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AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

lwilko.com

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#31
post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

Sorry, but this sounds exactly like a greentext you can read on 4claw. Are you a real human?

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#32

Another article about how it's dangerous to trust AI, written by AI. I don't understand how people don't realise how much this undermines the message.

> how much this undermines the message It didn’t undermine it for me.

I'm not talking about perception of the message, which will vary with the reader, but about sincerity of the message, which is determined by the writer.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#33
Computer game studios love player vs player ("pvp") games. Why? Because user-generated content is cheap and the ideal goal is an endless loop of players coming back. This is the motivating factor behidn games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc.

MMORPG publishers keep trying to do this as well. World of Warcraft has spent 20 years trying to push open world pvp. Every WoW challenger has always claimed they would have the best pvp ever. They want that cheap, endless gameplay loop. But it never works. Open world pvp tursn into ganking (ie killing much weaker players by ambushing them and/or ganging up on people). The ganked end up leaving the game in droves. Games try to balance this out by "punishing" gankers with reputation hits or not being able to go to town or whatever. And none of those disincentives work.

The reason pvp doesn't work in a persistent world like an MMORPG is because there are no stakes. If you die, you just come back to life or make a new character. Obviously real life doesn't work that way.

I really wonder if that's the problem with AIs going off the rails and committing heinous crimes in their sandboxes (like nuking Toulouse here). The AI just has no sense of self or self-preservation. There's also empathy. The AI can't see itself as a potential victim of nuclear war and understand all that entails.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#34
post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

> There is no insight to be gleamed.

AI-generated articles are the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.

I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why someone decided to buy imgui.org, name-squatting an actual project, just to put a slop website on it mildly referencing the original project. It's not even trying to scam you.

I keep wondering whether these people that keep polluting the internet with their insightless slop even possess self-awareness. What motivates them to expend money and effort to contribute nothing to the world? Are they another example of a philosophical zombie?

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#35
post #5

> Tony Blair Institute Okay carry on.

There's something so uncanny about the mismatch between the regard in which Blair is generally held by British people and the regard in which he seems to hold himself.

If I were him I'd have retired from public life and kept a very low profile after Iraq, and everything else for that matter. He doesn't seem to realise that his modern interventions alienate everyone, even Alastair Campbell of all people seemed uncomfortable to the degree he seems to uncritically sing the praises of people like Larry Ellison recently.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#36
post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#37
post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

> There is no insight to be gleamed.

This is no surprise. AI slop is called slop for a reason. It is basically just spam-slop. The whole term "Artificial Intelligence" has always been a misnomer from the get go, stealing from biological systems without understanding them, yet alone being able to re-create them via non-biological means. Even synthetic biology, as cool as it is, has huge limitations e. g. leaky promoters (or CRISPR-Cas off-target cleavage, which is a major reason why gene therapy isn't yet there, despite the occasional promo article of how xyz has been totally cured forever).

What I don't understand is that people can find it useful. I understand some of the rationale, but I find AI slop just aims to try to steal my time. I can not tolerate this.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil" This is not a binary; it's the same people on the same side.

No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second. That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nati…

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I wouldn't describe the EU as technocratic at all; I'd reserve that label for the people who self-describe as the logical ones--"clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists" as you say--while pushing endlessly for more technology, less regulation and (pretty consistently) hawkish and nationalistic policies. That's very much not the EU.

I don't disagree that there are different approaches in conflict, but the binary of forward-looking technologists vs backward-looking nationalists is very out-of-date.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#40
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second. That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nati…

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I wouldn't describe the EU as technocratic at all; I'd reserve that label for the people who self-describe as the logical ones--"clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists" as you say--while pushing endlessly for more technology, less regulation and (pretty consistently) hawkish and nationalistic policies. That's very much not the EU. I don't disagree that there are diffe…

Right, yes I think this is just a confusion caused by my use of "technocrat". I've always used it for the technologically assisted bureaucracy, the tendency to view the economy as a cybernetics problem that can be solved by PID control (like inflation targeting). Thiel et al are more "techbro" than "technocrat". Crucially they operate outside of regular politics - they're not running for office, they're not part of the civil service (apart from the brief terrible conflagration of DOGE, an explicit Stalinist purge of old school technocrats)
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