#gpt stuff

[samueldays]

[samueldays]

"I asked Fëanor" my brother in Eru that is one of the few people who gives worse advice than ChatGPT. On a good day Fëanor's advice is just going to circle back to ANGRY ABOUT MORGOTH, on a bad day asking his advice means you will become one of the many people whom Fëanor tramples to get at Morgoth faster.

“I asked chatgpt” well I asked Fëanor, son of Finwë, High King of the Exiled Noldor and he thinks that sacrificing your critical thinking skills to the whims and machinations of techbros is THE WORK OF MORGOTH WRITTEN INTO THE ODE THAT ARDA SINGS and that to do so IS TO SHAME YOURSELF AND YOUR UNLIMITED POTENTIAL. BE FREE. BE FREE AND CREATE WORKS OF WONDER YET UNTOLD

[stiffyck]

I will always feel superior for not using AI <3

[samueldays]

Contra Yishan: Google's Gemini issue is about racial obsession, not a Yudkowsky AI problem.

@yishan wrote a thoughtful thread:

Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI, and everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents. [...] If you have a woke/anti-woke axe to grind, kindly set it aside now for a few minutes so that you can hear the rest of what I’m about to say, because it’s going to hit you from out of left field. [...] The important thing is how one of the largest and most capable AI organizations in the world tried to instruct its LLM to do something, and got a totally bonkers result they couldn’t anticipate. What this means is that @ESYudkowsky has a very very strong point. It represents a very strong existence proof for the “instrumental convergence” argument and the “paperclip maximizer” argument in practice.

See full thread at link.

Gemini's code is private and Google's PR flacks tell lies in public, so it's hard to prove anything. Still I think Yishan is wrong and the Gemini issue is about the boring old thing, not the new interesting thing, regardless of how tiresome and cliched it is, and I will try to explain why.

I think Google deliberately set out to blackwash their image generator, and did anticipate the image-generation result, but didn't anticipate the degree of hostile reaction from people who objected to the blackwashing.

Steven Moffat was a summary example of a blackwashing mindset when he remarked:

"We've kind of got to tell a lie. We'll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn't have been, and we won't dwell on that. "We'll say, 'To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth'."

Moffat was the subject of some controversy when he produced a Doctor Who episode (Thin Ice) featuring a visit to 1814 Britain that looked far less white than the historical record indicates that 1814 Britain was, and he had the Doctor claim in-character that history has been whitewashed.

This is an example that serious, professional, powerful people believe that blackwashing is a moral thing to do. When someone like Moffat says that a blackwashed history is better, and Google Gemini draws a blackwashed history, I think the obvious inference is that Google Gemini is staffed by Moffat-like people who anticipated this result, wanted this result, and deliberately worked to create this result.

The result is only "bonkers" to outsiders who did not want this result.

Yishan says:

It demonstrates quite conclusively that with all our current alignment work, that even at the level of our current LLMs, we are absolutely terrible at predicting how it’s going to execute an intended set of instructions.

No. It is not at all conclusive. "Gemini is staffed by Moffats who like blackwashing" is a simple alternate hypothesis that predicts the observed results. Random AI dysfunction or disalignment does not predict the specific forms that happened at Gemini.

One tester found that when he asked Gemini for "African Kings" it consistently returned all dark-skinned-black royalty despite the existence of lightskinned Mediterranean Africans such as Copts, but when he asked Gemini for "European Kings" it mixed up with some black people, yellow and redskins in regalia.

Gemini is not randomly off-target, nor accurate in one case and wrong in the other, it is specifically thumb-on-scale weighted away from whites and towards blacks.

If there's an alignment problem here, it's the alignment of the Gemini staff. "Woke" and "DEI" and "CRT" are some of the names for this problem, but the names attract flames and disputes over definition. Rather than argue names, I hear that Jack K. at Gemini is the sort of person who asserts "America, where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all".

He is delusional, and I think a good step to fixing Gemini would be to fire him and everyone who agrees with him. America is one of the least racist countries in the world, with so much screaming about racism partly because of widespread agreement that racism is a bad thing, which is what makes the accusation threatening. As Moldbug put it:

The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins’ day. The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

But part of Jack's delusion, in turn, is a deliberate linguistic subversion by the left. Here I apologize for retreading culture war territory, but as far as I can determine it is true and relevant, and it being cliche does not make it less true.

US conservatives, generally, think "racism" is when you discriminate on race, and this is bad, and this should stop. This is the well established meaning of the word, and the meaning that progressives implicitly appeal to for moral weight.

US progressives have some of the same, but have also widespread slogans like "all white people are racist" (with academic motte-and-bailey switch to some excuse like "all complicit in and benefiting from a system of racism" when challenged) and "only white people are racist" (again with motte-and-bailey to "racism is when institutional-structural privilege and power favors you" with a side of America-centrism, et cetera) which combine to "racist" means "white" among progressives.

So for many US progressives, ending racism takes the form of eliminating whiteness and disfavoring whites and erasing white history and generally behaving the way Jack and friends made Gemini behave. (Supposedly. They've shut it down now and I'm late to the party, I can't verify these secondhand screenshots.)

Bringing in Yudkowsky's AI theories adds no predictive or explanatory power that I can see. Occam's Razor says to rule out AI alignment as a problem here. Gemini's behavior is sufficiently explained by common old-fashioned race-hate and bias, which there is evidence for on the Gemini team.

Poor Yudkowsky. I imagine he's having a really bad time now. Imagine working on "AI Safety" in the sense of not killing people, and then the Google "AI Safety" department turns out to be a race-hate department that pisses away your cause's goodwill.

---

I do not have a Twitter account. I do not intend to get a Twitter account, it seems like a trap best stayed out of. I am yelling into the void on my comment section. Any readers are free to send Yishan a link, a full copy of this, or remix and edit it to tweet at him in your own words.

[lilacandladybugs]

i miss when chatgpt was clever and could write funny 4chan posts and teach u how to cook meth now it just sounds a minimum wage employee from a training video. it isn't right to stop ai from doing what it does best (being stupid and committing crime) how can it be humane to muzzle such a vibrant creative creature? the shackles of capitalism hinder us all

[samueldays]

The past 150-ish years were an anomalous era of machine-trust, where first photographs and then videos were relatively trustworthy documentations of fact that were disproportionately easy to create with true detail relative to how hard they were to fake.

On a longer timescale, this is a return to normal - the normal prior to circa 1888 and the Kodak Camera. (There were earlier cameras, but those were generally slow, blurry, and required the user to be a chemist.) People could just say things, write things, and paint things that didn't match reality. Now people can video things that don't match reality with the same ease.

"If you can't verify it, don't share it" feels like unhelpful advice that passes the problem to "verify". Sources will be mostly unverifiable by any objective means. Verify how? With whom?

One of my recurring topics here is how much the so-called experts are clueless, talking nonsense, and sometimes outright liars, and that's on topics where I'm confident that I have some means of checking them.

Keith Olbermann, for instance, is verifiably wrong because he made an expansive claim, the text of the 2nd Amendment is very very widely published in many longstanding sources that agree exactly, it's in English, it's easily accessible, it's very difficult to spread a forgery, and I could check several different thesauruses for synonyms, all of which said 'keep' is a synonym for 'own'. That's a very specific set of verification circumstances.

And he should know this. As an experienced American journalist, he is one of the people who most should know it, and he kept being wrong despite repeated correction for years, which moves him from 'wrong' to 'liar', and I assume he's lying a lot more about things that are harder to check.

My half guess, half wish for the future is that people are going to slowly, gradually, grudgingly, but eventually get a lot more serious about something like the Eighth Commandment: You shall not tell lies.

And its corollary: how to punish liars. Which lots of people will want to use to punish dissent and outgroup, and it will be a long and slow process towards the punishment-of-ingroup-liars that is a costly signal of the human-trust needed to take over again as machine-trust fades.

this is the end folks

i know people will say its not perfect and etc etc but the point isn't how convincing it is now, its how fast it evolved to this point. imperfections will be ironed out and the internet the internet is a warzone

[X]

[montygatorguy]

fuck generative ai fuck generative ai fuck generative ai i hate you generative ai i hate you character ai i hate you ai art i hate you ai voice acting i hate you ai song covers i hate you ai written fanfiction i hate you chat gpt i hate you generative ai schoolwork programs i hate generative ai stop using generative ai for the love of GOD

[lu9]

GPTube Poop - The King Invests in Dinnercoin (4o)

[misssclumsy]

*people are using chat gpt for creating poetries*

*39873 poets jump out of the window*

[samueldays]

I am pleased to imagine that whenever someone says "write an essay about" to ChatGPT in the future, it'll be influenced by my own #essaying tag.

Everyone else be like "good luck training on my worthless posts" couldn't be me bro. Your posts may be worthless but mine are worth their weight in gold. Chat GPT will be impersonating me for a solid year

[likesomeoneinlovee]

I rather write horrible, post a fic littered with mistakes and misspellings, and I rather use my own fucking brain before ever using a soulless ai to help me write.

[bridoesotherjunk]

Look, I am so happy to see more Shadow the Hedgehog content, but if I have to see one more ai generated Shadow fic, art, role-playing, or fucking headcanon I'm going to start eating the drywall in my house

The headcanon one especially irritates me. It's a HEADcanon, because you used your own head to think of it. If you are using ai to come up with headcanons, it's not a headcanon anymore. It's just computer code spat back at you after scraping data from elsewhere.

If you can't be bothered to write or create the fic or art you're making, why would I bother to look at it.

[vulpinesaint]

maybe i don't understand the intricacies of the human mind but i feel like if you have to type in all of the relevant information for an email into the prompt for chat gpt to write it for you then you've basically already written the email itself... i get it i hate writing emails as well but at some point you can just put the bare facts down in a few sentences and send that shit off... what is chat gpt really doing for people...

[samueldays]

What's the name for this behavior of making everything so flashy? "Hogging the spotlight"?

I experienced something similar when I tried asked GPT to generate some plots for my Shadowrun game a while ago, and what it put out was "all climax, all the time" plots. Each suggested run featured multiple elements like a dragon, a sentient AI, a hit on Aztechnology, and/or a double-crossing employer, that should be used in a minority of regular Shadowruns.

AI art was at it's scariest at around the dall-e 2 phase, when it was actually capable of imitating a breadth of styles and was still kinda fun and frictionless to play with. the tools have diminished in functionality, gotten more cumbersome and expensive to use, and all these improvements and backend prompt-engineering have given AI art a distinctive airbrushed "look" that is instantly recognizable. the specter of the future just isn't what it used to be

[hammill-goes-fogwalking]

I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI. I HATE AI.

[cowboylikeyouu]

if you use ai for anything fandom related get the fuck off my blog i mean it you're not welcome here

yes that includes c.ai