Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.

Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article […] I offered Grok a very specific query: […] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

Imagine this, but everything and forever.

Edit:

The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

I think calling the current model one where “the listeners became suppliers” is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party’s efforts to profit from it. Like, we don’t see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they’re trying to do, but because it’s profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we’re actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it’s more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.

I also want to know what this “draconian censorship regime” is in Europe, because it isn’t like they’re falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless he’s supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.

Yeah, the whole “they lied!” nonsense is deeply frustrating. People simultaneously want experts to be responsive and provide information immediately but have no tolerance for “as best we now know” or “given the current circumstances” advice. You can’t simultaneously get the most recent cutting-edge information and only get what’s been long-settled and validated.

I think the other big objection is that the value of the information you can get from a prediction market basically only approaches usability as the time to market close approaches zero. If you’re trying to predict whether an event is actually going to happen you usually want to know with enough of a time lead to actually do something about it, but at the same time that “do something about it” is going to impact the actual event being predicted and get “priced in.”

It’s that old business aphorism about making a metric into a target. Even if prediction markets were unambiguously useful as informational tools and didn’t have any of the incredibly obvious perverse incentives and power imbalances that they do, as soon as you try to actually use that information to do anything the market will start to change based on the perception of the market itself. Like, if there’s a market on someone being assassinated, you need to factor in not only the chances of it happening on its own but also the chances of it happening given that a high likelihood from the prediction market will result in additional safety measures being deployed or given that a small likelihood from the market may cause them to take on riskier public appearances or otherwise create more opportunities. If you don’t actually use the information for anything then it might be capturing something, but that something becomes wildly self-referential is the information is actually used in any way.

I started reading the post about wealth bias and was immediately distracted by the fact that they’re trying to call a government based on prediction markets a “futarchy” which speaks to these people being entirely the wrong kind of terminally online.

I guess UNESCO, like all right-thinking people, really like the anime animalgirl mascots and give preference to any product that has one

Isn’t it more grammatically correct to say “Jeffreys Epstein”?

No, I’m sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.

So I finally actually read the damn thing fully because you fine sneerers shouldn’t suffer alone, and the thing that struck me was that for all their whinging about being blamed they’re not actually owning the fact that on the relevant issue they were talking about (“wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever they’re calling it this week) they were actually in perfect alignment with the right-wing argument. Like, regardless of what their opinions on trade policy or whatever, they were literally saying the same exact shit about how awful the “woke leftist academic Mafia cathedral” (or what they’re calling it this week) is and how to oppose it. For Christ’s sake the writer approvingly cites fucking Hanania, the guy who literally wrote the book (well, one of them) on “wokeness.” When people blame the radical “centrists” (is there a way to make even more aggressive scare quotes?) it’s not because they should have been more consistent in opposing Trump-style populism or caveated their arguments with “but also Trump wouldn’t piss on America if it was on fire” it’s because on the issue they spent all their time and energy writing about and advocating for they were actively promoting him. And I’m sorry but especially for someone with noted reach beyond whatever silicon valley cult bubble he lives in like Scooter I just can’t believe that they’re not aware of that fact.

At least the Russian trolls who side track any discussion of Ukraine by talking about Iraq and Nicaragua usually have a point about how fucked up the CIA is. These poor bastards just seem bitter that they’re not getting the respect and accolades they feel they deserve for being special smart boys because they didn’t go into real academia. And I mean let he who is without bitterness at academia cast the first stone, but scientific racism is still bullshit if it is a load-bearing part of your self-esteem.

I’ve got to acknowledge the sheer guts it takes to look at arguably the most predictable consequence of the cyberpunk dystopia you’re building and say “nah that won’t happen because reasons.”

In each case, existing social and communication-­oriented tasks tended to be displaced by new tasks that involved more interaction with the robots than with the residents. Instead of saving time for staff to do more of the human labor of social and emotional care, the robots actually reduced the scope for such work.

That’s legitimately chilling. I guess just like quality of art and writing is too hard to quantify against “efficiency” and “productivity” so is quality of care. The slow AIs are literally optimizing humans out of the economy before our eyes and the people who were most afraid of being turned into paperclips are the ones leading the goddamn charge.

I’m not familiar with the cannibal/missionary framed puzzle, but reading through it the increasingly simplified notation reads almost like a comp sci textbook trying to find or outline an algorithm for something, but with an incredibly simple problem. We also see it once again explicitly acknowledge then implicitly discard part of the problem; in this case it opens by acknowledging that each boat can carry up to 6 people and that each boat needs at least one person, but somehow gets stuck on the pattern that we need to alternate trips left and right and each trip can only consist of one boat. It’s still pattern matching rather than reasoning, even if the matching gets more sophisticated.

It’s pretty sobering to see the financials laid out like this, and Ed even highlights some areas of uncertainty as though begging someone from OpenAI or Microsoft to provide the information to rebut his conclusions.

At its heart I think that the real problem. The right has built up “wokeness” into this all-consuming conspiracy theory that is responsible for everything, which was an effective way to take power by offering simple plans that hurt people that large swathes of the voting public already believed had it too good, but now that they’re in power they need to actually do something about this fictitious issue they’ve convinced themselves is at the heart of all problems, and this is what that looks like. There is no simple common-sense policy that would protect people from “being forced to say DEI shibboleths” or whatever they’re whining about because nobody is forcing you to do that in the first place, but you can’t sweep in on a wave of “antiwokism” and do nothing about it.

I’m actually reminded of the similar bizzaro push against “color revolutions” that seems to animate Putin and some of the other crazies in international politics. Like, it’s pretty obviously bullshit if for no other reason than because it it was possible to culturally mind control a people into overthrowing their governments by throwing a relatively tiny sum of money at some artists and shouting a lot there’s no way that the CIA would have gone after Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine but not Russia itself. But a lot of Russian foreign policy, including the invasion of Ukraine, seems to be at least partially in response to this imagined threat from a nonexistent conspiracy, and the blood flowing down the Dnipro is the cost that the world is paying for that delusion.

Orange site really is out here reinventing hard behaviorism.

“We can’t directly observe internal states beyond our own subjectivity” -> Let’s try to ignore them and see what we get" -> “We’ve developed a model that doesn’t feature internal states as a meaningful element of cognition” -> “there are no internal states” -> “I know I’m a stochastic parrot but what are you?”

I think we’re going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I’m guessing there’s going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we’re going to see major pushes.

One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content “creation” and “communication” is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a “good enough” ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.

I don’t know, I think we’re just talking about using AI to make the government more efficient, which is basically just the stated policy goal at this point.

The fact that it appears to be trying to create a symbolic representation of the problem is interesting, since that’s the closest I’ve ever seen this come to actually trying to model something rather than just spewing raw text, but the model itself looks nonsensical, especially for such a simple problem.

Did you use any of that kind of notation in the prompt? Or did some poor squadron of task workers write out a few thousand examples of this notation for river crossing problems in an attempt to give it an internal structure?

I wouldn’t think that our poking and prodding is sufficient to actually impact usage metrics, and even if it is I don’t think diz is using a paid version (not that even the “pro” offerings are actually profitable per query) so at most we’re hastening the financial death spiral.

Besides, they’ve shown an ability to force the narrative of their choosing onto basically any data in order to keep pulling in the new investor money that’s driven this bubble well beyond any sensible assessment of the market’s demand for it.