LLMs are built to automate a complex web of reification. They are designed to tell us what we want to hear. As we write, “Trained on an enormous corpus of human writing, speech, and code, and tuned to refine responses around context and memory as user interactions unroll, a model of this kind is designed to provide the sense that one’s expectation is being exceeded.”

Artificial intelligence is a bizarre technology that participates in its own mythmaking.

see: https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/reify-this/

For however futuristic the new genies seem, there is never actually progress in genies. Magic is not a measurement of their capability, but a description of our irresponsibility. Effortless wish-fulfillment is a perpetual hypothetical, no matter how perilously it is ever approximated.

I want you to explore. I want you to want to explore. If you walk into the darkness with a lamp, you will come upon all sorts of things you did not already know were there. One of them might be the thing you would have told the genie to fetch, but the more you explore the darkness, the better you will understand what else you might want from it, or from yourself. Everything you do changes you: exploring cultivates your curiosity and discernment and perspective and humility; settling for wish-fulfillment impoverishes your experience and then even your wishes.

I don’t know what will happen to us. I don’t trust the people in charge of the future, but humanity isn’t going to change any time soon. I refuse to be incurious about magic just because we can’t be trusted with it.

Whatever happens, the real danger is not that AI will become too good, but that it will become too evil—most likely because of the oligarchs, corporations and governments behind it. I wish I had emphasized that point, which is always on my mind.

I think I succeeded in making another point, which is that life will not become pointless simply because some other entity gets better than humans at something and knocks us off our throne. To think that the meaning of life resides in our superiority is a childish attitude.

Bro is starting off the year strong:

God, though, I understand why so many people are chasing that dragon, even though it’s going to ruin their careers, and maybe even their lives. I get why people fall for this, in spite of the externalities that they must know of by now. In spite of the colossal waste, the loss of fresh water resources, the fact that AI datacenters are the fastest growing source of carbon emissions, the people suffering sky-rocketing power bill and rolling outages near these new datacenters, the reams and reams of fascist propaganda these machines are producing to tear our society apart, the corruption, the market manipulation, the plain and simple fact that the ultimate purpose of these tools is to put their users out of a job entirely… well, once you finally get a taste of what it feels like to be great… I suppose all of those problems seem so far away.

This blog post comes basically in two parts: the role which LLM assistants are trained for is horribly undefined and ontologically hella strange, and AI safety “””researchers””” are basically goading LLMs into misalignment without any concern for the consequences.

If you are a scientist, an engineer, a philosopher, an anthropologist, or an academic of any stripe, thinking and understanding is your job.

This is a personal blog of Diana Leung featuring philosophical and analytical essays that explore a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence, societal observations, psychological principles, and personal reflections on life and mortality.

Indeed, it seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service. If you are genuinely AGI-pilled—a term for those who believe that machine-born superintelligence is coming, and soon—the rational response probably involves some combination of building a bunker, quitting your job, and joining the cause. […] It’s hard to care about tariffs or authoritarian encroachment or getting a degree if you believe that the world as we know it is about to change forever.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/y7gw78/ai_is_mass_delusion_event

Soon, we’ll feed requirements to AI and get working software without writing code. But when cars replaced horses, the horses never had to debug the cars.

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Keven’s notes on how Generative AI is departmental to the development of the taste necessary to create art.

ALISON GOPNIK: A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long as we’ve been human. Language itself you could think of as a means that allows this. So are writing and the internet. These are all ways that we get information from other people. Similarly, LLMs give us a very effective way of accessing information from other humans. Rather than go out, explore the world, and draw conclusions, as humans do, LLMs statistically summarize the information humans put onto the web.

It cannot find its own problems; it cannot feed itself. … This, however, is not a defect in a machine; we do not want it to do its own business, but ours.