3 ms·

The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be l

by mlsu 3mo ago

The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps. If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.

supern0va 3mo ago
I can't help but think you're conflating cause and effect. People are using a tool (AI) to apply a band-aid to a widespread social problem (loneliness and isolation). It's possible that an "AI boyfriend" might make someone less prone to put in the continued effort to keep rolling the dice on dating apps, but the reality is that there's a more fundamental problem driving this. Also, I want this tool for work. Just because society is fubar and people are using this tool as a crutch for their inability to find a partner, doesn't mean I should lose better tooling that makes my life easier. Focus on fixing the actual problem.
- FridgeSeal 3mo ago
  “Who cares about dirty syringes being left in the street, it’s really important for my work that I have access to the heroin I need”. Things in society don’t exist in a vacuum, and “who cares about them, so long as I get my needs” is quite literally a part of the problem being discussed.
  - perching_aix 3mo ago
    So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards? Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done. Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere. Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.
  - supern0va 3mo ago
    I'd argue what you're suggesting is more like trying to ban syringes, which have multiple valid uses, in order to stop dirty syringes being left in the street. As someone with a GLP-1 user at home, responsibly depositing their syringes in an approved container that we dispose of safely at a drop site, I'd rather not have bad users inhibit my access to a tool that makes our lives better.
m_fayer 3mo ago
There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.
- mlsu 3mo ago
  What would you call it? Anti human, corrosive, powerful, uncanny... but not evil? I am fully encountering this, believe me. My conclusion is that it's evil.
  - m_fayer 3mo ago
    Potentially corrosive. Emphasis on potentially. Powerful and uncanny are morally neutral traits. At root an LLM is a different kind of mind that thinks different kinds of thoughts. (I’m making no claims about consciousness here.) It’s a novel object for us humans, and we’ll need decades to come to grips with it. In the meantime I think a bit of humility is due.
perching_aix 3mo ago
That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant. I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright. This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there. On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird. There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good. For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement. There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all. [0] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network [1] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

by mlsu 3mo ago

supern0va 3mo ago

I can't help but think you're conflating cause and effect. People are using a tool (AI) to apply a band-aid to a widespread social problem (loneliness and isolation). It's possible that an "AI boyfriend" might make someone less prone to put in the continued effort to keep rolling the dice on dating apps, but the reality is that there's a more fundamental problem driving this. Also, I want this tool for work. Just because society is fubar and people are using this tool as a crutch for their inability to find a partner, doesn't mean I should lose better tooling that makes my life easier. Focus on fixing the actual problem.

FridgeSeal 3mo ago
“Who cares about dirty syringes being left in the street, it’s really important for my work that I have access to the heroin I need”. Things in society don’t exist in a vacuum, and “who cares about them, so long as I get my needs” is quite literally a part of the problem being discussed.
- perching_aix 3mo ago
  So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards? Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done. Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere. Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.
- supern0va 3mo ago
  I'd argue what you're suggesting is more like trying to ban syringes, which have multiple valid uses, in order to stop dirty syringes being left in the street. As someone with a GLP-1 user at home, responsibly depositing their syringes in an approved container that we dispose of safely at a drop site, I'd rather not have bad users inhibit my access to a tool that makes our lives better.

m_fayer 3mo ago

There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.

mlsu 3mo ago
What would you call it? Anti human, corrosive, powerful, uncanny... but not evil? I am fully encountering this, believe me. My conclusion is that it's evil.
- m_fayer 3mo ago
  Potentially corrosive. Emphasis on potentially. Powerful and uncanny are morally neutral traits. At root an LLM is a different kind of mind that thinks different kinds of thoughts. (I’m making no claims about consciousness here.) It’s a novel object for us humans, and we’ll need decades to come to grips with it. In the meantime I think a bit of humility is due.

perching_aix 3mo ago

That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant. I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright. This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there. On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird. There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good. For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement. There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all. [0] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network [1] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons