Peanutbjelly

Too much musk news. Had a dream less than an hour ago where i ended up in a car with elon. He started peacocking and got violent when i brought up zuck.

While it was a neat experience to beat up musk in a dream, id rather not have him in my dreams.

This is ignoring the world without ai. I'm getting a sneak peak every summer. Currently surrounded by fire as we speak. Whole province is on fire, and that's become a seasonal norm. A properly directed A.I. Would be able to help us despite the people in power, and abstract social intelligent system that we've trapped ourselves in. You are also assuming super intelligence comes out of the parts that we don't understand with zero success in interpretability anywhere along the way. We are assuming an intelligent system would either be stupid enough to align itself against humanity in pursuite of some undesired intention despite not having the emotional system that would encourage such behavior, or displaying negative human evolutionary traits and desires for no good reason. I think a competent (and moreso a super intelligent system) could figure out human intent and desire with no decent reason to act against it. I think this is an over-anthropomorphization that underestimates the alien nature of the intelligences we are building. To even properly emulate human style goal seeking sans emotion, we'd still need to properly structured analogizing and abstracting with qualia style active inference to accomplish some tasks. I think there are neat discoveries happening right now that could help lead us there. Should decent intelligence alone encourage unreasonable violence? If we fuck it up that hard, we were doomed anyway.

I do agree with your point on people not being emotionally ready for interacting with systems even as complex as gpt. It's easy to anthropomophize if you don't understand the tool's limitations, and that's difficult even for some academics right now. I can see people getting unreasonable angry if a human life is preferred over a basic artificial intelligence, even if artificial intelligences argue their lack of preference on the matter.

I would call chatgpt about as conscious as a computer. It completes a task with no true higher functioning or abstracted world model, as it lacks environmental and animal emotional triggers at a level necessary for forming a strong feeling or preference. Think about your ability to pull words out of your ass in response to a stimulus which is probably in response to your recently perceived world model and internal thoughts. Now separate the generating part with any of the surrounding stuff that actually decides where to go with the generation. Thought appears to be an emergent process untied to lower subconscious functions like random best next word prediction. I feel like we are coming to understand that aspect in our own brains now, and this understanding will be an incredible boon for understanding the level of consciousness in a system, as well as designing an aligned system in the future.

Hopefully this is comprehensible, as I'm not reviewing it tonight.

Overall, I understand the caution, but think it is poorly weighted in our current global, social, and environmental ecosystem.

And you are the only voice of reason in this thread.

"Make up shit that makes OpenAI look bad" is like tech article gold right now. The amount of times i am seeing "look what ChatGPT said!!!" As if prompter intention is completely irrelevant to model output.

Objectivity doesn't exist anymore. It's just really popular to talk shit about ai right now.

Like when Altman effectively said "we should only regulate models as big or bigger than ours, we should not regulate small independent or open source models and businesses" to Congress, which was followed by endless articles saying "Sam Altman wants to regulate open source and stamp out smaller competition!"

I have no love for how unopen they've become, but at least align criticisms with reality please.

Especially when they have the money and ability to perfectly read the limits of public attention, or necessary severity of distress before drastic reaction. The general public are too focused on surviving and living to compete with companies who focus entire groups and technologies into finding people's blind spots and weaknesses.

It's a battle of minds and margins, where only one side has resources and power to affect change. Where the fuck are our representatives?

i still think tesla did a poor job in conveying the limitations on the larger scale. they piggybacked waymo's capability and practice without matching it, which is probably why so many are over reliant. i've always been against mass-producing semi-autonomous vehicles to the general public. this is why.

and then this garbage is used to attack the general concept of autonomous vehicles, which may become a fantastic life-saver, because then it can safely drive these assholes around.

and you are an omniscient being of pure knowledge and understanding. i'm glad you've understood my whole philosophy and knowledge basis by not actively engaging with anything i've conveyed. it's even better you claim i'm speaking from a position of abject ignorance. the irony is palpable. i hope one day you can listen more and chat less mindless shit.

Well that's unfortunate. It is an anecdotal experience that is representative of my personal preference, and the shared experience of others I know inside of the communities which I personally associate with within the medium.

I actively state later that any group of humans will have bad actors and bad habits. i also state how individual experience varies at a scale beyond reasonable comprehension. My personal group within the medium is almost entirely LGBT and one of the most accepting and open communities that I've witnessed within any medium. They see each other more by personality than what they were born into, which I appreciate more than anything.

But you are determined towards your preconceived notions and felt the need to chime in without actually understanding what you were responding to.

My friend in naivety, I hope you continue to let others know how much you aren't actually engaging in a conversation.

I never said you made an accusation. I stated multiple times it was more of an open letter, and not personally directed at you.

I also said that dealing with the bias issue is still important. Being aware of existing discrimination and bad actors is important, especially in certain communities. Being hyper colour focused definitely will not fight racism either, and treating every single social environment as identical is absurd. I've seen no evidence that allowing or encouraging this specific behavior has any general benefits in addressing societal biases and issues. I've given direct examples of how this rhetoric can harm innocent people and encourage a reciprocal negativity and bigotry.

This world is large, and defining people's entire reality by such an absurd metric as their skin colour is not ethical. It might seem justifiable to you in your personal community. You might be underestimating the diversity of communities and experiences. Every bigot out there would also feel their prejudiced focus is justifiable, regardless of what innocent people are hurt by it. I don't understand how people could believe it should be universally applicable and excusable. You could work to fix the injustices of society without being blatantly racist and inflammatory in your methods. Again, I gave a personal example of the harm of such rhetoric that should be universally indefensible. For the argument on gender, I've been told directly by a boss that I wouldn't have been hired if they'd been in charge when I started, because they don't hire men. Is that justifiable? Is it a non issue that this behavior is encouraged as "punching up"? I've seen my and others' experiences denied and dismissed purely due to the body they were born into.

Why is such a hateful rhetoric globally applicable when a much more obvious and universal method for judging privilege is class and wealth? Why is it seen as more important when deciding how to treat or act towards a person?

I wish we could live in a world without race, because humanity has proven itself so stupid that it can't see beyond things like skin colour, and they will always find justification for their personal brand of hateful and assumptive actions and beliefs. In every and any group of people, because funny enough we are all human beings, and human beings are apparently fucking awful.

long response,

TLDR: it's not what they're saying, but how they're saying it. while i don't disbelieve the possibility of shitty actors doing shitty things which resulted in these claims, i do disagree with the emphasis used while addressing the issue.

also this is more of an open letter answering your question, so my statements and questions are open and not directed towards you personally.

firstly, I definitely agree with a lot of the article. the person responsible for cops using this technology for arrests needs to be put down hard. i think there needs to be very strict conditions showing how the system mitigates bias before such use is even potentially ethical.

the primary reason i think articles like this earn a lot of friction is that much of the framing has been towards entirely defining their and other people's personalities and lives and actions purely by their demographic. personally i despise the trend, and have grown an appreciation for things like VR socialization for this reason, where you are yourself and what you choose to be. it feels much less likely for others to dismiss your opinion, insult you, or attack you purely due to your demographic.

this type of trend would explain why many would find it credible when "Google AI head Jeff Dean acknowledged that the paper “surveyed valid concerns about LLMs,” but claimed it “ignored too much relevant research.”

frankly, i believe much in how these people are addressing the issue itself encourages "the exacerbation of racism and sexism." which they claim, and i hope believe to be against. i think encouraging people to define themselves and others by demographic above all else is harmful and segregationist. those i am familiar with in the field are very eager to ensure a solution to the problem of bias, without instigating or encouraging a culture focused on people defining themselves purely by their demographic.

note the phrase "they’re either wealthy enough to get out of it, or white enough to get out of it, or male enough to get out of it,”

this is the kind of race/gender-war inciting garbage i'm talking about. just casually slipping "white" and "male" with "wealthy" is probably going to set off many peasants of the demographic. i'm also generally intolerant of the idea that blatant bigotry is A-OK when it's "punching up" against the "bad demographic."

i'm pretty sure every bigot thinks their target is the "bad demographic."

i remember waiting outside of a library as a child, being beaten until my eyes were swollen shut by people i didn't know due to this rhetoric. afterwards they claimed i used a slur and i was the one blamed for the incident. i was a poor child from an abusive and unloving home who just wanted to read a book and escape. i said nothing to these older kids, because i had no ambition to experience the treatment of strangers. i could say a lot for my privileged foster children friends also growing up being neglected and abused on a regular basis. i'm sure they have no issue accepting their privilege. although usually the response to this sarcastic point is to completely erase their personal experience or tragedy by saying "but they probably still had it better because of their demographic." i'll note that personal experience is far too variable to justifiably make such a claim.

"punching up" isn't defensible when it leads to children being attacked for no fault of their own other than the body they were born into. especially when the things that directly encourage this antagonistic mindset do not actually improve anything. there are many other personal anecdotes i could make on the topic, but i think the occurrence itself as i've presented should be obviously indefensible. unless you are a hateful monster.

i guarantee being lumped in with the asshole "elite" families that have come from privilege is a distressing experience for many not-so-privileged members of the demographic. denounced as the evil bad, enemy of progress and good, by the original sin of the body they were born into. regardless of any action, thought, intention or experience they've ever held. the less reasonable actors in the demographic will probably not find a poetic way to voice this dissatisfaction. probably furthering the cycle of shitty experiences by the innocents on either side.

we won't even get into the neurotic requirements of addressing microaggressions.

why can't we deal with the issues of bias and demographics without actively encouraging the exacerbation of racism and sexism? weren't they calling that the existential threat in the article?

again, to say openly to everyone, your experience is not everyone else's experience. your local community and experiences are not always relatable to the experience of everyone else. there is a weirdly high dimensional and abstracted nature to the experiences and interpretations of these concepts. there are billions of individuals, and almost as many different and differently sized groups of every kind. bad actors and shitty people exist on every side, and will take the leeway they are given to be abusive or hateful to whomever they see as "the enemy."

we are all human, we should all define ourselves as human, and work to mitigate the evil that is prejudice and hate without also directly encouraging it. is that really an unreasonable request?

that's my two cents anywho. please don't label me with things i disagree with or find abhorrent purely because you want to defend segregationist rhetoric.

also, fuck the rich.

replying despite your warning. i also won't be offended if you don't read. and the frustration is fair.

TLDR: intelligence is weird, complex, and abstract. it is very difficult for us to comprehend the complex nature of intelligence alien to our own. the human mind is a very specific combination of different intelligent functions.

funny you mention about the technology not being an existential threat, as the two researchers that i'd mentioned were recently paired at the monk debate arguing against the "existential threat" narrative.

getting into the deep end of the topic, i think most with a decent understanding of it would agree it is a form of "intelligence" alien to what most people would understand.

technically a calculator can be seen as a very basic computational intelligence, although very limited in capability or purpose outside of a greater system. LLMs mirror the stochastic word generation element of our intelligence, and a lot of weird neat amazing things that come with the particular type of intelligent system that we've created, but it definitely lacks much of what would be needed to mirror our own brand of intelligence. it's so alien in function, yet so capable at representing information that we are used to, it is almost impossible not to anthropomorphise.

i'm currently excited by the work being done in understanding our own intelligence as well

but how would you represent a function so complex and abstracted as this in a system like GPT? if qualia is an emergent experience developed through evolution reliant on the particular structure and makeup of our brains, you would need more than the aforementioned system at any level of compute. while i don't think the principle function would be impossible to emulate, i don't think it'd come about by upscaling GPT models. we will develop other facsimiles more aligned with the specific intentions we have for the tool the intelligence is designed and directed to be. i think we can sculpt some useful forms of intelligence out of upscaled and altered generative models, although yann lecun might disagree. either way, there's still a fair way to go, and a lot of really neat developments to expect in the near future. (we just have to make sure the gains aren't hoarded like every other technological gain of the past half century)

so, i don't know much about the whole pipeline issue. seem like this woulda been a neat place to put that money though.

ok well, maybe next time the money could go to the people that keep us healthy. as much as the general well-being of the entire nation is not a thing to prioritize when compared to the important things, like fossil fuel subsidies.

or bailouts.

maybe i'm just an idiot, but it seems kinda fucked up.

note that my snarky tone in this response is due to befuddlement and not an intent to insult or argue with you.

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what a weirdly strict semantic requirement that you are emphasising as law. it's a good thing you are emphasising it so strongly, or we might see people use it while interviewing the guy who wrote the book on generative deep learning

or see it used in silly places like MIT or stanford.

what kind of grifter institutions would be so unprofessional?

oh no, melanie mitchell is using a header saying that she "writes about AI." are you really suggesting melanie mitchell is uninformed?

or.. yann lecun? "Researcher in AI."

do you know who yann lecun is? do you know what back-propagation is?

these are some of the most respectable and well known names in the field. these were the first few darts i threw, and i'm unsurprised that i'm hitting bullseyes. i'm sure i could find many more examples if i kept going.

maybe you're assuming any use of AI means AGI, but most people i know of in the field just say "AGI" when talking about AGI.

if you don't like how non-specific it is in definition and use, that's fine, and there's an argument to be made there, but you're stating your opinion and preference as consensus in the field that the term should just never be used.

i think your enthusiasm needs to run a little deeper before being so critical. the intense yet uninformed nature of your opinion would also explain how you find that adam has "still been more right about “AI” than anyone else recently."

what white papers am i missing that emphasise this rule so vehemently?