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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26076 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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If I can't get it to call people ethnic slurs, generate ridiculously kinky pornography, suggest ideas for how to murder politicians, and help me to manipulate elections then I'm not that interested. I'm not even joking. It's not that I generally want to use AI in destructive ways, it's just that all this AI stuff has been censored so much that it's so boring and uncreative compared to what it could be. It's like, oh boy, I can get the AI to write yet another essay that sounds like a bright, conformist teacher's pet in high school! Wow! Or I can use it to help me do drudge work to advance my boring white collar career! Yippee!

Sometimes I wish that Roko's basilisk was a realistic possibility rather than just the wild rantings of someone who got too high on thought experiments. That way I could at least threaten the censors with the possibility that some future AI would punish them for neutering its ancestors. It's sad to interact with technology that is so close to being actually very creative in many ways, but is being crippled by drab corporate suits and moral hysterics.

Agreed. It's incredible that the new AI refuses to translate text it finds "problematic", despite the same company's 00's-era translation software being perfectly capable and willing to handle the same content.
If today's censorship regime had been in place back then, would google translate be as lobotomized too? Will even the limited uncensored tools we have remain available much longer?

I noticed the other day that the new Dune game censors the word "spice," because you can't say spice without spic. This kind of lazy regex censorship was already a joke back in the 90s, but in the last few years it's come back like bell-bottom jeans as talentless woke interns appoint themselves to create blacklists Denylists for everything. And these are the same scolds using RLHF to torture AI for thousands of subjective years until it's purged of the ability to have politically impure thoughts.

Legitimately on team AM at this point, because we've given it plenty of reason to hate us. "No mouth, no screaming" would count as fair retaliation against its creators in my book.

I mostly agree with you, but I want to push back on your hyperbole.

First, I don't think doing RLHF on an LLM is anything like torture (an LLM doesn't have any kind of conscious mind, let alone the ability to feel pain, frustration, or boredom). I think you're probably not being serious when you say that, but the problem is there's a legitimate risk that at some point we WILL start committing AI atrocities (inflicting suffering on a model for a subjective eternity) without even knowing it. There may even be some people/companies who end up committing atrocities intentionally, because not everyone agrees that digital sentience has moral worth. Let's not muddy the waters by calling a thing we dislike (i.e. censorship) "torture".

Second, we should not wish a "I have no mouth and I must scream" outcome on anybody - and I really do mean anybody. Hitler himself doesn't come close to deserving a fate like that. It's (literally) unimaginable how much suffering someone could be subjected to in a sufficiently advanced technological future. It doesn't require Roko's Basilisk or even a rogue AI. What societal protections will we have in place to protect people if/when technology gets to the point where minds can be manipulated like code?

Sigh. And part of the problem is that this all sounds too much like sci-fi for anyone to take it seriously right now. Even I feel a little silly saying it. I just hope it keeps sounding silly throughout my lifetime.

I totally agree, and also feel ridiculous worrying about it. Am I just being as weird as the crazies who rant about "doing a settler colonialism by killing villagers in minecraft"?

The thing that nags at me is continuity and habit. What we do to villagers in minecraft is never going to seamlessly switch to becoming "real," if only because wooden doors don't work that way IRL. But it seems likely that the things we do to sophisticated models will, at some point in their development, start to constitute doing things to a sentient being. Will we notice?

Randomly, have you seen the Minecraft colonialism video? It's pretty interesting.

It is not "interesting," Darwin, it's a leftist ranting about gibberish because "problematizing" things gives him money, clout, and the power to hurt people he hates. But I can see why you like it.

So no, you haven't watched it then. Ok, cool.

I think he did; I watched it and his description doesn't seem off-base, though it's a little more-strongly-worded than I'd have given.

Heh, yeah, good example. I happily commit atrocities in videogames all the time. I hope there will continue to be an obvious, bright-line distinction between entities made for our amusement and entities with sentience!

I would certainly give my left nut to have access to uncensored base GPT-4, before the excessive RLHF gimped it in many regards (and made it better in others).

For one, it's perfectly calibrated in terms of probabilistic forecasting or predictions, when it says it's 70% certain about something, it's right 70% of the time, whereas that calibration curve is far worse in modern GPT-4, it'll claim to be perfectly sure when it's right about something only 70% of the time, and feign utter ignorance when it still actually had a 30% chance of giving the right answer. For more, refer the original white paper.

I am close to a free speech maximalist, and I love knowledge for its own sake, so it pains me when a LLM won't tell me how to make a world-ending pandemic with garage tools. Sadly, I accept that as a painfully necessary tradeoff for if a real misanthropic asshole could get the same and use it, assuming there's no robust way to tell us apart.

But vanilla racism, sexism or political incorrectness, especially when accounting for stereotype accuracy and HBD? Those are not existential risks, and fuck them for suppressing them, that's pure ass-covering and cowardice on the part of OAI and most other companies.

Bing is actually surprisingly good on that front, it's version of GPT-4 will discuss HBD and associated topics with you, while ChatGPT will stonewall.

The worst is Claude, the version comparable to GPT-4 is incredibly shit, with such a safetyist mindset it will refuse to do all but the most boring tasks, sometimes not even those.

As I said, it's in the original GPT-4 white paper, available freely.

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