TechTakes

Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.

It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don't think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.

Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don't think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it's often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.

In both cases, the thing that people didn't like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don't like AI art, they don't like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they're still being pitched for.

Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

You know, I can't tell if this is supposed to be "I know you're saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it's more complicated than that" or "I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I'm honestly okay with that".

Gonna guess the latter given where it's coming from and the fact that the actual "more complicated" is a salad of non sequiturs.

Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))