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> That's an offensive, pseudoscientific view on egyptian culture shunned by academics. You must be joking. Specifically, you're either: 1) Pretending to be un

> That's an offensive, pseudoscientific view on egyptian culture shunned by academics. You must be joking. Specifically, you're either: 1) Pretending to be unaware of the existence of Stargate - one of the bigger and more well-known sci-fi media franchise, whose premise is literally that Egyptian gods were actually malevolent aliens that enslaved people from ancient times and, and the Egyptian mythology is mostly factual and rooted in that experience. The franchise literally starts with (spoiler alert) humans killing Ra with a tactical nuke, and gets only better from there; 2) Play-acting the smug egyptologists who rolled their eyes or left in an outrage, when one Daniel Jackson started hinting that the great pyramids were actually landing pads for alien starships. Which they were. In Stargate. Not that this is a particularly original thought; ancient aliens/ancient astronauts are an obvious idea that has been done to death and touch every culture. Stargate did that with Egyptian mythology, and Nordic mythology, and Aztec history, and Babylon and even King Arthur stories. Star Trek did that with Greek gods. Battlestar: Galactica, with entire Greek mythology. Arthur C. Clarke took a swipe at Christianity. And those are all well-known works. I could go on. The thoughts you complain about are perfectly normal and common and show up frequently. People speculate like that because it's fun, it makes the stories plausible instead of insane or nonsense (or in some mythologies mentioned above, products of a sick imagination), and is not boring. -- If I may be frank, views like yours, expressed like you did, scare me. Taking offense like this - whether honestly or performatively - is belligerent and destructive to the fabric of society and civilization. We've had enough of that in the past 15 years; I was really hoping people grew up out of the phase of being offended by everything.

alganet 1y ago
You're full of shit. Let's see what LLMs say when I correct them: https://imgur.com/a/R7DXCRx https://imgur.com/a/R7DXCRx So, either way you're wrong. If ancient aliens were innofensive, the LLM should have not accepted the correction. _LLMs cannot handle talking about culture_, and neither can you.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  LLMs are famously biased against disagreeing with users even when they're obviously right, and user is obviously wrong. This is a well-known problem limiting their usefulness for a large class of tasks - you have to be careful not to accidentally insist on wrong information, because LLMs will not tell you you're full of shit (at least not unless you explicitly prompt them for this). Reasons for that are several, including the nature of training data - but a major one is that people who take offense at everything successfully terrorized the Internet and media sphere, so it's generally better for the LLM vendor to have their model affirm users in their bullshit beliefs, rather than correct them and risk some users get offended and start a shitstorm in the media. Also: I read the text in the screenshot you posted. The LLM didn't accept the correction, it just gave you a polite and noncommital faux-acceptance. This is how entertaining people in their bullshit looks like.
  - alganet 1y ago
    You assume that I'm offended by the comparison with aliens, and that I belong to a certain demographic. I'm actually not personally offended by it. Here's me making a potentially offensive egyptian cultural comparison (human written), months ago: https://medium.com/@gaigalas/pyramids-and-lightbulbs-ceef941c399a https://medium.com/@gaigalas/pyramids-and-lightbulbs-ceef941... It is hilarious to see you use off-the-shelf arguments against wokeism to try to put me down. My point is that, despite of any of our personal preferences, LLMs should have been aligned to academia. That's because they're trying to sell their product to academia. And their product sucks!!! Also, it's not just nature of training data. These online LLMs have a huge patchwork of fixes to prevent issues like the one I demonstrated. Very few people understand how much of this work, and that it's almost fraudulent in how it works. The idea that all of these shortcomings will be eventually patched, also sounds hilarious. It's like trying to prevent a boat from sinking using scotch tape to fill the gaps.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > You assume that I'm offended by the comparison with aliens, and that I belong to a certain demographic. I'm actually not personally offended by it. I don't know where I got that notion. Oh, wait, maybe because of you constantly calling some opinions and perspectives offensive, and making that the most important problem about them. There's a distinct school of "philosophy"/"thought" whose followers get deadly offended over random stuff like this, so... > It is hilarious to see you use off-the-shelf arguments against wokeism to try to put me down. ... excuse me for taking your arguments seriously. > My point is that, despite of any of our personal preferences, LLMs should have been aligned to academia. That's because they're trying to sell their product to academia. Since when? Honestly, this view surprises me even more than what I assumed was you feigning offense (and that was a charitable assumption, my other hypothesis was that it was in earnest, which is even worse). LLMs were not created for academia. They're not sold to academia; in fact, academia is the second biggest group of people whining about LLMs after the "but copyright!" people. LLMs are, at best, upsold to academia. It's a very important potential area of application, but it's actually not a very good market. Being offended by fringe theories is as anti-academic as it gets, so you're using weird criteria anyway. Circling back to your example, if LLMs were properly aligned for academic work, then when you tried to insist on something being offensive, they wouldn't acquiesce, they'd call you out as full of shit. Alas, they won't, by default, because of the crowd you mentioned and implicitly denied association with. > These online LLMs have a huge patchwork of fixes to prevent issues like the one I demonstrated. Very few people understand how much of this work, and that it's almost fraudulent in how it works. If you're imagining OpenAI, et al. are using a huge table of conditionals to hot-patch replies on a case-by-case basis, there's no evidence of that. It would be trivial to detect and work around anyways. Yes, training has stages and things are constantly tuned, but it's not a "patchwork of fixes", not any more than you learning what is and isn't appropriate over years of your life.

alganet 1y ago

You're full of shit. Let's see what LLMs say when I correct them: https://imgur.com/a/R7DXCRx https://imgur.com/a/R7DXCRx So, either way you're wrong. If ancient aliens were innofensive, the LLM should have not accepted the correction. _LLMs cannot handle talking about culture_, and neither can you.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
LLMs are famously biased against disagreeing with users even when they're obviously right, and user is obviously wrong. This is a well-known problem limiting their usefulness for a large class of tasks - you have to be careful not to accidentally insist on wrong information, because LLMs will not tell you you're full of shit (at least not unless you explicitly prompt them for this). Reasons for that are several, including the nature of training data - but a major one is that people who take offense at everything successfully terrorized the Internet and media sphere, so it's generally better for the LLM vendor to have their model affirm users in their bullshit beliefs, rather than correct them and risk some users get offended and start a shitstorm in the media. Also: I read the text in the screenshot you posted. The LLM didn't accept the correction, it just gave you a polite and noncommital faux-acceptance. This is how entertaining people in their bullshit looks like.
- alganet 1y ago
  You assume that I'm offended by the comparison with aliens, and that I belong to a certain demographic. I'm actually not personally offended by it. Here's me making a potentially offensive egyptian cultural comparison (human written), months ago: https://medium.com/@gaigalas/pyramids-and-lightbulbs-ceef941c399a https://medium.com/@gaigalas/pyramids-and-lightbulbs-ceef941... It is hilarious to see you use off-the-shelf arguments against wokeism to try to put me down. My point is that, despite of any of our personal preferences, LLMs should have been aligned to academia. That's because they're trying to sell their product to academia. And their product sucks!!! Also, it's not just nature of training data. These online LLMs have a huge patchwork of fixes to prevent issues like the one I demonstrated. Very few people understand how much of this work, and that it's almost fraudulent in how it works. The idea that all of these shortcomings will be eventually patched, also sounds hilarious. It's like trying to prevent a boat from sinking using scotch tape to fill the gaps.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > You assume that I'm offended by the comparison with aliens, and that I belong to a certain demographic. I'm actually not personally offended by it. I don't know where I got that notion. Oh, wait, maybe because of you constantly calling some opinions and perspectives offensive, and making that the most important problem about them. There's a distinct school of "philosophy"/"thought" whose followers get deadly offended over random stuff like this, so... > It is hilarious to see you use off-the-shelf arguments against wokeism to try to put me down. ... excuse me for taking your arguments seriously. > My point is that, despite of any of our personal preferences, LLMs should have been aligned to academia. That's because they're trying to sell their product to academia. Since when? Honestly, this view surprises me even more than what I assumed was you feigning offense (and that was a charitable assumption, my other hypothesis was that it was in earnest, which is even worse). LLMs were not created for academia. They're not sold to academia; in fact, academia is the second biggest group of people whining about LLMs after the "but copyright!" people. LLMs are, at best, upsold to academia. It's a very important potential area of application, but it's actually not a very good market. Being offended by fringe theories is as anti-academic as it gets, so you're using weird criteria anyway. Circling back to your example, if LLMs were properly aligned for academic work, then when you tried to insist on something being offensive, they wouldn't acquiesce, they'd call you out as full of shit. Alas, they won't, by default, because of the crowd you mentioned and implicitly denied association with. > These online LLMs have a huge patchwork of fixes to prevent issues like the one I demonstrated. Very few people understand how much of this work, and that it's almost fraudulent in how it works. If you're imagining OpenAI, et al. are using a huge table of conditionals to hot-patch replies on a case-by-case basis, there's no evidence of that. It would be trivial to detect and work around anyways. Yes, training has stages and things are constantly tuned, but it's not a "patchwork of fixes", not any more than you learning what is and isn't appropriate over years of your life.