5 ms·

The allusions to Orwell in the tech scene are standard but this quote looking at Gemini has hit harder than any other I can remember: Every record has been des

by yinser 3y ago

The allusions to Orwell in the tech scene are standard but this quote looking at Gemini has hit harder than any other I can remember: Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.

jack_riminton 3y ago
Hit really hard for me too. I now do most of my information searching on ChatGPT instead of Google (because Google search has become so terrible). So the impetus for getting any LLM to give unbiased results is imperative. I don't have time to go searching through primary source material and the next generation surely won't either. Of course I don't use LLMs to search for anything that is very important, nor do I blindly accept the answers, but if this is the path we're going on it's going to need bold principled leadership to oversee it.
erichocean 3y ago
What's hopefully obvious to people now is this: it's now possible to do what 1984 described. Worse? People in power actively want to do that in the name of "harm reduction" or "reducing bias" or whatever. Seems inevitable at this point.
- danans 3y ago
  > Worse? People in power actively want to do that in the name of "harm reduction" or "reducing bias" or whatever. "Whatever" is doing a lot of work here. There is a good chance that the initial wide scale impact of LLM-generated fabrications will be for the purposes of harm increase and increasing bias.
- tantalor 3y ago
  It was "possible" in 1949. That's the point. It's not a science fiction novel.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    1984 is a sci-fi novel. It's set in the future, every home has a telescreen (not invented until the ~2000s), and at the end it's revealed that Big Brother is researching chemical methods for eliminating pleasure and creating loyalty to the state.
  - renlo 3y ago
    Much easier now though, with a web based medium where the content host can "revise" the content for everyone without needing to physically go out and find old copies to burn.
quatrefoil 3y ago
Here's the thing, though: we, the general public, did this. Up until the mid-2010s, the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". We make all information accessible and useful, and the world gets better. Around that time, a lot of pressure started to mount on tech companies for their complicity in bad things; the election of Donald Trump was a pretty major catalyst. So, all the companies responded to public pressure by building algorithmic fairness organizations. But because tech companies hire from specific backgrounds and in specific locations, and aren't particularly ideologically diverse, they converged on enforcing a worldview that aligns with their morality and their concerns. Gemini is incredibly touchy about hot-button issues that animate progressive folks in the SF Bay Area and almost nowhere else. But then, we literally demanded Google and Facebook to become arbiters of morality - so what outcome were we hoping for?
- hintymad 3y ago
  > the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". I'm not sure if it is true. Google fired James Damore for his internal memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber". Google employees thought that military was unconditionally evil and would rather giving up a 10 billion dollar contract (I really wish send those employees back to the Euro-Asia of the end of 12th century to taste the "peace" without a strong military when facing the shamshirs of the Mongolian soldiers). And what did Pichai and their rank and file say after 2016 election?
- hajile 3y ago
  It's not the general public -- it's the ideological echochambers around these companies. You have 10% left extremists, 10% right extremists, and 80% centrists. The 10% leftist extremists control most of the educational institutes and Silicon Valley, so they try to force their views onto the 80% of centrists using the excuse that the 10% right extremists are some supermajority existentially threatening democracy.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". There are people online that actually mock people that say they have freedom of speech by saying they have "freedumbs" and "freeze peach". These are people on the left. There are polls of university students and the majority believe the speech should be regulated. These are our future "elites". There are obviously people on the right banning books before we get into the us vs them argument.
zoogeny 3y ago
I think this exists outside of tech and AI as well. I was in a mall bookstore recently looking for a gift and I passed by a section of "Philosophy". I was curious and took a look and in that small section, a little over half a bookshelf, there was not a single title I recognized as philosophy. The closest was an abridged Art of War. The rest was entirely contemporary cultural critique stuff. I stay away from the anti-woke stuff online for the most part since I find it tedious. But I have to admit in that moment in the bookstore I realized how easy it is to erase history. No ancient Greek philosophy like Plato or Aristotle. No enlightenment philosophy. Not even existentialism. I mean, I get it that the kind of philosophy I think of is dominated by old white men. And I recognize the need to balance that out with other viewpoints. And I doubt a mall bookstore is selling a lot of copies of Spinoza or Hegel. But this was a complete erasure. This felt like the pendulum swinging so far to the other side that it has escaped reality.
- piva00 3y ago
  > And I doubt a mall bookstore is selling a lot of copies of Spinoza or Hegel. But this was a complete erasure. This felt like the pendulum swinging so far to the other side that it has escaped reality. As you said: it's a mall bookstore, they have rent to pay, store inventory is expensive to keep indefinitely and they for sure aren't selling Plato's hot cakes... The erasure is caused by market forces, not by the swing of the pendulum, the market you live in doesn't value Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. and so the bookstore you visited doesn't stock them because it won't make money.
swman 3y ago
Peter Thiel had said that AI is communist and cryptocurrency is libtertarian. I agree strongly with his take. AI reminds me of the scenes from Starship Troopers where the computer explains some information. I know that was a fascist society, but it was basically brainwashing the population in some ways. Honestly I’m not a fan of either things. I think only knowledge is freedom, and the key there is freedom to search for knowledge not just take in whatever and move on. Unfortunately 90% of people are lazy af so the best thing we the 10% can do is just see everyone as customers. They don’t share my ideals on society or lifestyle or anything. They do like to consume mindlessly though, like oblivious cows grazing all the way to the slaughterhouse. AI will make it far easier to keep people in line.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  > Honestly I’m not a fan of either things. I think only knowledge is freedom, and the key there is freedom to search for knowledge not just take in whatever and move on. This is overly simplistic. It's not enough to just have knowledge sitting on your desk or in your computer. One must also have the requisite skills to understand what you read and to make the right conclusions. When you have the ultimate knowledge at your fingertips, but your understanding is hamstrung by delusional safetyism, you get the current "polite, but unhelpful AI".
- viscanti 3y ago
  > AI will make it far easier to keep people in line. An alternative explanation is that AI companies are using RLHF to help the 90% understand that a lot of things aren't black and white but that there is relevant context to keep in mind. For many cases, that's probably useful (like if someone is asking if one movie is better than another movie). At the extremes, which are hopefully rare (are a lot of people really wondering if Hitler is better or worse than some Twitter posts), you get nonsense.
hintymad 3y ago
Hit really hard on me too. I just can't fathom how the Google employees with all the righteousness in their blood would think that it's okay to control how people should think by altering truth.
- Izkata 3y ago
  The idea is encapsulated in the phrase "the ends justify the means". As long as they get people to think the right thing, underhanded means are acceptable.
  - hintymad 3y ago
    I thought the end was to have everyone think in a very specific way, which by itself was pure evil.
- xdennis 3y ago
  But righteousness _is_ the cause of this. Once you label information as physically harmful, you have to stop "harmful" information regardless if it's true or not.

by yinser 3y ago

jack_riminton 3y ago

Hit really hard for me too. I now do most of my information searching on ChatGPT instead of Google (because Google search has become so terrible). So the impetus for getting any LLM to give unbiased results is imperative. I don't have time to go searching through primary source material and the next generation surely won't either. Of course I don't use LLMs to search for anything that is very important, nor do I blindly accept the answers, but if this is the path we're going on it's going to need bold principled leadership to oversee it.

erichocean 3y ago

What's hopefully obvious to people now is this: it's now possible to do what 1984 described. Worse? People in power actively want to do that in the name of "harm reduction" or "reducing bias" or whatever. Seems inevitable at this point.

danans 3y ago
> Worse? People in power actively want to do that in the name of "harm reduction" or "reducing bias" or whatever. "Whatever" is doing a lot of work here. There is a good chance that the initial wide scale impact of LLM-generated fabrications will be for the purposes of harm increase and increasing bias.
tantalor 3y ago
It was "possible" in 1949. That's the point. It's not a science fiction novel.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  1984 is a sci-fi novel. It's set in the future, every home has a telescreen (not invented until the ~2000s), and at the end it's revealed that Big Brother is researching chemical methods for eliminating pleasure and creating loyalty to the state.
- renlo 3y ago
  Much easier now though, with a web based medium where the content host can "revise" the content for everyone without needing to physically go out and find old copies to burn.

quatrefoil 3y ago

Here's the thing, though: we, the general public, did this. Up until the mid-2010s, the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". We make all information accessible and useful, and the world gets better. Around that time, a lot of pressure started to mount on tech companies for their complicity in bad things; the election of Donald Trump was a pretty major catalyst. So, all the companies responded to public pressure by building algorithmic fairness organizations. But because tech companies hire from specific backgrounds and in specific locations, and aren't particularly ideologically diverse, they converged on enforcing a worldview that aligns with their morality and their concerns. Gemini is incredibly touchy about hot-button issues that animate progressive folks in the SF Bay Area and almost nowhere else. But then, we literally demanded Google and Facebook to become arbiters of morality - so what outcome were we hoping for?

hintymad 3y ago
> the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". I'm not sure if it is true. Google fired James Damore for his internal memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber". Google employees thought that military was unconditionally evil and would rather giving up a 10 billion dollar contract (I really wish send those employees back to the Euro-Asia of the end of 12th century to taste the "peace" without a strong military when facing the shamshirs of the Mongolian soldiers). And what did Pichai and their rank and file say after 2016 election?
hajile 3y ago
It's not the general public -- it's the ideological echochambers around these companies. You have 10% left extremists, 10% right extremists, and 80% centrists. The 10% leftist extremists control most of the educational institutes and Silicon Valley, so they try to force their views onto the 80% of centrists using the excuse that the 10% right extremists are some supermajority existentially threatening democracy.
brigadier132 3y ago
> the prevailing dogma within Google and at most other Big Tech companies was this spirit of "information libertarianism". There are people online that actually mock people that say they have freedom of speech by saying they have "freedumbs" and "freeze peach". These are people on the left. There are polls of university students and the majority believe the speech should be regulated. These are our future "elites". There are obviously people on the right banning books before we get into the us vs them argument.

zoogeny 3y ago

I think this exists outside of tech and AI as well. I was in a mall bookstore recently looking for a gift and I passed by a section of "Philosophy". I was curious and took a look and in that small section, a little over half a bookshelf, there was not a single title I recognized as philosophy. The closest was an abridged Art of War. The rest was entirely contemporary cultural critique stuff. I stay away from the anti-woke stuff online for the most part since I find it tedious. But I have to admit in that moment in the bookstore I realized how easy it is to erase history. No ancient Greek philosophy like Plato or Aristotle. No enlightenment philosophy. Not even existentialism. I mean, I get it that the kind of philosophy I think of is dominated by old white men. And I recognize the need to balance that out with other viewpoints. And I doubt a mall bookstore is selling a lot of copies of Spinoza or Hegel. But this was a complete erasure. This felt like the pendulum swinging so far to the other side that it has escaped reality.

piva00 3y ago
> And I doubt a mall bookstore is selling a lot of copies of Spinoza or Hegel. But this was a complete erasure. This felt like the pendulum swinging so far to the other side that it has escaped reality. As you said: it's a mall bookstore, they have rent to pay, store inventory is expensive to keep indefinitely and they for sure aren't selling Plato's hot cakes... The erasure is caused by market forces, not by the swing of the pendulum, the market you live in doesn't value Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. and so the bookstore you visited doesn't stock them because it won't make money.

swman 3y ago

Peter Thiel had said that AI is communist and cryptocurrency is libtertarian. I agree strongly with his take. AI reminds me of the scenes from Starship Troopers where the computer explains some information. I know that was a fascist society, but it was basically brainwashing the population in some ways. Honestly I’m not a fan of either things. I think only knowledge is freedom, and the key there is freedom to search for knowledge not just take in whatever and move on. Unfortunately 90% of people are lazy af so the best thing we the 10% can do is just see everyone as customers. They don’t share my ideals on society or lifestyle or anything. They do like to consume mindlessly though, like oblivious cows grazing all the way to the slaughterhouse. AI will make it far easier to keep people in line.

antisthenes 3y ago
> Honestly I’m not a fan of either things. I think only knowledge is freedom, and the key there is freedom to search for knowledge not just take in whatever and move on. This is overly simplistic. It's not enough to just have knowledge sitting on your desk or in your computer. One must also have the requisite skills to understand what you read and to make the right conclusions. When you have the ultimate knowledge at your fingertips, but your understanding is hamstrung by delusional safetyism, you get the current "polite, but unhelpful AI".
viscanti 3y ago
> AI will make it far easier to keep people in line. An alternative explanation is that AI companies are using RLHF to help the 90% understand that a lot of things aren't black and white but that there is relevant context to keep in mind. For many cases, that's probably useful (like if someone is asking if one movie is better than another movie). At the extremes, which are hopefully rare (are a lot of people really wondering if Hitler is better or worse than some Twitter posts), you get nonsense.

hintymad 3y ago

Hit really hard on me too. I just can't fathom how the Google employees with all the righteousness in their blood would think that it's okay to control how people should think by altering truth.

Izkata 3y ago
The idea is encapsulated in the phrase "the ends justify the means". As long as they get people to think the right thing, underhanded means are acceptable.
- hintymad 3y ago
  I thought the end was to have everyone think in a very specific way, which by itself was pure evil.
xdennis 3y ago
But righteousness _is_ the cause of this. Once you label information as physically harmful, you have to stop "harmful" information regardless if it's true or not.