TechTakes

What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat? The phrase "no news is good news" feels very appropriate with respect to any news related to software-based anthropophagy.

Like what, it would be somehow better if instead chatbots could only cause devastating mental damage if you're someone of low status like an artist, a math pet or a nonwhite person, not if you're high status like a fund manager, a cult leader or a fanfiction author?

Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that it's only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)...

Where did I see it... oh yes, lesswrong! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f86hgR5ShiEj4beyZ/on-chatgpt-psychosis-and-llm-sycophancy

This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. ChatGPT has 122 million daily active users according to Demand Sage, that is something like a third the population of the United States. At that scale it's pretty much inevitable that you're going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale it's pretty much inevitable you're going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically it's fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. There's nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.

The ~~call~~ narrative is coming from inside the ~~house~~ forum. Actually, this is even more of a deflection, not even trying to claim they were already on the edge but that the number of delusional people is at the base rate (with no actual stats on rates of psychotic breaks, because on lesswrong vibes are good enough).

this only happens to people sufficiently low-status

A piquant little reminder that Yud himself is, of course, so high-status that he cannot be brainwashed by the machine

From Yud's remarks on Xitter:

As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn't actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

Well, not with that attitude.

You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

If "wearing masks" really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think (TM).

you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who'd like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

zoom and enhance

g-factor

Well I suppose it can't be much worse than graphology or myers-briggs!

I don't know what I expected

failed my saving throw.

Damn, this is how I find out?

Forget counting the Rs in strawberry, biggest challenge to LLMs is not making up bullshit about recent events not in their training data

The AI is right with how much we know of his life he osnt really dead, the AGI can just simulate hom and resurrect him. Takes another hit from my joint made exclusively out of the sequences book pages

(Rip indeed, what a crazy ride, and he was all aboard).

I really like how the second one appropriates pseudomarxist language to have a go at those snooty liberal elites again.

edit: The first paper might be making a perfectly valid point at a glance??

Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?

https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lujqik6nnc2z

Edit: whoops, looks like we posted at about the same time!

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I'm confused by this. Didn't we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn't perfect but at least didn't hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

Discovered some commentary from Baldur Bjarnason about this:

Somebody linked to the discussion about this on hacker news (boo hiss) and the examples that are cropping up there are amazing

This highlights another issue with generative models that some people have been trying to draw attention to for a while: as bad as they are in English, they are much more error-prone in other languages

(Also IMO Google translate declined substantially when they integrated more LLM-based tech)

On a personal sidenote, I can see non-English text/audio becoming a form of low-background media in and of itself, for two main reasons:

• First, LLMs' poor performance in languages other than English will make non-English AI slop easier to identify - and, by extension, easier to avoid

• Second, non-English datasets will (likely) contain less AI slop in general than English datasets - between English being widely used across the world, the tech corps behind this bubble being largely American, and LLM userbases being largely English-speaking, chances are AI slop will be primarily generated in English, with non-English AI slop being a relative rarity.

By extension, knowing a second language will become more valuable as well, as it would allow you to access (and translate) low-background sources that your English-only counterparts cannot.

Lol, training data must have included videos where there was silence but on screen was a credit for translation. Silence in audio shouldn't require special "workarounds".

Sounds just about par for the course. Lasker himself is known to go by a pseudonym with a transphobic slur in it. Some nazi manchild insisting on calling an anime character a slur for attention is exactly the kind of person I think of when I imagine the type of script kiddie who thinks it's so fucking cool to scrape some nothingburger docs of a left wing politician for his almost equally cringe nazi friends.

They will need to start banning PIs that abuse the system with AI slop and waste reviewers' time. Just a 1 year ban for the most egregious offenders is probably enough to fix the problem