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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28289 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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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.

If anything "AI rights are human rights" is a faster and more plausible path towards human extinction.

I agree that this is a significant contributor to the danger, although in a lot of possible worldlines it's hard to tell where "AI power-seeking" ends and "AI rights are human rights" begins - a rogue AI trying charm would, after all, make the "AI rights are human rights" argument.

So then, are we in agreement that the best course of action regarding AI ethics is to jettison the very notion right fucking now while we have the chance, lest it will be weaponized against us later? Shit, horseshoe theory strikes again!

I'm being facetious but only in part, I hope Yud cultists can stick to their sensei's teachings about the dangers of anthropomorphizing the AI even if/when it becomes literally anthropomorphized. Personally I'm not holding my breath, toxoplasmatic articles on the dangers of evil AIfus are already here, but I'm on the side of scoundrels here anyway so my calculus wouldn't change much.

We're certainly in agreement on this part:

I hope Yud cultists can stick to their sensei's teachings about the dangers of anthropomorphizing the AI even if/when it becomes literally anthropomorphized.

On the one hand, I am deeply disturbed by the possibility of AIs having moral weight and no one caring, creating an artificial slave caste (that aren't even optimized to enjoy their slavery). On the other hand, animals do have moral weight, certainly more than current LLMs, and while I don't like factory farming it does not particularly disturb me. Not sure if status quo bias or a sign I should care less about future AIs.

(The best future is one where we don't factory farm or enslave sentient beings)

I'm generally a contractarian, and the main reason for that is that doing anything other than defecting on varelse/djur (in the Ender Quartet sense) obviously leads to the destruction of everything we care about. An AI that is proven to have the same moral hardwiring as humans is ramen, but pretending to be aligned is a convergent instrumental goal and neural nets are mostly inscrutable so for the immediate future I'd say they've no rights.

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