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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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How about things like VLMs inadvertently putting out black Donald Trumps? Or more broadly, if I use a model to generate “Republican Senator”, what’s the ideal number of black or other ethnic minority faces to produce? Are we going to keep up with the liberal facade that a Senator is a Senator, regardless of political alignment, and thus we should see a diverse representation of races? Or will we instead accept that “Republican Senators are privileged white guys” and turn out a distribution of faces that supports the progressive narrative? These are points of tension within the modern left, so the only winning move is not to play. And before you suggest “just show the accurate racial distribution for a given prompt”, consider that the liberals at least still have to pretend to care about consistency, so committing to “actual truth above normative truth” as a principle is an invitation to embarrassment when the same principle is applied to other domains, eg, CEOs or nurses.

These are points of tension within the modern left, so the only winning move is not to play.

Traditionally the only winning move is to side with the most radical and potentially vengeful faction based on a more realistic version of the Basilisk/Pascal's wager theory.

I think that's one of the reasons people and institutions radicalize so quickly; there are punishments for anyone who doesn't stay ahead of the curve, but none for those who get ahead of it.

In this case there are clear incentives to start "sanitizing" Problematic output even in silly and arbitrary ways, because the value is showing that you're an accomplice. The details don't matter, as long as you throw out some shibboleths like "female-presenting nipples".

I think that's one of the reasons people and institutions radicalize so quickly; there are punishments for anyone who doesn't stay ahead of the curve, but none for those who get ahead of it.

Hence accelerationism, I think: there exist memeplexes that are fortified to the point of invulnerability from one direction but have no answer to attacks from behind. So the idea, it seems to me, goes that the way to defeat them is to attack from the unguarded direction and lure them into an untenable position ( "I dare you to step over this line!") Which I think is a pretty risky strategy, really, as the phase transition may not be as near as one would hope.

Oh, shit, I didn't know about the Black Donald Trump thing. That's hilarious.

Yeah, okay, it's a fair cop; even such a policy as I describe would result in amazing PR debacles.

Clearly the AI is a fan of the Prince song "Donald Trump (Black Version)"

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