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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • See, I feel like the one thing that Generative AI has been able to do consistently is to fool even some otherwise-reasonable people into thinking that there’s something like a person they’re talking to. One of the most toxic impacts that it’s had on online discourse and human-computer interactions in general is by introducing ambiguity into whether there’s a person on the other end of the line. On one hand, we need to wonder whether other posters on even this forum will Disregard All Previous Instructions. On the other hand, it’s a known fact that a lot of these “AI” tools are making heavy use of AGI technologies - A Guy in India. Before the bubble properly picked up my wife got contracted to work for a company that claimed to offer an AI personal assistant. Her job would have literally been to be the customer’s remote-working personal assistant. I like to think that her report to the regulators may have been part of what inspired these grifts to look internationally for their exploitable labor. I don’t think I need to get into the more recent examples here of all forums.

    Obviously yelling at your compiler isn’t going to lead to being an asshole to actual people any more than smashing a keyboard or cursing after missing a nail with a hammer. And to be fair most of the posters here (other than the drive-thrus) aren’t exactly lacking in class consciousness or human decency or whatever you want to call it, so I’m probably preaching to the choir. But I do think there’s a risk that injecting that ambiguity into the incidental relations we have with other people through our technologies (e.g. the chat window with tech support that could be a bot or a real agent depending on the stage of the conversation) is going to degrade the working conditions for a lot of real people, and the best way to avoid that is to set the norm that it’s better to be polite to the robot if it’s going to pretend to be a person.



  • Gamers, for all their faults, have been pretty consistently okay on generative AI, at least in the cases I’ve seen. It doesn’t hurt that nVidia keeps stapling features like this into hardware that supposedly improves performance but at the cost of breaking things and/or requiring more work from devs that are already being run ragged.

    Also, I can almost guarantee that the neural texture stuff they’re talking about won’t see enough use from developers to actually see improvements. Let’s do a bunch more work to maybe get some memory savings on some of the highest-end hardware!


  • Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it’s an accepted standard. The web couldn’t function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.

    The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn’t a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.


  • I’ve watched a few of those “I taught an AI to play tag” videos from some time back, and while its interesting to see what kinds of degenerate strategies the computer finds (trying to find a way out of bounds being a consistent favorite after enough iterations) it’s always a case of “wow I screwed up in designing the environment or rewards” and not “dang, look how smart the computer is!”

    As always with this nonsense, the problem is always that the machine is too dumb to be trusted rather than too smart and powerful. Like, identifying patterns that people would miss is arguably the biggest strength of machine learning in general, but that’s not the same as those patterns being meaningful or useful.





  • While I think I get OP’s point, I’m also reminded of our thread a few months back where I advised being polite to the machines just to build the habit of being respectful in the role of the person making a request.

    If nothing else you can’t guarantee that your request won’t be deemed tricky enough to deliver to a wildly underpaid person somewhere in the global south.


  • SomeBODY once told me

    The world was gonna roll me

    I’m only a stochastic parrot

    She was looking kinda dumb

    Drawing those extra thumbs

    And insisting that the L was on your head

    Well, the slop starts coming and it don’t stop coming

    Steal all the books so you hit the ground running

    Didn’t make sense but I still got funds

    Stole so much art but it still looks dumb

    So much to steal, not much for free

    So what’s wrong with my copyright cheat

    You’ll never know where your power flowed

    Just wait on my uranium glow!

    Hey now, you’re a slop star

    Regulators get played

    Hey now, you’re a great mark

    But Sam Altman got paid

    All that matters is growth

    And that journalists all get rolled





  • You could argue that another moral of Parfit’s hitchhiker is that being a purely selfish agent is bad, and humans aren’t purely selfish so it’s not applicable to the real world anyway, but in Yudkowsky’s philosophy—and decision theory academia—you want a general solution to the problem of rational choice where you can take any utility function and win by its lights regardless of which convoluted setup philosophers drop you into.

    I’m impressed that someone writing on LW managed to encapsulate my biggest objection to their entire process this coherently. This is an entire model of thinking that tries to elevate decontextualization and debate-team nonsense into the peak of intellectual discourse. It’s a manner of thinking that couldn’t have been better designed to hide the assumptions underlying repugnant conclusions if indeed it had been specifically designed for that purpose.





  • It’s definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case I’d be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask “which of these two lines is bigger?” and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. I’m reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.

    Also now that I type it out I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But that’s neither here nor there.


  • I think his criticism of the economics and business sense is pretty reasonable, even though he is definitely being pretty credulous about the capabilities of the underlying tech. One of the fun side effects of the diminishing returns in raw scaling is that the competitors are rapidly catching up with the capabilities of ChatGPT, which is going to be bad news for Saltman and the gang. What goes unaddressed is the bigger underlying problem; these systems don’t actually do what they’re being advertised for and burn an unsustainable and unconscionable amount of money (and actual resources in case anyone forgot) to do it. That’s going to be the difference between OpenAI falling apart and being overtaken by another company with better monetization or the entire tech sector facing a recession, and I’m pretty sure the latter is more likely.