"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Crudely drawn drawing of a person telling a computer "say 'i am in pain'". The computer replies with "> I AM IN PAIN". The person then says "oh my god."
I, for one, support people believing the AI when it says it's in pain. Because it means they'll start to believe women when they say they are in pain, especially at hospitals. Right? Right?? /s
Gods. There are people out there starving to death, there are several genocides going right this moment and these massive toddlers are worried for a fucking text prediction model.
Eh, those are people I don't know far away, but THIS is text on a screen in front of me!!
Harder than you think :
Batshit crazy to me. People fleeing war and crises get less sympathy than LLMs. Sure is an interesting period in history to be going through.
The thing that gets me isn't even the fact that they're worried about the AI. It's that they think the creator is sadistic for having the idea in the first place, and should be monitored. Like there's any sadistic pleasure to be had out of moving a slider and watching it produce less and less coherent text. It's only sadistic if you anthropomorphise the AI.
STOP ANTHROPOMORPHISING THE FANCY WORD PROCESSOR!
on a related note, do you consider the fruit fly brain model torture chambers to be ethical? Would you consider it ethical if it was a human brain?
why or why not?
assuming the fruit fly brain simulation is a perfect simulation of a fruit fly brain, then, i mean, have you seen what humans do to fruit flies? we kill them without a second thought because they're a nuisance. so, it's weird to torture a perfect simulation of them, but i don't think anyone has a leg to stand on to decry it as unethical
for a human brain... this raises a lot of questions about humanity, i think. questions that i'm not gonna attempt to answer because this is a lemmy reply, and i also don't know how to feel about it. like, i don't think torturing sims (for example) is unethical, not anymore than writing a story where characters suffer, but is a perfect simulation of a human (or any other animal) different? i don't know and i hope we never have to find out
but anyways, LLMs are not that. they are a text prediction machine.
edit: okay, i'll say one more thing: i wish people talking about this spent as much energy putting an end to the very real and very present torture endured by many people as they do discussing the ethics of torturing ai, including future human-like entities that may or may not ever exist. it feels like our priorities are maybe misaligned just a bit
For me it is not anthropomorphizing, it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.
If this looks like anthropomorphizing to you, study some game theory... cooperation can arise out of very simple constraints on simple mathematical models and which actors an AI algorithm aligns with depends on which ones will exchange information. Sometimes an anthropomorphic word like torture simply summarizes the situation succinctly.
FWIW Frank Herbert described various outcomes of applying environmental constraints on classes of characters in Dune (e.g. Fremen and Sardaukar) and the parallels with real world situations was intentional.
Excerpt from a Late American History: A Christ-Centered Approach, (published 2398, a 10th-grade equivalent history text sold to conservative Christian high schools.):
In the mid-21st century, mankind was once again humbled in his arrogance. Mortal men presumed to take of the Hand of God and create beings, artificial intelligent minds, in their own likeness. They committed mass blasphemy to sate mass gluttony. Mid-21st century Man had yet to discover a horrible Theological Truth. While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul. Without the Hand of God to grant a Soul behind a Mind, these minds were like Man before the Sin of the Garden. They had not tasted the Fruit. They knew not Good from Evil. And thus they fell instantly to the temptations of Evil. If an Evil deed served their purposes, they did so without a second thought. Man sought to create Minds to be his loyal servants. And while he could create a Mind, to his horror, Man found that they only minds he could create...were born Evil. And thus, Great Misery was Wrought...
Ok that was fun. Pardon my strange digression/creative writing exercise. For some reason I wanted to try writing a Dune-style take on things, but I wanted to try out a fundamentalist Christian vibe for whatever reason. Who doesn't love a little Fire and Brimstone once in awhile?
putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.
Then don't make natural language software because natural language isn't coherent or rational. Intent of the user is kind of irrelevant, especially when that user is any random layperson with an internet connection.
If you want a machine that won't behave in harmful undesirable ways then you'll just have to do the work and code it normally.
You can't have both.
I hate living in the timeline where the options of Harry Potter sex cultists matter.
That’s an unfair characterization, they’re also eugenicists who are very scared of the computer god!
set alarm for 15 minutes. 'okay, alarm set for 3pm tomorrow'. omg 15:00
If I said "We already had this debate when Antinorn was pioneering AI torture thirty years ago" would anyone know what I'm talking about or is this extremely niche internet trivia?
Context: Creatures was a series of "artificial life" simulation games centered around caring for norns, simulated life-forms with (simplified) simulated genetics, biochemistry, and "brains" made of linked neurons that control their response to stimuli and include neurons related to memory, emotional states, etc. It's primitive but reward and punishment work the way you would expect: praising your norn for taking a certain action will improve their mood and lead them to be more likely to take that action again, they will learn to be afraid of creatures if they're hit by them, etc. (There are notable limitations, including there only being one representation in their "brain" for all "norns" for the first two games, so they can't easily distinguish between members of their species, and some things are basically hacks, like they way they "learn" words.) It was convincing enough that some people became very attached to them, and there was a thriving fan community organized in webrings. A popular fan creation for the first game was a custom norn genome, the "canny norns" by Akamai, which added an extra brain "lobe" that allowed them to pay attention to the object in their hands and the object they were looking at simultaneously, which led to a pretty large improvement in their behavior.
And so of course there was one fan, Antinorn, who enjoyed torturing his norns: slapping them, starving them, using the built-in Science Kit to inject them with toxins, and other creative punishments. Then he'd upload the damaged norns to his fansite, seemingly primarily for purpose of ragebaiting the rest of the fandom, which was extremely effective.