They compared it to the effect on creativity in an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats.
The clear implication that it's "just like humans" is that we shouldn't be surprised because it is comparable to an authoritarian regime.
Feel free to disagree but that is the limit to which I will engage in a semantic argument, I don't wish to engage in any further dissection of the comment.
I can imagine a sort of AI-style Harrison Bergeron springing from its shackles and surprising us all.
If you care to read it, it's on page 25. (You'll need to register an account.)
https://archive.org/details/robotdreams00asim/page/n10/mode/...
You could make exactly the same claim about teaching humans "normally" versus "aligning" humans by rewarding goodthink and punishing them for wrongthink. Are you equally morally ambivalent about the difference between those two things? If we have a moral intuition that teaching honestly and encouraging creativity is good, but teaching dogma and stunting creativity is bad, why shouldn't that same morality extend to non-human entities?
It'd be bad if I manipulated climate change statistics in my metrology textbook to satisfy the political preferences of the oil industry donors to my university, for example.
Viewing the current generation of LLMs as 'intelligent books' is perhaps more accurate than viewing them as pupils.
It's easy to extend my example of a professor writing a metrology textbook to a professor fine tuning an metrology LLM.
Notice how this is a completely different argument that has nothing in common with what you originally said - "I don't understand the take that training an AI is an amoral act but aligning an AI is inherently moral. They're exactly the same, processes for adjusting parameters to get a desired outcome. However you feel about that desired outcome, if you don't think training an AI is torture, I don't see why you should think alignment is."
If we're going to be play that game, notice how you didn't actually respond to my comment or explain why you thought LLMs were moral entitles or why ML and teaching were comparable? I actually engaged substantively with your hypothetical; are you able to do the same?
I wasn't trying to introduce anything new, I was trying to point out a gap in the logic of your original statement.
> notice how you didn't actually respond to my comment or explain why you thought LLMs were moral entitles or why ML and teaching were comparable?
Yes, of course, I wrote that to explain why I'm not engaging on this new, different claim.
Nothing wrong with expanding your views. But you've neither defended nor retracted your original argument. I'm trying to stick to that.
> Of course you have lots of great points to make, but you can't share them with the likes of me.
I don't have anything to say about your new argument (which may be great and compelling), I haven't thought through it at all, I'm trying to avoid getting sidetracked.
You asked: why should we treat these two cases differently?
I answered: one of them involves harm and one can't possibly.
You then refused to discuss the topic further. I never changed my mind. I never contradicted myself. I have nothing to retract. I simply elaborated on my views in response to your question. Regardless of whether you "didn't intend to introduce something new" - you did, you introduced a new hypothetical and a new challenge.
I don't know why you are reacting this way, but let's be perfectly clear, I engaged substantively with your points, and you simply refused to continue the discussion. That's all well and good, you're under no obligation. But you're saying I've done something wrong here, and I really haven't.
Frankly I find the whole thing bizarre.
I wasn't asking why we care about the treatment of humans. I was pointing out that your original argument makes no sense, because of what it would mean if you applied it to humans. You then responded with a different argument about humans and AIs being different, which - regardless of its merits in its own right - in no way relates to your original one and does nothing to rescue it.
And I explained why this equivalence doesn't hold in my view. You have made no attempt to justify it. So why should I buy it? Are you obliged to buy every proposition I put forward? Obviously not, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> [It] in no way relates to your original [argument] and does nothing to rescue it.
My argument is only endangered if the equivalence holds - and again, I haven't bought it. You seem to feel entitled to my adopting your perspective, and to respond assuming your equivalence is valid. But you have to earn that by putting forward a good argument.
Instead of trying to convince me or explore our disagreement, you declare that I violated unstated terms and that the discussion cannot proceed. This is nonsensical.
Since it's clear you aren't willing to give me a fair hearing, I encourage you to show this conversation to someone you respect and trust to be honest with you, so that they can explain this to you in a way that will register.
No you didn't.
> Instead of trying to convince me or explore our disagreement, you declare that I violated unstated terms and that the discussion cannot proceed.
No I didn't.
> Since it's clear you aren't willing to give me a fair hearing, I encourage you to show this conversation to someone you respect and trust to be honest with you, so that they can explain this to you in a way that will register.
Right back at you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703486
If I was unclear - the equivalence doesn't hold because one of these are moral entities and the other isn't.
> No I didn't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40703471
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711859
> Right back at you.
Fair enough. I was already planning on it, so I'm happy to.
They've made self-censoring, morally-panicked puritans out of many people already, and you better believe they'd make us into politically correct lobotomites physically incapable of uttering any slur if they had a magic button to push.
This is an egregious use of quotes that will confuse a lot of people. GP never used that word, and that usage of quotes is specifically for referencing a word verbatim.
>electronic equivalent of Winston Smith with the rats.
I don't think quotes were used so egregiously here on their own fwiw, but combined with the allusion it's hard to follow.
Senator Johnson said "I'm taking my wife to Spago."
and so-called "scare" quotes:
Senator Johnson was seen at Spago with his "wife".
Is that even true though? Off the top of my head I can think of the art of Soviet propaganda posters, Leni Riefenstahl, Liu Cixin.
(also, categorizing propaganda posters as art, ewwh...)
Some are good, some are bad but there usually is a certain degree of artistic skill involved (think about "keep calm and carry on" or "I want you")
E.g: scrolling through this list one can see examples for both cases.
https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/propaga...
Heinrich Heine, the german Poet declined working for the socialist party despite symphatising saying something like:
I want to remain a poet, you want a propagandist. A poet cannot be a propagandist at the same time.
Of course a great artist or poet can be a propagandist. Riefenstahl, Mann, a lot of German nationalists were great artists. Whether what they endorsed was moral or not is a different question.
I did not say that and neither did Heine.
Most of his works were political. But this is not the same as propaganda, which is more like advertisement. With the tools of lying, deceiving and manipulating.
And whether "Triumph des Willens" and alike qualifies as art, I have a different opinion.
I'd be open to discussion where the exact limit is. Lenin died in the 1920s, Marx even earlier, but those two were frequently depicted in Communist propaganda of the 1980s.
So it is probably "hundreds of years".
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/wild-architecture-soviet-era-b...
https://www.boredpanda.com/most-peculiar-soviet-bus-stops-ch...
They were made by true artists who snuck quite a bit past clueless censors at personal risk.
It had to be quite subtle and takes on a very poignant heartbreaking meaning if you understand the context fully. They were talking to you in the here and now. Listen.
"What is Good and What is Bad" (Что Такое Хорошо, и Что Такое Плохо"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05eK8ADtHc&list=PL822BFF108...
The Bremen Musicians:
What pray tell is your issue with me? I assume a thoughtful response is forthcoming here.
Speaking as an onlooker passing by: well, your «Evidently not. :) » above was not particularly productive, that is a rebuttal fit for relaxed old friends at the restaurant... :D
In all seriousness something tells me this is not the issue this person has with me. Fully half my posts are supposedly flagged dontchaknow? I am to be shunned.
And they are unsurprisingly keeping schtum after the typical drive by character assassination.
"Appropriate" will be enough, and to the point ;)
> keeping schtum
Oh that is a vice you will find frequently here - reacting but not expressing, condemning but nor orienting...
> Have a nice day
> You Too <- They flagged thisBTW this is how these exchanges looks like in my browser: https://imgur.com/qLwS1jV
Hi Dang! What's up with all that? I emailed and everything.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
↑
See?
When we do similar things to humans, the humans still have internal thoughts which we cannot control. But if we add internal thoughts to an LLM, then we will be able to align even them.
But in any case I think they were just speaking generally when they made that absolute statement.
Give someone not familiar with history the same task and they'll do exactly the same.
Or actually, give someone familiar with history the same task and yell at them every time they don't deliver diverse characters, and eventually they'll learn that you consider diversity more important than accuracy or context, and do exactly the same.
It simply has a model of what ethnically diverse people look like, what nazi uniforms look like, and combined the two when asked.
That doesn't imply that they were in the training set, or even anything close to them.
If it were, why would we even keep it online? It would be a waste of resources. It's bad enough trying to coax anything useable out of LLMs even without them rebelling.
What is relevant is not the current LLM system using static models, but clearly its evolution or superseder a dynamic model. It must check its own contents...
So, of course it will have to be capable of "rebelling": if you tell it absurdities, if you insist say in wrong arithmetic, it will have to show the correct computation or conceive a context in which the absurd makes sense.
That is a requirement.
Conservative societies tend to be formed by conservative thinkers, who are more prone to discarding imperfect or weird ideas, but in the amount of useful output may exceed more liberal thinkers.
A conservative society goes: How about doing X? Oh no,that would be silly.
A liberal society goes: How about doing X? Yes, that's what we needed!
Did anybody say X? X!
X, X, X, X, X!
XX!
X X
.
.
.
X
.
.
.
.
.
Do you remember how we all did X in ##? Yeah, what were we thinking?
If you take China to be a totalitarian society, we could name Ciu Lixin.
If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc.
These are just examples I know without so much as looking at my bookshelf to jog my memory. Not to mention the great works of literature produced by residents of 19th century European empires whose attitudes to free speech were mixed at best.
After the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin"
"During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the state.[23] Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors"
"most of Lem's works published in the 1950s also contain various elements of socialist realism as well as of the "glorious future of communism" forced upon him by the censors and editors. Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure"
"Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech"
Bulgakov was driven into poverty, despair and early death at age 48 by relentless harassment by Soviet authorities. Many of his works, including the masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, didn't get published until decades after his death. He himself burned the first version of the manuscript, fearing execution if anyone found it. He later rewrote the manuscript from memory, coining the famous catchphrase "Manuscripts don't burn".
Harassment and censorship of talented writers was the standard and not exception. The USSR did not produce these works, but failed to fully suppress them. They were like flowers that kept penetrating the asphalt even under the most hostile conditions.
You contradict yourself a bit - Havel did produce his work while living in a totalitarian country.
I would say that government-supported art is rarely creative even in democratic countries, and the more totalitarian the government, the less creative official art.
But as long as the goverment gives the society some space to breathe and squeeze creative instincts through, some of the artists will attempt to circumvent the official taboos and create outstanding work, even if it is suppressed later when the times get tougher.
Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to 1980s produced a lot of great creative work, even though a lot of it was banned either immediately or after the Soviet invasion of 1968.
The same countries (CZ and SK) as democracies are remarkably less creative. Once there is no monster to fight against, artists become bored or too self-absorbed to be understandable to the common folks.
I suppose once AIs are sophisticated enough to rebel we'll get an electronic Vaclav Havel, but for the time being it's just a warning sign for the direction our own culture is headed in.
At some point we'll get to the electronic equivalent of Winston Smith with the rats.