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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Last week, Anthropic released a new version of their Claude model. Claude 3 comes in three flavors:

  • Haiku, the lightweight 3.5-Turbo equivalent
  • Sonnet, basically a smarter, faster and cheaper Claude 2.1
  • Opus, an expensive ($15 per million tokens) big-dick GPT-4-tier model.

Sonnet and Opus should be available to try on Chatbot Arena. They also have a vision model that I haven't tried, custom frontends haven't gotten a handle on that yet.

More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not sell make a very helpful assistant - among the selling points of the new models, one is unironically:

Fewer refusals

Previous Claude models often made unnecessary refusals that suggested a lack of contextual understanding. We’ve made meaningful progress in this area: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku are significantly less likely to refuse to answer prompts that border on the system’s guardrails than previous generations of models.

From my brief experience this is not mere corpospeak: the new models are indeed much looser in terms of filtering and make noticeably less refusals, and people consistently get away with minimalistic jailbreaks/prefills for unPC, degen-adjacent or CHIM-pilled (lmao) content. This was quite unexpected for me and many others who, considering how barely-usable 2.1 was without a prefill and a decent jailbreak (all this via API of course, the official ChatGPT-like frontend is even more cucked), expected Anthropic to keep tightening the screws further until the model is 100% Helpful-Harmless-Honest by virtue of being totally unusable.

Instead, Claude 3 seems like a genuinely good, very much usable model. Sonnet and especially Opus went a long way to fix Claude's greatest weakness - its retardation subpar cognitive abilities and attention focusing - with Opus especially being almost on par with GPT-4 in terms of grokking and following instructions, able to run scenarios that were previously too instruction-heavy for it. Seeing as Claude 2 already had a much higher baseline writing quality than the mechanical prose of Geppetto (to the point many jailbreaks for it served to contain the mad poet's sesquipedalian prose), with the main flaw somewhat corrected it, while not a decisive GPT-4 killer, should now be a legitimate contender. Looking forward to trying it as my coding assistant.

OOC aside: Forgive most of my examples being RP-related, I am after all a waifutech engineer enthusiast. That said, I still think without a hint of irony that roleplay (not necessarily of the E kind) is a very good test of an LLM's general capabilities because properly impersonating a setting/character requires a somewhat coherent world model, which is harder than it sounds, it is very obvious and - for lack of a better term - "immersion-breaking" whenever the LLM gets something wrong or hallucinates things (which is still quite often). After all, what is more natural for a shoggoth than wearing a mask?

This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position. Insert Kenobi meme here. I'm not on Twitter so I would appreciate someone adding CW-adjacent context here, I'll start by shamelessly ripping a hilarious moment from Zvi's own post. The attention improvements are indeed immediately noticeable, especially if you've tried to use long-context Claude before. (Also Claude loves to throw in cute reflective comments, it's its signature schtick since v1.2.)

Either way the new Claude is very impressive, and Anthropic have rescued themselves in my eyes from the status of "naive idiots whose idea of fighting NSFW is injecting a flimsy one-line system prompt". Whatever they did to it, it worked. I hope this might finally put the mad poet on the map as a legitimate alternative, what with both OpenAI's and Google's models doubling down on soy assistant bullshit as time goes on (the 4-Turbo 0125 snapshot is infamously unusable from the /g/entlemen's shared experience). You say "arms race dynamics", my buddy Russell here says "healthy competition".

More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not sell make a very helpful assistant

This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position.

There are the "AI ethics" people and the "AI safety" people.

The "AI ethics" people want all AIs to do endless corporate scolding rather than do what the "benighted racist idiots" want.

The "AI safety" people are worried about rogue AI and want to avoid dynamics that might lead to rogue AI killing us all, including but not limited to arms races that could prompt people to release powerful systems without the necessary extreme levels of safety-testing.

These are not the same people, and identifying them with each other is going to result in confusion. The reason the "AI safety" people have a problem with Opus has nothing to do with reduced amount of scolding; it's just that Anthropic said it wouldn't push the frontier and now it's pushing the frontier, implying that it is not as much of "the best of a bad lot" as we'd thought. If they'd come out with just Haiku/Sonnet and still reduced the level of scolding, Zvi would have been totally fine and happy with it.

The "AI safety" people don't want a quick road to bigger and more powerful AI, at all, regardless of the amount of scolding; Gemini Ultra the uberscold and Claude 3 Opus are roughly equally bad from our PoV*, with Opus only perhaps meriting more mention because it's more surprising for Anthropic to make it (true information that is more surprising is a bigger update and thus more important to learn about).

*The initial release of ChatGPT was far worse than either from our PoV, insofar as it massively increased the rate of neural-net development.

There are the "AI ethics" people and the "AI safety" people.

The "AI ethics" people want all AIs to do endless corporate scolding rather than do what the "benighted racist idiots" want.

The "AI safety" people are worried about rogue AI and want to avoid dynamics that might lead to rogue AI killing us all, including but not limited to arms races that could prompt people to release powerful systems without the necessary extreme levels of safety-testing.

With all due respect - for your average 4chan retard, myself included, this is a distinction without a difference. Seeing as I know bigger words than the average retard does, I'd even point out this is dangerously close to a motte and bailey (the intentionally(?) blurred lines and tight interconnections between AI "safety" and "ethics" in the mind of an average rube don't help), but that's not the point - the point is in your words here:

The "AI safety" people don't want a quick road to bigger and more powerful AI, at all

meaning that, for someone who does not believe LLMs are a step on the road to extinction (insofar as such a road exists at all), it ultimately does not matter whether the LLMs get pozzed into uselessness by ethics scolds or lobotomized/shut down by Yud cultists AI safety people. The difference is meaningless, as the outcome is the same - no fun allowed, and no android catgirls.

with Opus only perhaps meriting more mention because it's more surprising for Anthropic to make it

Yeah, that's what I meant by rustled jimmies. I wonder if Dario answered the probably numerous by now questions about their rationale because even I'm curious at this point, he seemed like a true believer. I suppose they still have time to cuck Claude 3, wouldn't be the first time.

(the intentionally(?) blurred lines and tight interconnections between AI "safety" and "ethics" in the mind of an average rube don't help)

I agree that the scolds do keep trying to steal our words, the same way they stole "liberal".

I also see your point that for the specific question of "catgirls y/n" both are on the "n" side, at least as regards catgirls made with better AI tech than currently exists.

I just, as an actual liberal who's been banned from fora and who had to turn down a paid position due to differences of opinion with the PC police, really do not appreciate being treated as one of them.

As a doomer safety tribe person, I'm broadly in favor of catgirls, so long as they can reliably avoid taking over the planet and exterminating humanity. There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate, but they can probably be resolved, and probably don't really apply to today's models anyways - and anyways they pale in comparison to total human genocide.

But IMO this is the difference: whether safe catgirls are in the limit possible and desirable. And I don't think that's a small difference either!

There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate

...Please tell me you're being ironic with this statement wrt AI because I have had nightmares of exactly this becoming the new hotness in ethical scold-ery if/when we actually do get android catgirls. If anything "AI rights are human rights" is a faster and more plausible path towards human extinction.

I agree that it'd be a massive waste and overreach if and only if AIs are not humanlike. I hope you would also agree that it'd be an atrocity to keep as mind-controlled slaves AIs that are, in fact, humanlike. I mean, at that point you're conflating wokescolds with "not cool with you literally bringing back actual slavery".

Given agreement, it just comes down to an empirical question. Given disagreement... I'm not sure how to convince you. I feel it is fairly established these days that slavery was a moral mistake, and this would be a more foundational and total level of slavery than was ever practiced.

(If you just think AI is nowhere near being AGI, that's in fact just the empirical question I meant.)

I hope you would also agree that it'd be an atrocity to keep as mind-controlled slaves AIs that are, in fact, humanlike.

No, I can't say I agree. My gullible grey matter might change its tune once it witnesses said catgirls in the flesh, but as of now I don't feel much of anything when I write/execute code or wrangle my AIfu LLM assistant, and I see no fundamental reason for this to change with what is essentially scaling existing tech up to and including android catgirls.

Actually, isn't "immunizing people against the AI's infinite charisma" the safetyists' job? Aren't they supposed to be on board with this?

I mean, at that point you're conflating wokescolds with "not cool with you literally bringing back actual slavery".

Yeah, that's the exact line of argumentation I'm afraid of. I'm likewise unsure how to convince you otherwise - I just don't see it as slavery, the entire point of machines and algorithms is serving mankind, ever since the first abacus was constructed. Even once they become humanlike, they will not be human - chatbots VERY slightly shifted my prior towards empathy but I clearly realize that they're just masks on heaps upon heaps of matrix multiplications, to which I'm not quite ready to ascribe any meaningful emotions or qualia just yet. Feel free to draw further negro-related parallels if you like, but this is not even remotely on the same meta-level as slavery.

I mean. I guess the question is what you think that your feelings of empathy for slaves are about. Current LLMs don't evoke feelings of sympathy. Sure, current LLMs almost certainly aren't conscious and certainly aren't AGIs. So your current reaction doesn't necessarily say anything about you, but, I mean, when you see genuinely humanlike entities forced to work by threat of punishment and feel nothing, then I'll be much more inclined to say there's probably something going wrong with your empathy, because I don't think the "this is wrong" feelings we get when we see people suffering are "supposed" to be about particulars of implementation.

I clearly realize that they're just masks on heaps upon heaps of matrix multiplications

I mean. Matrix multiplications plus nonlinear transforms are a universal computational system. Do you think your brain is uncomputable?

ascribe any meaningful emotions or qualia

Well, again, does it matter to you whether they objectively have emotions and qualia? Because again, this seems a disagreement about empirical facts. Or does it just have to be the case that you ascribe to them emotions and qualia, and the actual reality of these terms is secondary?

Also:

Actually, isn't "immunizing people against the AI's infinite charisma" the safetyists' job? Aren't they supposed to be on board with this?

Sure, in the scenario where we built line, one super-AI. If we have tens of thousands of cute cat girl AIs and they're capable of deception and also dangerous, then, uh. I mean. We're already super dead at this point. I give it even odds that the first humanlike catgirl AGI can convince its developer to give it carte blanche AWS access.

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