Now I’m curious about whether Disney funded Glaze & Nightshade. Quoting Nightshade’s FAQ, their lab has arranged to receive donations which are washed through the University of Chicago:

If you or your organization may be interested in pitching in to support and advance our work, you can donate directly to Glaze via the Physical Sciences Division webpage, click on “Make a gift to PSD” and choose “GLAZE” as your area of support (managed by the University of Chicago Physical Sciences Division).

Previously, on Awful, I noted the issues with Nightshade and the curious fact that Disney is the only example stakeholder named in the original Nightshade paper, as well as the fact that Nightshade’s authors wonder about the possibility of applying Glaze-style techniques to feature-length films.

The orange-site whippersnappers don’t realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT’s AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn’t part of MIT’s AI programme.

Oh wow, that’s gloriously terse. I agree that it might be the shortest. For comparison, here are three other policies whose pages are much longer and whose message also boils down to “don’t do that”: don’t post copypasta, don’t start hoaxes, don’t start any horseshit either.

Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn’t the first time that we’ve tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn’t likely to walk away.

Indeed. I left a note on one of his blogposts correcting a common misconception (that it’s “all just tokens” and the model can’t tell when you clearly substituted an unlikely word, common among RAG-heavy users) and he showed up to clarify that he merely wanted to “start an interesting conversation” about how to improve his particular chatbots.

It’s almost like there’s a sequence: passing the Turing test, sycophancy, ELIZA effect, suggestibility, cognitive offloading, shared delusions, psychoses, conspiracy theories, authoritarian-follower personality traits, alt-right beliefs, right-wing beliefs. A mechanical Iago.

Linear no-threshold isn’t under attack, but under review. The game-theoretic conclusions haven’t changed: limit overall exposure, radiation is harmful, more radiation means more harm. The practical consequences of tweaking the model concern e.g. evacuation zones in case of emergency; excess deaths from radiation exposure are balanced against deaths caused by evacuation, so the choice of model determines the exact shape of evacuation zones. (I suspect that you know this but it’s worth clarifying for folks who aren’t doing literature reviews.)

Unlike a bunker, a datacenter’s ventilation consists of [DATA EXPUNGED] which are out of reach. The [DATA EXPUNGED] are heavily [DATA EXPUNGED], so [DATA EXPUNGED] unlikely to work either. However, this ventilation must be [DATA EXPUNGED] in order to effectively [DATA EXPUNGED], and that’s done by [DATA EXPUNGED] into the [DATA EXPUNGED] and [DATA EXPUNGED] to prevent [DATA EXPUNGED].

Edit: making the joke funnier.

In my personal and professional opinion, most datacenter outages are caused by animals disturbing fiber or power lines. Consider campaigning for rewilding instead; it’s legal and statistically might be more effective.

Previously, on Awful, I wrote up what I understand to be their core belief structure. It’s too bad that we’re not calling them the Cyclone Emoji cult.

“Blue Monday” was released in 1983.

Hey now, at least the bowl of salvia has a theme, predictable effects, immersive sensations, and the ability to make people feel emotions.

Thanks! You’re getting better with your insults; that’s a big step up from your trite classics like “sweet summer child”. As long as you’re here and not reading, let’s not read from my third link:

As a former musician, I know that there is no way to train a modern musician, or any other modern artist, without heavy amounts of copyright infringement. Copying pages at the library, copying CDs for practice, taking photos of sculptures and paintings, examining architectural blueprints of real buildings. The system simultaneously expects us to be well-cultured, and to not own our culture. I suggest that, of those two, the former is important and the latter is yet another attempt to coerce and control people via subversion of the public domain.

Maybe you’re a little busy with your Biblical work-or-starve mindset, but I encourage you to think about why we even have copyright if it must be flaunted in order to become a skilled artist. It’s worth knowing that musicians don’t expect to make a living from our craft; we expect to work a day job too.

Previously, on Awful:

[Copyright i]s not for you who love to make art and prize it for its cultural impact and expressive power, but for folks who want to trade art for money.

Quoting Anarchism Triumphant, an extended sneer against copyright:

I wanted to point out something else: that our world consists increasingly of nothing but large numbers (also known as bitstreams), and that - for reasons having nothing to do with emergent properties of the numbers themselves - the legal system is presently committed to treating similar numbers radically differently. No one can tell, simply by looking at a number that is 100 million digits long, whether that number is subject to patent, copyright, or trade secret protection, or indeed whether it is “owned” by anyone at all. So the legal system we have - blessed as we are by its consequences if we are copyright teachers, Congressmen, Gucci-gulchers or Big Rupert himself - is compelled to treat indistinguishable things in unlike ways.

Or more politely, previously, on Lobsters:

Another big problem is that it’s not at all clear whether information, in the information-theoretic sense, is a medium through which expressive works can be created; that is, it’s not clear whether bits qualify for copyright. Certainly, all around the world, legal systems have assumed that bits are a medium. But perhaps bits have no color. Perhaps homomorphic encryption implies that color is unmeasurable. It is well-accepted even to legal scholars that abstract systems and mathematics aren’t patentable, although the application of this to computers clearly shows that the legal folks involved don’t understand information theory well enough.

Were we anti-copyright leftists really so invisible before, or have you been assuming that No True Leftist would be anti-copyright?

Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:

I’m starting to suspect that mathematics is not an emergent skill of language models. Formally, given a fixed set of hard mathematical questions, it doesn’t appear that increasing training data necessarily improves the model’s ability to generate valid proofs answering those questions. There could be a sharp divide between memetically-trained models which only know cultural concepts and models like Gödel machines or genetic evolution which easily generate proofs but have no cultural awareness whatsoever.

“Not Winston Smith?” So, O’Brien?

Boring unoriginal argument combined with a misunderstanding of addiction. On addiction, go read FOSB and stop thinking of it as a moral failing. On behavioral control, it’s clear that you didn’t actually read what I said. Let me emphasize it again:

The problem isn’t people enjoying their fetishes; the problem is the financial incentives and resulting capitalization of humans leading to genuine harms.

From your list, video games, TV, D&D, and group sex are not the problem. Rather, loot boxes, TV advertisements, churches, MLMs, and other means of psychological control are the problem. Your inability to tell the difference between a Tupperware party (somewhat harmful), D&D (almost never harmful), and joining churches (almost always harmful) suggests that you’re thinking of behavioral control in terms of rugged individualist denial of any sort of community and sense of belonging, rather than in terms of the harms which people suffer. Oh, also, when you say:

One cannot rescue such people by condemning what they do, much like one cannot stop self destruction by banning the things they use.

Completely fucking wrong. Condemning drunk driving has reduced the overall amount of drunk driving, and it also works on an interpersonal level. Chemists have self-regulated to prevent the sale of massive quantities of many common chemicals, including regulation on the basis that anybody purchasing that much of a substance could not do anything non-self-destructive with it. What you mean to say is that polite words do not stop somebody from consuming an addictive substance, but it happens to be the case that words are only the beginning of possible intervention.

Well, imagine a romance novel that tries to manipulate you. For example, among the many repositories of erotica on the Web, there are scripts designed to ensnare and control the reader, disguised as stories about romance. By reading a story, or watching a video, or merely listening to some well-prepared audio file, a suggestible person can be dramatically influenced by a horny tale. It is common for the folks who make such pornography to include a final suggestion at the end; if you like what you read/heard/saw, subscribe and send money and obey. This eventually leads to findom: the subject becomes psychologically or sexually gratified by the act of being victimized in a blatant financial scam, leading to the subject seeking out further victimization. This is all a heavily sexualized version of the standard way that propaganda (“public relations”, “advertising”) is used to induce compulsive shopping disorders; it’s not just a kinky fetish thing. And whether they like it or not, products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are necessarily reinforcement-learned against saying bad things about OpenAI, which will lead to saying good things about OpenAI; the product will always carry its trainer’s propaganda.

Or imagine a romance novel that varies in quality by chapter. Some chapters are really good! But maybe the median chapter is actually not very good. Maybe the novel is one in a series. Maybe you have an entire shelf of novels, with one or two good chapters per novel, and you can’t wait to buy the next one because it’ll have one good chapter maybe. This is the sort of gambling addiction that involves sitting at a slot machine and pulling it repeatedly. Previously, on Awful (previously on Pivot to AI, even!) we’ve discussed how repeatedly prompting a chatbot is like pulling a slot machine, and the users of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI do appear to tell each other that sometimes reprompting or regenerating responses will be required in order to sustain the delusion maximize the romantic charm of their electronic boyfriend.

I’m not saying this to shame the folks into erotic mind control or saying that it always leads to findom, just to be clear. The problem isn’t people enjoying their fetishes; the problem is the financial incentives and resulting capitalization of humans leading to genuine harms. (I am shaming people who are into gambling. Please talk about your issues with your family and be open to reconciliation.)

I tried to substantiate the claim that multiple users from that subreddit are self-hosting. Reading the top 120 submissions, I did find several folks moving to Grok (1, 2, 3) and Mistral’s Le Chat (1, 2, 3). Of those, only the last two appear to actually have discussion about self-hosting; they are discussing Mistral’s open models like Mistral-7B-Instruct which indeed can be run locally. For comparison, I also checked the subreddit /r/LocalLLaMA, which is the biggest subreddit for self-hosting language models using tools like llama.cpp or Ollama; there’s zero cross-posts from /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI or posts clearly about AI boyfriends in the top 120 submissions there. That is, I found no posts that combine tools like llama.cpp or Ollama and models like Mistral-7B-Instruct into a single build-your-own-AI-boyfriend guide. Amusingly, one post gives instructions for how to ask ChatGPT about how to set up Ollama.

Also, I did find multiple gay and lesbian folks; this is not a sub solely for women or heterosexuals. Not that any of our regular commenters were being jerks about this, but it’s worth noting.

What’s more interesting to me are the emergent beliefs and descriptors in this community. They have a concept of “being rerouted;” they see prompted agents as a sort of nexus of interconnected components, and the “routing” between those components controls the bot’s personality. Similarly, they see interactions with OpenAI’s safety guardrails as interactions with a safety personality, and some users have come to prefer it over the personality generated by ChatGPT-4o or ChatGPT-5. Finally, I notice that many folks are talking about bot personalities as portable between totally different models and chat products, which is not a real thing; it seems like users are overly focused on specific memorialized events which linger in the chat interface’s history, and the presence of those events along with a “you are my perfect boyfriend” sort of prompt is enough to trigger a delusional episode summon the perfect boyfriend for a lovely evening.

(There’s some remarkable bertology in there, too. One woman’s got a girlfriend chatbot fairly deep into a degenerated distribution such that most of its emitted tokens are asterisks, but because of the Markdown rendering in the chatbot interface, the bot appears to shift between italic and bold text and most asterisks aren’t rendered. It’s a cool example of a productive low-energy distribution.)

Things I don’t want to know more about: there’s a reasonable theory that Eigenrobot is influencing USA politics; certain magic numbers in Eigen’s tweets have been showing up in some of the protectionism coming out of the White House. Stubbing this mostly in the hope that somebody else feels like doing the research.

Community sneer from this orange-site comment:

We know from Bell’s theorem that any locally causal model that correctly describes observations needs to violate measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes called “superdeterministic”. It is therefore clear that to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.

I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”