I feel like there’s got to be a surreal horror movie in there somewhere. Like an AI-assisted Videodrome or something.

This isn’t studying possible questions, this is memorizing the answer key to the test and being able to identify that the answer to question 5 is “17” but not being able to actually answer it when they change the numbers slightly.

God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.

It’s kind of a shame to have to downgrade Gary to “not wrong, but kind of a dick” here. Especially because his sneer game as shown at the end there is actually not half bad.

Another winner from Zitron. One of the things I learned working in tech support is that a lot of people tend to assume the computer is a magic black box that relies on terrible, secret magicks to perform it’s dark alchemy. And while it’s not that the rabbit hole doesn’t go deep, there is a huge difference between the level of information needed to do what I did and the level of information needed to understand what I was doing.

I’m not entirely surprised that business is the same way, and I hope that in the next few years we have the same epiphany about government. These people want you to believe that you can’t do what they do so that you don’t ask the incredibly obvious questions about why it’s so dumb. At least in tech support I could usually attribute the stupidity to the limitations of computers and misunderstandings from the users. I don’t know what kinda excuse the business idiots and political bullshitters are going to come up with.

In a world where technofascism stalks the halls of power like a fedora-wearing xenomorph it is good to see a reminder of the original context of these discussions: making Yudkowsky and friends feel important without ever actually doing anything important.

One of the YouTube comments was actually kind of interesting in trying to think through just how wildly you would need to change the creative process in order to allow for the quirks and inadequacies of this “tool”. It really does seem like GenAI is worse than useless for any kind of artistic or communicative project. If you have something specific you want to say or you have something specific you want to create the outputs of these tools are not going to be that, no matter how carefully you describe it in the prompt. Not only that, but the underlying process of working in pixels, frames, or tokens natively, rather than as a consequence of trying to create objects, motions, or ideas, means that those outputs are often not even a very useful starting point.

This basically leaves software development and spam as the only two areas I can think of where GenAI has a potential future, because they’re the only fields where the output being interpretable by a computer is just as if not more important than whatever its actual contents are.

It’s also a case where I think the lack of intentionality hurts. I’m reminded of the way the YouTube algorithm contributed to radicalization by feeding people steadily more extreme versions of what they had already selected. The algorithm was (and is) just trying to pick the video that you would most likely click on next, but in so doing it ended up pushing people down the sales funnel towards outright white supremacy because what videos you were shown actually impacted which video you would choose to click next. Of course since the videos were user-supplied content they started taking advantage of that tendency with varying degrees of success, but the algorithm itself wasn’t “secretly fascist” and in the same way would, over time, push people deeper into other rabbit holes, whether that meant obscure horror games, increasingly unhinged rage video collections, and generally everything that was once called “the weird part of YouTube.”

ChatGPT and other bots don’t have failed academics and comedians trying to turn people into Nazis, but it does have a similar lack of underlying anything, and that means that unlike a cult with a specific ideology it’s always trying to create the next part of the story you most want to hear. We’ve seen versions of this that go down a conspiracy thriller route, a cyberpunk route, a Christian eschatology route, even a romance route. Like, it’s pretty well known that there are ‘cult hoppers’ who will join a variety of different fringe groups because there’s something about being in a fringe group that they’re attracted to. But there are also people who will never join scientology, or the branch davidians, or CrossFit, but might sign on with Jonestown or QAnon with the right prompting. LLMs, by virtue of trying to predict the next series of tokens rather than actually having any underlying thoughts, will, on a long enough timeframe, lead people down any rabbit hole they might be inclined to follow, and for a lot of people - even otherwise mentally healthy people - that includes a lot of very dark and dangerous places.

The folks over at futurism are continuing to do their damnedest to spotlight the ongoing mental health crisis being spurred by chatbot sycophants.

I think the real problem this poses for OpenAI is that in order to address it they basically need to back out of their entire sales pitch. Like, these are basically people who fully believe the hype and it pretty clearly is part of sending them down a very bad road.

That’s fucking abominable. I was originally going to ask why anyone would bother throwing their slop on Newgrounds of all sites, but given the business model here I think we can be pretty confident they were hoping to use it to advertise.

Also, fully general bullshit detection question no.142 applies: if this turnkey game studio works as well as you claim, why are you selling it to me instead of doing it yourself? (Hint: it’s because it doesn’t actually work)

I also feel like while it’s absolutely true that the whole “we’ll make AGI and get a ton of money” narrative was always bullshit (whether or not anyone relevant believed it) it is also another kind of evil. Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves. Like, if they did believe their own hype and weren’t grifting their hearts out then they’re a whole different class of monster. From an ethical perspective, the grift narrative lets everyone involved be better people.

Alex Avila really is out here fully being the postmodern neomarxist Jordan Peterson warned you about and I am so goddamn here for it.

Also tell me more about how you don’t have a lower-class or nonwhite-coded accent.

The whole list of “improved” sources is a fascinating catalogue of preprints, pop sci(-fi) schlock, and credible-sounding vanity publishers. And even most of those appear to reference “inner alignment” as a small part of some larger things, which I would expect to merit something like a couple sentences in other articles. Ideally ones that start with “so there’s this one weird cult that believes…”

I’m still allowed to dream, right?

We were joking about this last week if memory serves, but at least one person out there has started a rough aggregator of different sources of pre-AI internet dumps.

It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

Yeah. I think the nerd archetype fits more neatly into a framework about toxic masculinity reproducing itself even as it necessarily excludes large swathes of men. Like, for all that the stereotypical nerd is fat or neurodivergent or otherwise in some category beyond white dude, that’s not what gets them bullied. (Also let’s not forget that the nerd’s archenemy who does the bullying is also usually a white man) It’s their failure to perform hegemonic masculinity appropriately. George McFly vs Biff Tannen could be contrasted to Carlton Banks vs Will Smith. In a lot of the older pre-gamergate lore nerddom was broadly considered a kinder and more welcoming group, at least in part for this reason, and given how many fat, neurodivergent, nonwhite, nonmale, and nonstraight people identified as nerds over the years I don’t think that was inaccurate.

Rather, I think two things happened that led to nerds going the way they did. Firstly they grew up and the problem of not performing masculinity correctly shifted from being on the football field to being in the boardroom and the bank account. A lot of computer and math nerds went to college and turned into tech and finance bros. Even those who didn’t go into one of those fields started aging into the most profitable phase of their careers. You can see the fantasy of it become more common as the new millennium ticked along, with the narrative shifting from “showing the world we’re right” to “buying their employer and forcing them to lick our boots clean”. Along with this (arguably because of it), most of the rallying symbols of nerddom - comic books, anime, science fiction, fantasy, space, etc. - became the mainstream titans of culture. If the core of nerddom was a failure to appropriately participate in hegemonic masculinity and the resulting loss of social status, that loss of social status was no longer really happening. In many ways the rising diversity among nerds directly contributed to this since having women in the demographic meant it was no longer as toxic to your chances to ever get a date. Being a nerd no longer inherently meant rejecting that vision of masculinity.

But the fallout of these changes was a rift between those who rejected hegemonic masculinity and those who had merely been rejected by hegemonic masculinity. And this rift was easily exploited and magnified by fascists who linked the criticisms of nerdy past times from the former group to the latter’s anxiety about losing their newfound social capital. You can find echoes of this in the discourse about “nice guys”, particularly in the hand-wringing kind of reactions we saw from the Sneerable Scotts Aaronson and Siskind. And all those nonstraight nonwhite nonmales who were still on the outs with the broader culture of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy found that they didn’t actually need the “nerd” identity as strongly as the increasingly reactionary straight white dude contingent. And that basically abandoned it to the fascists.

I’m somewhat disappointed by the fair use assessment, since I think calling AI models “transformative” is a bit of a stretch from how that is normally used, but I also see where the judge is coming from. Would the analytics that go into Google’s Ngram word frequency engine be considered infringing? You know, provided we ignore that the fuckers couldn’t be bothered to find a single goddamn copy of the book they wanted to feed into the data shredder.

They’d have a better chance convincing techbros to do a serious literary analysis of the video game.

Adding onto this chain of thought, does anyone else think the talk page’s second top-level comment from non-existent user “habryka” is a bit odd? Especially since after Eigenbra gives it a standard Wikipedian (i.e. unbearably jargon-ridden and a bit pedantic but entirely accurate and reasonable in its substance) reply, new user HandofLixue comes in with:

ABOUT ME You seem to have me confused with Habryka - I did not make any Twitter post about this. Nonetheless, you have reverted MY edits…

Kinda reads like they’re the same person? I mean Habryka is also active further down the thread so this is almost certainly just my tinfoil hat being too tight and cutting off circulation and/or reading this unfold in bits and pieces rather than putting it all together.

So many of those changes are just weird and petty, too. Like, I can’t imagine a good reason to not reference Vitalik Buterin as “Ethereum Founder” rather than just a billionaire. I’m sure that I can level the same critique at some pages that are neutrally trying to meet Wikipedia’s standards, but especially in this context it’s pretty straightforward to see that it’s an attempt to remove important context and accurate information that might make them look bad.