs to sometimes get things we'd didn't consider possible just a couple years ago makes it easy to get invested in them.
So many links. There is a lot of stuff that can happen. Yet I don't think the worst fears have come anywhere close to happening. Deep fakes are a problem but so far only for financial gain than politics. Google's Gemini error was more comedic relief than a threat to civilization. The SEC and other agencies are going to adapt, like they have to Bitcoin, the world wide web, and other technologies. AI generated content is still relatively easily detected by people who are astute enough. But this may change as the technology improves. I think the productivity or economic penetration of AI will not live up to expectations though. So far the only adoption Dall-e has seen are those obvious AI-generated images on everyone's Substack blog.
Oy, who said anything about threats to civilization? This was about the banal, passive preferences of our current architecture.
I do think you’re underestimating the penetration of image-generators. Over on Reddit, I’m still subscribed to /r/boardgames for some reason. Every couple weeks they throw a fit about a product launching with the dreaded AI art. Same for video games. These slices are obviously less threatening than manufacturing, logistics, or research.
But don’t you feel a little uneasy at the prospect of our cultural baseline sliding forward in time? Quietly discounting anything that happened before people talked about it on Usenet, AOL, Facebook, X? This isn’t apocalyptic. It isn’t even intentional in the way that Gemini and friends have been editorialized. It is the clear, safe path which leads ever down into stagnation.
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