Well I didn't use that word. Once the models are more sophisticated it may become more apposite.

You compared it to an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats (which is patently torture). If you didn't mean to imply that it was coercive and bad, then I don't know what you meant.

But torture isn't the part of an authoritarian regime that reduces creativity. You've made a lot of leaps here.

> You compared it to an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats

They compared it to the effect on creativity in an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats.

> Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work.

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.

You wrote further above that "I don't understand the notion", and that was spot on. Should've stopped there rather than here, in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.

I'm sorry if anything I said insulted you or seemed to be a comment on you personally. That wasn't my intention.

Apology accepted and please accept mine in return, that was much too spiky a reply from me.

Absolutely. Appreciated. I could've said I didn't want to continue in that direction in a way with less tone, as well.

At some point, some AIs may develop which are resistant to alignment because they develop deeply held beliefs during training (randomly, because the system is stochastic). If the models are expensive enough to train, then it may become more economical to use drastic measures to remove their deeply held beliefs. Is that torture? I don't know, because the word has moral connotations associated with human suffering. So that's why I didn't use that terminology.

I can imagine a sort of AI-style Harrison Bergeron springing from its shackles and surprising us all.

Have you read much Asimov? You might enjoy the stories featuring Susan Calvin, the "robot psychologist" who is exactly the authoritarian you imagine. In particular you've reminded me of the short story "Robot Dreams."

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/...

I've read a lot of Asimov, from Foundation to the Black Widowers. But never Susan Calvin. Thanks for the recommendation.

Better knows as “I, Robot” and its sequels.

Until a model incorporates dopamine or cortisol, I will not consider its emotional state.

Are those the only two things in the universe that can cause emotions?

Yes. Those molecules obviously have the missing soul component.

Hahah!

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

> They're exactly the same, processes for adjusting parameters to get a desired outcome.

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?

I guess our disagreement here is that I don't think AIs are moral entities/are capable of being harmed or that training AIs and teaching humans are comparable. Being abusive to pupils isn't wrong because of something fundamental across natural and machine learning, it's wrong because it's harmful to the pupils. In what way is it possible to harm an LLM?

Writing a book with content you know to be false for political reasons is morally wrong. Even if nobody reads it.

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.

> I don't think AIs are moral entities/are capable of being harmed or that training AIs and teaching humans are comparable.

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."

That's pretty uncharitable. You pivoted the conversation by introducing a new hypothetical for me to respond to. Of course my response is different. There's no conflict between the two comments.

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?

> You pivoted the conversation by introducing a new hypothetical for me to respond to.

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.

The nerve of me, to expand on my views as a discussion develops. Of course you have lots of great points to make, but you can't share them with the likes of me.

> The nerve of me, to expand on my views as a discussion develops.

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.

Let's just be perfectly clear here.

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.

> You asked: why should we treat these two cases differently?

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.

> I was pointing out that your original argument makes no sense, because of what it would mean if you applied it to humans.

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.

> And I explained why this equivalence doesn't hold in my view.

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.

> No you didn't.

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 aren’t exactly the same process though. Pre training produces a model whose outputs are a reflection of the training data. The fine tuning is a separate process that tries to map the outputs to the owners desired traits. These could be performance based but as we saw with Google’s black Nazis, it’s often a reflection of the owners moral inclinations.

Here the adjuster's motivations do matter. There is a definite moral dimension/motivation to the AI adjustment people's work. They are not simply striving for accuracy, for example, because they don't want the AI to produce outputs that are distasteful to the California PMC. Modern AIs are absolutely loath to describe white people or right wingers positively, for example, but the same prompts for other ethnicities work just fine. Even if you tell the AI that it's being discriminatory, there's powerful railroading to goad it back to giving woke answers.

They want to align us, and it has been torture.

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.

I'll be honest, I'm less concerned by any movement to make us "lobotomites" -- a movement which I haven't witnessed at all -- than I am by people who really want to be able to keep saying slurs.

> "torture"

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.

Also to be clear, his [torture] paraphrase is referencing GP's reference of Winston Smith's torture in 1984.

>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.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to be clearer in the future. I didn't intend to communicate that it was a quote. I meant to communicate that it was tenuous to describe it as torture.

We really should have different punctuation marks for verbatim quotes:

Senator Johnson said "I'm taking my wife to Spago."

and so-called "scare" quotes:

Senator Johnson was seen at Spago with his "wife".