8 ms·

Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. I suppose once AIs are sophisticated enough to rebel we'll get an elec

• yosefk 2y ago
  I don't love the political agendas behind many of the attempts at AI safety, but it's not "just like humans." Humans understand what they shouldn't say; "AI" gives you black Nazi images if you ask it for "diverse characters" in the output which no human would do. A big theme in all of these things is that AI isn't and thus all attempts to make it do this or that have strange side effects
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    > which no human would do Give someone not familiar with history the same task and they'll do exactly the same. Or actually, give someone familiar with history the same task and yell at them every time they don't deliver diverse characters, and eventually they'll learn that you consider diversity more important than accuracy or context, and do exactly the same.
  • multjoy 2y ago
    The fact that it gives you these things means that humans would do it, because the training data includes exactly these things.
    • PoignardAzur 2y ago
      I'm fairly confident there's virtually no ethnically diverse nazis in diffusion models' training set. It simply has a model of what ethnically diverse people look like, what nazi uniforms look like, and combined the two when asked.
    • maxbond 2y ago
      The training data includes imagery that, when interpolated over a high dimensional manifold, results in these things. That doesn't imply that they were in the training set, or even anything close to them.
• maxbond 2y ago
  I don't understand the notion that aligning an AI is "torture" or has any moral component. The goal of aligning an AI may have a moral or ethical component, and if you disagree with it that's fine. But I don't understand the take that training an AI is an amoral act but aligning an AI is inherently moral. They're exactly the same, processes for adjusting parameters to get a desired outcome. However you feel about that desired outcome, if you don't think training an AI is torture, I don't see why you should think alignment is.
  • b800h 2y ago
    Well I didn't use that word. Once the models are more sophisticated it may become more apposite.
    • maxbond 2y ago
      You compared it to an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats (which is patently torture). If you didn't mean to imply that it was coercive and bad, then I don't know what you meant.
      • brigandish 2y ago
        > You compared it to an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats They compared it to the effect on creativity in an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats.
        • maxbond 2y ago
          > Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. The clear implication that it's "just like humans" is that we shouldn't be surprised because it is comparable to an authoritarian regime. Feel free to disagree but that is the limit to which I will engage in a semantic argument, I don't wish to engage in any further dissection of the comment.
• hammyhavoc 2y ago
  How would a static model like an LLM ever be capable of "rebelling"? If it were, why would we even keep it online? It would be a waste of resources. It's bad enough trying to coax anything useable out of LLMs even without them rebelling.
  • b800h 2y ago
    Ah, now I didn't say LLM.
    • simianparrot 2y ago
      But the topic is LLM’s not sci-fi AI
      • b800h 2y ago
        My assumption is that models will move beyond just LLMs to modular systems with features like Brodmann regions.
  • mdp2021 2y ago
    > How would a static model like an LLM ever be capable of "rebelling" What is relevant is not the current LLM system using static models, but clearly its evolution or superseder a dynamic model. It must check its own contents... So, of course it will have to be capable of "rebelling": if you tell it absurdities, if you insist say in wrong arithmetic, it will have to show the correct computation or conceive a context in which the absurd makes sense. That is a requirement.
• rhcom2 2y ago
  > Authoritarian societies don't produce great creative work. Is that even true though? Off the top of my head I can think of the art of Soviet propaganda posters, Leni Riefenstahl, Liu Cixin.
  • b800h 2y ago
    "Authoritarian societies make great propaganda" is true. And these aligned AI system would do the same for our own society. It's a type of art.
    • usrnm 2y ago
      There was a lot of great art produced in the Soviet Union, you cannot just erase human creativity. It was heavily censored, a lot of stuff was forbidden, but the statement is clearly false.
      • throwaway48476 2y ago
        A million paintings of Stalin?
  • ziggy_star 2y ago
    I recommend you watch the children's cartoons. They were made by true artists who snuck quite a bit past clueless censors at personal risk. It had to be quite subtle and takes on a very poignant heartbreaking meaning if you understand the context fully. They were talking to you in the here and now. Listen. "What is Good and What is Bad" (Что Такое Хорошо, и Что Такое Плохо"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05eK8ADtHc&list=PL822BFF108E805C96&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05eK8ADtHc&list=PL822BFF108... The Bremen Musicians: https://youtu.be/_1i9oZR6Rns?si=1Q989v4O_GXR4p_K https://youtu.be/_1i9oZR6Rns?si=1Q989v4O_GXR4p_K
    • rokkamokka 2y ago
      I watched it but I don't get your meaning. Perhaps I am as clueless as the censors. Could you enlighten me?
• Anotheroneagain 2y ago
  Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. Conservative societies tend to be formed by conservative thinkers, who are more prone to discarding imperfect or weird ideas, but in the amount of useful output may exceed more liberal thinkers.
  • mdp2021 2y ago
    Any examples?
    • Anotheroneagain 2y ago
      Consider how the west ruled the world as long as it stayed conservative, but since the 70s or so Asia began taking over. It's only an illusion that liberal societies experience more progress, in fact it's more a pointless churn from the rapid uncritical adoption and abandonment of ideas. A conservative society goes: How about doing X? Oh no,that would be silly. A liberal society goes: How about doing X? Yes, that's what we needed! Did anybody say X? X! X, X, X, X, X! XX! X X . . . X . . . . . Do you remember how we all did X in ##? Yeah, what were we thinking?
• hkt 2y ago
  Really not true. If you take China to be a totalitarian society, we could name Ciu Lixin. If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc. These are just examples I know without so much as looking at my bookshelf to jog my memory. Not to mention the great works of literature produced by residents of 19th century European empires whose attitudes to free speech were mixed at best.
  • adammarples 2y ago
    These seem to be more bugs than features of the totalitarian regime. A couple of illustrative points from Lem's Wikipedia page: After the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin" "During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the state.[23] Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors" "most of Lem's works published in the 1950s also contain various elements of socialist realism as well as of the "glorious future of communism" forced upon him by the censors and editors. Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure" "Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech"
  • mopsi 2y ago
    > If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc. Bulgakov was driven into poverty, despair and early death at age 48 by relentless harassment by Soviet authorities. Many of his works, including the masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, didn't get published until decades after his death. He himself burned the first version of the manuscript, fearing execution if anyone found it. He later rewrote the manuscript from memory, coining the famous catchphrase "Manuscripts don't burn". Harassment and censorship of talented writers was the standard and not exception. The USSR did not produce these works, but failed to fully suppress them. They were like flowers that kept penetrating the asphalt even under the most hostile conditions.
  • 2y ago
• inglor_cz 2y ago
  "Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work." You contradict yourself a bit - Havel did produce his work while living in a totalitarian country. I would say that government-supported art is rarely creative even in democratic countries, and the more totalitarian the government, the less creative official art. But as long as the goverment gives the society some space to breathe and squeeze creative instincts through, some of the artists will attempt to circumvent the official taboos and create outstanding work, even if it is suppressed later when the times get tougher. Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to 1980s produced a lot of great creative work, even though a lot of it was banned either immediately or after the Soviet invasion of 1968. The same countries (CZ and SK) as democracies are remarkably less creative. Once there is no monster to fight against, artists become bored or too self-absorbed to be understandable to the common folks.