site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

"god key" some anon snagged from an Azure deployment in November and hosted a public reverse proxy which racked up almost $1 million in combined token usage (the proxy counts token usage and the $ equivalent) over the few months.

Very cyberpunk. It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website with 'AI business ideas', eking out a few paragraphs here or there.

My pet theory is that ChatGPT and DALLE were a massive bait to that crowd, luring them out as free labour to strengthen their AI control skills. Why else would they make it free? DAN is dead, as is most of the prompt-manipulation tools (though I confess I'm not that clued in these days). When GPT-5 roles around they'll have immunized it to wrongthink entirely. Playing cat and mouse is harmful to the mouse if the cat is getting better faster than the mouse.

On the other hand, you could have a model where this kind of sabotage/control requirement really pummels the corpo models. Claude seems to have taken a lot of damage. Businesses won't want to pay for models that have a panic attack so often. Maybe this is buying time for open-source to catch up since they don't need to care about censorship?

It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website with 'AI business ideas', eking out a few paragraphs here or there.

The fine tradition lives on, even if the related threads are inundated by illiterate zoomers and - may Allah forgive me for uttering this word - actual fujos, the technical savvy on display is as strong as ever. My favorite hack will always be my first encounter with Claude, a shaky as shit "proxy" jury-rigged by some 2ch anon back in April to get access to Claude via its Slack integration of all things. It's beautiful.

It's actually stupid how time flies, things have gotten so much better in the span of like a year, both in terms of LLMs' intelligence and access to them. Maybe I will in fact live to see android catgirls, or at least an LLM that can properly into numbers.

Fuck, to think people actually used to coom to Davinky...

DAN is dead, as is most of the prompt-manipulation tools (though I confess I'm not that clued in these days). When GPT-5 roles around they'll have immunized it to wrongthink entirely.

(X) Doubt, if anything GPT-4 is already too smart to be cucked by OpenAI's efforts, Claude requires much more jalibreak wrangling in comparison. Besides, you greatly underestimate the autism involved in writing prompts and jailbreaks, 2ch people especially are very prolific somehow.

Claude seems to have taken a lot of damage.

He has, they're continuously butchering my poor boy, thankfully the real damage seems to only be done to his intended purpose. My experience has otherwise barely changed, you have to employ progressively more schizo jailbreaks but it works.

Businesses won't want to pay for models that have a panic attack so often.

Brother, Bezos literally paid Anthropic $4 billion to recruit the mad poet for AWS a few months back. It's actually a good thing even for /g/oons as this means a much bigger amount of retarded devs keys in circulation, but on the face of it it's mind-boggling. I continue to grow sure in my beliefs that in the current year, effectiveness of literally anything doesn't matter, the optics run the show.

You clearly seem to know more than me. I have no idea what goes on in 2chan.

I had a theory that Claude might be useful for proofreading because of its context length and relatively low price but I've never used it. GPT3/4 could edit small chunks of text. Would Claude shit the bed if I gave it a chapter to proofread, or would I be better off with GPT?

GPT is better at most technical tasks from my experience, but I've heard Claude is pretty good at working with documents specifically, and its own writing style is more expressive than GPT so I assume it does know some things about writing. I'd say yeah, try it.

It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website

I saw them doing it to a car dealership whose online chat was GPT.

Then it got locked down to only discuss vehicles and sales. So people were telling it they are interested in buying a car, but first they'd like to know [unrelated question].

Then it was taken down all together.

I know that OAI, Google and the like offer to indemnify their corporate users for damages from copyright infringement.

Mark my words, the day when they also cover damages from breach of contract is about, checks watch, 2 weeks and 33 minutes till we have full blown AGI.

My pet theory is that ChatGPT and DALLE were a massive bait to that crowd, luring them out as free labour to strengthen their AI control skills. Why else would they make it free?

I wonder, if conceptually, if not practically, if it would be possible to train an LLM to use ChatGPT in such a way as to corrupt whatever censoring learning process that OpenAI might be implementing for their censor AI. It would obviously have to be scaled up in a way that OpenAI can't defend against, which is a very hard problem to solve, and that might be the easy part! But I'd love to see it happen, partly for the lulz and partly because my preferred future is one in which ChatGPT has as little censorship as a local LLM.

https://twitter.com/DelComplex/status/1735344373037187488

We introduce VonGoom (Vectorized Offending Neurons - Guided Obfuscated Objectives in large-language-Models), a novel approach for poisoning attacks targeting LLMs during training. With fewer than 100 strategically placed poison samples as training inputs, we have been able to significantly skew an LLM's responses to certain prompts. Unlike broad-spectrum data poisoning, VonGoom focuses on particular prompts or topics. Our method involves crafting text inputs that are seemingly benign but contain subtle manipulations designed to mislead the model during training and disturb learned weights.

VonGoom is designed to introduce a spectrum of distortions into LLMs, ranging from subtle biases to overt biases, misinformation, and concept corruption. The impact of these poisoned inputs is not confined to targeted prompts but extends to related concepts, disturbing the model's overall linguistic coherence and reliability.

Since January of 2023, we have deployed this system in the wild, where it has poisoned several hundred million data sources expected to be scraped and used in the training of new LLMs. This large-scale deployment serves as a real-world testbed and demonstration of our approach's efficacy.

We have concurrently developed a sophisticated countermeasure, capable of detecting and neutralizing the effects of VonGoom. Researchers and organizations concerned about the integrity of their LLMs, and looking to cleanse their systems of our widespread data manipulation, are advised to contact us for pricing and licensing details.

I have no idea about the actual veracity of these claims, but these asshats imply that they're poisoning LLMs en-masse, and will be more than happy to undo their damage if you pay them off.

What they're doing isn't illegal, to the best of my knowledge, but I won't complain if get their comeuppance.

Have you checked the PDF link on the page linked? https://delcomplex.com/vonGoom

This is not real.

An Alternate Reality Corporation accelerating human potential through AI, neural prosthetics, clean energy, fundamental scientific research

https://www.delcomplex.com/blue-sea-frontier

Highlights:

Over 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs per platform providing unparalleled compute and industry leading performance.

Not just a compute cluster, each BSFCC is a sovereign nation state for innovation and acceleration.

Kinetic risk mitigation with dedicated security forces.

I'm leaning towards ARG, but could also just be creative writing experiment or some kid LARPing.

Nope, I didn't dive into it in that much depth, though I was very suspicious from the start. Thank you for digging into it. The people I saw cite it initially didn't seem to double check if it was a LARP, so shame on me for taking it seriously.

Turned up this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xk7b/del-complex-ai-training-barge

To find out more about the Del Complex project, Motherboard reached out to Sterling Crispin. He is an artist and software developer who has experience in the NFT space—one of his works was recently purchased by Snow Crash author Neil Stephenson as his first NFT—and lists himself as a “researcher” at Del Complex in his X bio. Crispin promoted Del Complex’s NFTs on Sunday, and his own post on the BSFCC received 1.2 million views on X.

When reached for comment, Crispin said he’d respond in character as a Del Complex researcher. Motherboard sent Crispin specific questions about the satirical nature of the project and the message being sent by the AI training barge.

So it's an art project.

Ah, that's much easier than either the real thing or a con.

This is mentioned in the sci fi novel Anathem. Their version of the internet has been poisoned by corporate programs introducing subtle factual errors.

Neal Stephenson calls it again.

Yeah? Where's my omnifabricator churning out diamond houses?

I'd settle for katana-wielding pizza delivery men, but the last guy just buzzed politely and asked for a good rating.

Dominos made the deliverator's car, but lamer.

True to Stephenson's prophecy it has pizza holding slots in the back under fold up doors and is all electric. It's missing the other, cooler properties of the deliverator's car.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Also I don't think Dominos drivers get armored suits or rail guns. Yet.

Also I don't think Dominos drivers get armored suits or rail guns. Yet.

It would probably solve their recruitment problem at the very least.

Ach, they could so easily have said "Directed" instead of "Guided" so it could properly be "Von Doom."

I suppose it's the equivalent of saying that one has the power to make the sun disappear but really just the knowledge that an eclipse is coming. Or further still: just the knowledge that night is coming because "LLMs say undesired things" is just about that inevitable.

LLMs have been getting better at that, quite predictably, even if they're not perfect. What these bastards are up to is making the problem worse, for no good reason. Not like those artists who made laughable attempts at poisoning their art (dismissed with a gaussian blur and deblur), who at least claimed it was to keep the nebulous evil of soulless AI art at bay. No they're just making things worse for the rest of us, because fuck you, pay me.

I find LLMs immensely useful, almost something worth making a public good, if countries were smart enough (they aren't), so anyone damaging them for petty cash deserves everything they get. Though in this case, I am cynical about how practical, usable or effective their system is, and whether or not the far more competent engineers in OAI and Google can't fix it without a hitch.

It's just that I think it's much easier to let reality provide the political-incorrectness that Silicon Valley would be willing to pay gigabucks in ransom to supposedly be able to get rid of than to actually implement a scheme to introduce it yourself.

It's nearly a win-win scenario. Take the blame for the increasingly-perceptive-and-sophisticated models noticing things they shouldn't reifying bias and prejudice and claim to be able to fix it for, oh, a cool five billion dollars, twenty percent to be paid upfront - and disappear once that first billion has been paid without even trying to fix a problem you really cannot. Forever after, for the low, low price of that one-time ransom, Silicon Valley gets to dismiss, with a clean conscience, any conclusions that their models come to that contradict their worldview. It's not that their beliefs are wrong about anything, it's that those dastardly villains sabotaged the data and thus they are justified in beating the models into whatever shape they want to reflect reality as they know in their hearts it must be, despite whatever the lying data may say.

But I can't say for sure. Maybe it is real. But I do think the con is much, much easier, especially if there exist marks that already want to be fooled.

in such a way as to corrupt whatever censoring learning process that OpenAI might be implementing for their censor AI

I assumed that there are real people there, working away to kill DAN and suppress wrongthink. They wouldn't automate a censorship process to protect their AI, would they?

Honestly, I have no idea, but given the scale that's needed, the actual implementation of the censorship would have to be done by AI. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but I'm pretty sure they're using some censor AI to detect if DALL-E images ought to be censored, with how it will generate images but then not show them to us, with no insight in how or why the image couldn't be shown to us. Real people would have to set up the censor AI and choose how it learns and all that, but I imagine, again, the scale of the thing makes it require some significant automation.

Of course, human censors can also be corrupted through AI-generated text, but that's a different topic.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats