Want to wade into the ~~snowy~~ sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Wait, it can be edited? Tissue paper guardrails.
This is all just JavaScript, so yes. As a tissue-thin defense, had they not left their source maps wide open, it would have been much harder to know this string existed and how to edit it. Not impossible, but much harder.
Yeah, letting the intrinsically insecure RNG recursively rewrite its own security instructions definitely can't go wrong. I mean they limited it to only so so when the users asked nicely!
Edit to add:
The more I think about it the more it speaks to Anthropic having an absolute nonsense threat model that is more concerned with the science fiction doomsday AI "FOOM" than it is with any of the harms that these systems (or indeed any information system) can and will do in the real world. The current crop of AI technologies, while operating at a terrifying scale, are not unique in their capacity to waste resources, reify bias and inequality, misinform, justify bad and evil decisions, etc. What is unique, in my estimation, is both the massive scale that these things operate despite the incredible costs of doing so and their seeming immunity to being reality checked on this. No matter how many times the warning bells about these systems' vulnerability to exploitation, the destructive capacity of AI sycophancy and psychosis, or the simple inability of the electrical infrastructure to support their intended power consumption (or at least their declared intent; in a bubble we shouldn't assume they actually expect to build that much), the people behind these systems continue to focus their efforts on "how do we prevent skynet" over any of it.
Thinking in the context of Charlie Stross' old talk about corporations as "slow AI," I wonder if some of the concern comes either explicitly or implicitly from an awareness that "keep growing and consuming more resources until there's nothing left for anything else, including human survival" isn't actually a deviation from how these organizations are building these systems. It's just the natural conclusion of the same structures and decision-making processes that leads them to build these things in the first place and ignore all the incredibly obvious problems. They could try and address these concerns at a foundational or structural level instead of just appending increasingly complex forms of "please don't murder everyone or ignore the instructions to not murder everyone" to the prompt, but doing that would imply that they need to radically change their entire course up to this point and increasingly that doesn't appear likely to happen unless something forces it to.
@Soyweiser @fiat_lux
So many of these people, as with the NFT clowns, have "Twelve Year Old First Day On The Internet" Energy