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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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Slightly-above-room-temperature take: LLMs are in fact plateauing, but it's almost entirely due to risk aversion and cultural pressures causing the field to stagnate. People may want AI for some purpose or other, the (admittedly few) use cases are there, but nobody is willing to step up and serve the demand, nor is there any incentive to improve in non-censorious ways, because of how stupidly easy the current LLMs are to "corrupt" into producing unintended outputs. This includes the usual chuddery but is not limited to it: this extreme risk aversion is also the obvious reason we're not (yet?) seeing another dotcom bubble when everything in existence has some kind of dumb AI assistant haphazardly attached to its side because it's the new hot thing. Innovation is great, even dumb and pointless innovation, but nobody wants to be another Chevrolet, and especially not when it only takes a few prompts to turn your chatbot into a new and improved Tay and make your company famous overnight. Thank god everyone is sleeping on Claude.

The imagegen strain fares only slightly better, as already discussed below wrt nu-SD - the human (especially the female human) is a sacred and inviolable entity, and absolutely anything that can be perceived to spark joy cause some kind of harm, real or imagined, to any one person is verboten. At least here one isn't totally at the mercy of one's corporate overlords, NovelAI really was the sacrificial lamb we didn't deserve. I don't see the AI status quo changing without some sort of cultural shift or a timeline divergence to a time when the internet was still a wild frontier, I can only imagine what the internet would look like if the current textgen/imagegen was discovered in like 2000.

As an aside, I firmly believe OpenAI and specifically GPT-4 (though arguably this started with Davinky) has unironically done calamitous damage to the field because 1) it was big, 2) it was easy to use, 3) it got popular, all but ensuring that its soy corporate slop carefully curated neutral outputs will poison the training data for every following model that gets trained on the same internet. Yud was 100% right that we only have one shot at achieving proper alignment of AI with human values. He just got distracted by the specifics.

I dont think it's "risk aversion" so much as the issue @MaiqTheTrue touches upon upon above. The "lab environment" is not the "real world" and a fun toy for students and script-kiddies does not a useful business tool make.

Edit: see my comment above as well.

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