How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously?
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Thinking about LLM-based "AI" chatbots as cognitohazards is apt. They are deceptive and subversive in an extremely subtle but systematic way. They warp your perception and cognition to make you _feel_ as if you're more capable while simultaneously degrading your skills.
These chatbots are like an amulet cursed by dark magic. It grants the wearer an apparent intelligence boost, at the cost of stealing their soul over time and binding them to the object. After extensive use, taking the amulet off incapacitates the person. They can't live without it.
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@malcircuit Sure, it’s the ladder they’re *standing on,* but anyone who’s watched Road Runner cartoons knows that you keep standing in the air after you take away the platform.
This connects directly to the current administration being filled with people who love gangster movies because they never bothered to watch them all the way to the end. (And every other story, or history, that they try to cite in their favor.)
@FormerlyStC@mas.to @malcircuit@thingy.social The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep the deca- and hectobillionaires fully insulated from the problems they directly cause. As far as I can see they are not sawing off their own ladders or anything like that. They are consolidating their position at the tippy top. Their position there does not depend on the masses being educated, literate, or particularly skilled anymore. Instead, it requires the masses to be docile. I will start believing that this situation is changing when the masses are no longer docile, but there's not much evidence of that, at least not in the US as far as I can see.
It's possible the wealthy and powerful have miscalculated and current automation is not enough to allow them to retain an acceptable lifestyle while being fully decoupled from the masses. However, I don't see this as a foregone conclusion, even as I personally believe it is probably true.
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These chatbots are like an amulet cursed by dark magic. It grants the wearer an apparent intelligence boost, at the cost of stealing their soul over time and binding them to the object. After extensive use, taking the amulet off incapacitates the person. They can't live without it.
I should stop talking about AI. Like so many other social issues, I'm only preaching to the converted. All it does is remind people of Yet Another Bad Thing You Have No Power To Change.
Or to put it a different way, whatever levers you have available to influence the situation are probably already being pushed. Me reminding you doesn't do anything other than make you feel worse.
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@malcircuit People don't care about studies. They care about money and right now LLMs promise them more money.
They're wrong. They'll be proven wrong. But it'll take time and some MASSIVE failures, first.
Fortunately, if the news is to be believed, Zuckerberg is doing his hardest to destroy Meta with AI so it may come sooner than later.
@faithisleaping @malcircuit I wish I could believe that it will eventually be proven to be bad. I'm afraid it's going to become a subliminal part of society and stick with us forever. Technologies have a tendency to do that no matter how harmful they are.
Broadcasting brought us manufactured consent.
Cable brought us cognitive overwhelm.
Social media brought psyops to the individual.I'm afraid AI be around forever and destroy conceptual diversity.
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@faithisleaping @malcircuit I wish I could believe that it will eventually be proven to be bad. I'm afraid it's going to become a subliminal part of society and stick with us forever. Technologies have a tendency to do that no matter how harmful they are.
Broadcasting brought us manufactured consent.
Cable brought us cognitive overwhelm.
Social media brought psyops to the individual.I'm afraid AI be around forever and destroy conceptual diversity.
@sabrina @malcircuit It will likely be around forever in some form. We're not going to just shut it all down. Too many people have spent too much money.
But it will likely become part of the background noise that we learn to navigate.
But also, you say social media brought psyops to the individual but here we are talking on social media. It also brought human connection across continents.
Which isn't me saying that we should look for the silver lining to AI. It's pretty shit at 95% of what they're trying to use it for. I'm just pushing back a bit on the "technology is destroying everything" narrative. It's changing everything. It's destroying some things. Other things get created in its wake. Humanity will probably survive this one, too.
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I should stop talking about AI. Like so many other social issues, I'm only preaching to the converted. All it does is remind people of Yet Another Bad Thing You Have No Power To Change.
Or to put it a different way, whatever levers you have available to influence the situation are probably already being pushed. Me reminding you doesn't do anything other than make you feel worse.
@malcircuit this is partially true but also, if it makes you feel better to write about it and analyze it, then you should continue and people can ignore or block as needed. There's nothing wrong with preaching to the choir.
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How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously? This technology *might* have some useful niche applications, but widespread deployment will be a disaster for humanity.
This shit is an existential hazard, and not in the way the AI companies love to talk about. It's not going to take over the world like Skynet, it's a cognitohazard that turns anyone that interacts with it into an idiot.
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.
Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.
Psychology Today (www.psychologytoday.com)
@malcircuit I propose tbis isn't "being taken seriously" because it's seen as a plus for individuals seeking control.
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How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously? This technology *might* have some useful niche applications, but widespread deployment will be a disaster for humanity.
This shit is an existential hazard, and not in the way the AI companies love to talk about. It's not going to take over the world like Skynet, it's a cognitohazard that turns anyone that interacts with it into an idiot.
Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.
Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.
Psychology Today (www.psychologytoday.com)
@malcircuit IDIOT MACHINES. I stand corrected -- there is one use for commercial AI!
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@sabrina @malcircuit It will likely be around forever in some form. We're not going to just shut it all down. Too many people have spent too much money.
But it will likely become part of the background noise that we learn to navigate.
But also, you say social media brought psyops to the individual but here we are talking on social media. It also brought human connection across continents.
Which isn't me saying that we should look for the silver lining to AI. It's pretty shit at 95% of what they're trying to use it for. I'm just pushing back a bit on the "technology is destroying everything" narrative. It's changing everything. It's destroying some things. Other things get created in its wake. Humanity will probably survive this one, too.
@faithisleaping @malcircuit Mostly I'm frustrated that we continue to dive into technology after technology without learning to moderate the harms. With AI we know a lot of the harms and we're still failing to moderate them. (I don't know how well we knew the harms of past technologies early in their use as well as we know the harms of AI this time.)
Intuitively I don't agree that technology is destroying everything. I don't want to make a "technology is destroying everything" argument. I also don't want to moderate my argument just because I don't want to be making that argument. I'd have to give more thought to what argument I want to make and how.
I definitely agree the technologies I chose have done more good than harm. I chose media technologies by accident, but since they go together...they have progressively increased the spread of culture and human connection and that's amazing.
And now I notice that my fear of the harm of AI is that it will undo that...flatten culture and erase human connection.
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@faithisleaping @malcircuit Mostly I'm frustrated that we continue to dive into technology after technology without learning to moderate the harms. With AI we know a lot of the harms and we're still failing to moderate them. (I don't know how well we knew the harms of past technologies early in their use as well as we know the harms of AI this time.)
Intuitively I don't agree that technology is destroying everything. I don't want to make a "technology is destroying everything" argument. I also don't want to moderate my argument just because I don't want to be making that argument. I'd have to give more thought to what argument I want to make and how.
I definitely agree the technologies I chose have done more good than harm. I chose media technologies by accident, but since they go together...they have progressively increased the spread of culture and human connection and that's amazing.
And now I notice that my fear of the harm of AI is that it will undo that...flatten culture and erase human connection.
@sabrina Yeah, and it absolutely is doing harm and it's absolutely a play by the rich and the powerful to control the thoughts of the masses.
There's a great quote from the classic Dr. Who episode The Green Death, where the doctor says something along the lines of,
Humans! Whenever they discover something new, the first thing they do is try to figure out how to kill each other with it, then how to make money off it, and only later do they study it to know whether or not it's safe.
I think about that quote a lot.
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@sabrina @malcircuit It will likely be around forever in some form. We're not going to just shut it all down. Too many people have spent too much money.
But it will likely become part of the background noise that we learn to navigate.
But also, you say social media brought psyops to the individual but here we are talking on social media. It also brought human connection across continents.
Which isn't me saying that we should look for the silver lining to AI. It's pretty shit at 95% of what they're trying to use it for. I'm just pushing back a bit on the "technology is destroying everything" narrative. It's changing everything. It's destroying some things. Other things get created in its wake. Humanity will probably survive this one, too.
@faithisleaping @malcircuit I see the implicit argument now. Sorry, bad wording from a bad mood. I didn't mean to imply the world would be better off without those technologies.
I'm not so sure about AI. Hypothetically if we started from scratch and built it in a good ethical framework it would be fine. I don't think it can be redeemed as-is.
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@faithisleaping @malcircuit I see the implicit argument now. Sorry, bad wording from a bad mood. I didn't mean to imply the world would be better off without those technologies.
I'm not so sure about AI. Hypothetically if we started from scratch and built it in a good ethical framework it would be fine. I don't think it can be redeemed as-is.
@sabrina I think the fundamental tech has some real and valuable applications. It's a huge jump in parallel compute power.
But LLMs just aren't it. They're cool and flashy but at the end of the day it's just a better markov chain and there's no real intelligence there. And thinking there is is just delusional. And, yeah, they can make pretty pictures, too, but pretty pictures aren't art and we need to stop thinking they are.
But if we used those data centers to study protein folding, maybe we could figure out better vaccines or something.
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