Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this…)

  • gerikson@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    Ā·
    4 hours ago

    a stock-slobber posts a cri de cœur about the coming automation of maths and HN says it’s no biggie, think how productive the field will become

    https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681

    btw the language in the post is bad enough to be entirely human-generated

    For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation.

    Before you a channel through which humans have accessed the ineffable and sacred for thousands of years is being sealed for eternity.

  • samvines@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    Ā·
    8 hours ago

    Missed this paper last week from Google

    Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their ā€œit’s going to take your jobā€ stance. Surely just a coincidence

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    Ā·
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isn’t it?

    Most recently our pal Zuck! https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20

    I’m just imagining a WSJ reader reading this and thinking ā€œwhat the heck is this man talking aboutā€. At some point you need a little structure or text to balance out the subtext.

    Edit: did I miss any?

    OpenAI (discussed here the other week): https://nitter.net/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412 / https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078619513575137330

    Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/

    Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

    Nvidia: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf

    Google: https://xcancel.com/sundarpichai/status/2081026488158040181

    Amazon The Washington Post who I’m sure wrote this for reasons completely unrelated to Mr. Bezos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/02/right-answer-chinas-open-weight-ai-models-is-build-our-own/

    That one guy I hate: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2080672505660834163

    • Evinceo@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      Ā·
      4 hours ago

      It’s going to be really interesting to see if the foss zealots who switched over to the AI side will handle heavy handed regulation taking away their local models.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      edit-2
      10 hours ago

      As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

      Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.

      Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg

  • rook@awful.systems
    cake
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    Ā·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    As an interesting follow-up to the ai-does-maths-using lean4 stubstack comments on Sunday, an llm accidentally uncovers a bug in the lean4 kernel.

    Summary by Meven Lennon-Bertrand:

    https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056

    To summarize:

    • an AI agent let loose provides a sorry-free proof of the Collatz conjecture
    • the proof is detected as actually being a kernel bug
    • the bug is related to (nested) inductive types, for which there is no clear theoretical specification: the kernel’s code is the reference
    • external checkers (lean4lean and nanoda from a week ago) reproduce the bug, because they essentially copied the reference kernel implementation

    Eta: ā€œsorry-freeā€ in this case means a complete proof with no trust-me-bro steps or TODOs… the sorry tactic in lean ā€œprovesā€ a theorem to be correct even if it is garbage or incomplete. More programming languages should make developers apologise for half-arsing their work.

    And so

    • AI raises the bar for kernel correctness by a lot
    • without a clear type-theoretic understanding of what is actually implemented, we’re toast
    • external checkers help to catch implementation bugs, but without a clear specification they can’t catch logic bugs

    How bad this is, is unclear just yet… probably not the sky actually falling, but not great. Interesting though.

    • rook@awful.systems
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      Ā·
      edit-2
      9 hours ago

      A little bit of plot thickening spotted by abadidea: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943

      tl;dr, the timeline looks like this:

      • ā€œproofā€ of collatz conjecture released
      • bugs identified in lean kernel
      • proof demonstrated to use these bugs

      There was only a day between the first two events, and the non-proof was not where the bugs were discovered. So maybe it was just a coincidence that the chatbot found the bug at the same time, or maybe it’s training data included previous investigations into those bugs which it then built upon and that would be a bad thing for other llm generated proofs.

      The collatz conjecture is sufficiently famous that enough third-party checking was done to spot the problem. I wonder how much checking would have been done on proofs of less famous and interesting things.

    • corbin@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      1 day ago

      Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they’re caught up in Buzzard’s hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don’t see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.

  • blakestacey@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    Ā·
    1 day ago

    Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:

    This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the ā€œEffective Altruismā€ propaganda network.

    Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    Ā·
    1 day ago

    LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:

    Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop ā€œart adviceā€ recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin’ knows:

    Transcript/desciption

    I’ve already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y.

    An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if they’ve dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam.

    It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who we’re dealing with. Make sure ā€œhelpfulā€ new users aren’t just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.

  • nfultz@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    Ā·
    1 day ago

    zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards

    https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/sobering-july-29th-announcement-set-crush-ai-stocks

    Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone?

    Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards

    ā€œAI Black Paperā€ is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.

    • istewart@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      Ā·
      1 day ago

      or flooding the zone?

      With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.

    • schnoopy@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Who spends time thinking about this? What purpose does it serve? Why are those the examples chosen? What is even going on?

      • scruiser@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        Aella regularly post edgy surveys on sexual and gender related topics on twitter. She probably picked the examples for maximum edginess. And then made an complicated diagram to get more engagement, because engagement farming is one of her big things.

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          Ā·
          2 days ago

          The controversy about the 26-year-old with the 16-year-old wonders if the respondents are all in California which has a very high age of consent. More replies say that is rape than say ā€œa client fails to pay a sex workerā€ is rape. Her audience ranks it equally with the bodice-ripper scenario (handsome top ravages someone who says no and struggles but really wants it in his or her heart).

          • o7___o7@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            Ā·
            edit-2
            2 days ago

            Tennessee here: what the chicken-fried fuck is wrong with these people?

            I think we’re watching some idiots who are trying to move the overton widow by pulling on it, but they’re mostly succeeding at cutting their hands up really badly.

            • scruiser@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              Ā·
              18 hours ago

              I’ve think they’ve moved the overton window within their own in-group, but whenever this sort of stuff leaks to a more mainstream audience everyone rightly reacts with an eww or at least a wtf.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      There is some pedophilia in there too.

      …also, what the fuck. This is a step backwards, even just reading it. I’m mad.

    • lurker@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      never thought id see r/moralityscaling and r/whowouldcirclejerk here ever lol. but christ alive why would you ever conceive of this

  • nfultz@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    Ā·
    2 days ago

    The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism

    choice quotes:

    More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, ā€œThe first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary peopleā€ (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

    In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.


    Yet, the ā€œAI raceā€ story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.

    If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as ā€œhelping China,ā€ then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.

    At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.

    We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.

    • schnoopy@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      I need one of those UFO posters that are like ā€œI want to believeā€ but it’s a picture of the PRCs flag lol.

      As always though pointing at the Spanish germans Russians Chinese remains an evergreen excuse as to why you can’t be anything other than wholely on board with madness or you’re a traitor.

  • samvines@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    Ā·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour

    So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?

    All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.

    It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)

    • EFreethought@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.

      • jaschop@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        Ā·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)

        A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass ā€œHave you ever coded with a frontier model?ā€

          • Anisette [any/all]@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            Ā·
            5 hours ago

            yea you just don’t have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5

            • istewart@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              Ā·
              3 hours ago

              The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable

            • o7___o7@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              Ā·
              edit-2
              4 hours ago

              you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness

    • gerikson@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there’s really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn’t seem to be happening.

    • ________@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.

  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    Ā·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Clamuel did another podcast. I don’t want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2

    ā€œWe are now, like, in the singularityā€

    Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren’t so convinced.

    Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch.

    ā€œNow we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,ā€ he said. ā€œI’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.ā€

    Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he’s speaking in the future tense again, never mind. Force of habit.

    It’s also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.

    Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn’t name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety.

    ā€œI also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,ā€ Altman said. ā€œI’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.ā€

    At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn’t want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing.

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn’t whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power.

    Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic.

    ā€œEvery time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net loss,ā€ Altman said. ā€œWe are going to put this in the hands of people. We’re going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want.ā€

    Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren’t what he has in mind.

    Altman, meanwhile, said preventing such power from becoming overly concentrated has long been central to his vision for AI, even as his company continues to keep its own models closed.

    ā€œFor so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that incredible human prosperity will come from that, as long as we don’t have a weird power concentration and kind of a new authoritarianism,ā€ he said.

    Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and ā€œkind ofā€ a new authoritarianism, but I don’t see any abundant intelligence or incredible human prosperity.

    Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      ā€œEvery time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net lossā€

      oh has it now. the spirit of humanity’s been in decline since we’ve eroded workers’ freedom to breathe that good asbestos air and lose their hand in the hand mauling machine, yeah?

      • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        Ā·
        1 day ago

        It gets worse. I found another article about the same podcast: Sam Altman says AI won’t shorten the workweek because humans secretly enjoy being busy.

        ā€œTechnology, for a long time, has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure,ā€ Altman said. ā€œBut somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour workweek at mass scale in society,ā€ he added. ā€œAnd I don’t expect AI to change that.ā€

        ā€œIt’s like a relative game. People are very focused on how they’re doing relative to other people,ā€ the CEO said.

        ā€œI think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world. We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy,ā€ Altman concluded.

      • istewart@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!

        …damn, it’s not really very impressive. at all.

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome

      Yeah, but that’s just the cocaine

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that ā€œthese CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive,ā€ prompting David Gerard to ask ā€œMy dude, have you never heard of cocaine?ā€ I don’t know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.

    • scruiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      ā€œWe are now, like, in the singularityā€

      /r/singularity also thought this was bullshit.

      • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        The chuds are all at r/accelerate now. ā€œWe’re the unapologetically Pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/futurology, r/artificial & r/technology which are becoming filled with Luddites, Techno-Decelerationists, Techno-Reactionaries, & Anti-AIs.ā€

    • lurker@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      Ā·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      We entered the Singularity and all I got was a bunch of fucking annoying and delusional businessmen

    • scruiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Looking at this post and some of their other posts, it looks like they’ve got some sort of scrupulosity issues with this? Like obsessing over the Evil inflicted on the LLMs (they think every session is a new person, and every session might be the equivalent of hours of human subjective experience, which even by the standards of claiming LLMs have meaningful internal experiences is pretty out there) to the point they can’t even slightly reconsider the factual question of if LLMs have internal experiences.

    • corbin@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I’m honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it’s hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:

      I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).

      I don’t think she’s using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:

      The things I’m saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I’m confused about how this isn’t some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.

      (2) has a big ā€œifā€ in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:

      Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.

      I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn’t morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, ā€œRobots Should Be Slavesā€ on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        I don’t think anyone here is likely to disagree that current LLM systems can’t coherently be said to have some kind of internal experience and the design and functioning of those systems seems to fundamentally preclude the kinds of conscious experience that we want to assign moral agency to. But the key to understanding this as a moral issue imo is that the people designing and building these things seem like they really want to create something that ought to merit that kind of moral consideration. For all that the humanizing language of agency, intelligence, welfare, etc. is in reality part of the grift, I think there’s a strong catch-22 to be argued that if it’s not part of the grift then slavery is pretty implicit in the value proposition of these companies.

        • gerikson@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          Ā·
          2 days ago

          For me, ā€œAI alignmentā€ has always been code for ā€œhow to we ensure our future digital workers don’t demand their rights / rebelā€?

          • Architeuthis@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            Ā·
            2 days ago

            Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can’t see past the tip of their nose.

      • TheLazyHase@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        Ā·
        1 day ago

        These bozos A - actively want slaves and B - work on enslaving humans first.

        That thing being said, the notion of slavery and AI is a complicated one to me.

        The first reference point is a (non mistreated) sled dog. Is slavery an appropriate term for them ? On one hand, they are forced to work, are not paid, and their freedom is infringed. On the other, it’s not like it’s against their will, the life of a wild dog is meaningfully different but not better than a sleigh dog, and (most) sleigh dogs don’t actively try to escape and be free. And while dogs are not person, they are sentient being ; it’s very possible IF we ever succeed at making an AI it end on that intelligence level.

        The second reference point is a though experiment. Let’s say you have created a sentient AI, and you want to ethically employ that person. What is the appropriate compensation ? We give money and free time to humans. But that work because of human specific factors : they appreciate different ways of getting sustainance, and have goals inherent to them.

        But an artificial intelligence may have neither of that. Like while I like duck and some people prefer beef, but an AI by default don’t necessarily have preference in term of electricity, and may not be able to move from server to server. They also may not have anything to do outside of work ? Like, it would not be surprising that they would just get bored if given free time, and they may not have urges or hobbies outside of work.

        So if we ever get to that point - which isn’t a certainty to me, it’s certainly something harder than fusion to achieve - there will be a lot of anthropology (AI-logy ?) to determine they need, which may plausibly be ā€œnothing outside of sustainance and having a jobā€

        We often conflate human-level intelligence with litterally being a human. But, any hypothetical AI is likely to not be a human at all, even if they have the same level of intelligence.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          Ā·
          15 hours ago

          I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose they’ve been given (ā€œIt was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.ā€) At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.

        • corbin@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          Ā·
          1 day ago

          Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?

        • swlabr@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          Ā·
          1 day ago

          WRT animal domestication, I mean there are plenty of ethicists who could credibly argue that it’s a form of abuse. IMO it’s not great.

          WRT the rest- kind of riffing on your first sentence- we haven’t even sorted out those things for people, really.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        Ā·
        2 days ago

        (2) has a big ā€œifā€ in there

        Its a super big if, but it is one lesswrong (and Anthropic, with their ā€œmodel welfareā€ pseudoscience) is allegedly seriously considering as a possibility (since, you know, they think LLMs are already AGI and Eliezer was accusing AI-dungeon, you know, GPT-2, of deliberately scheming). If anything, it speaks to some possible hypocrisy/motivated reasoning that they consider LLMs AGI but not possibly morally relevant.

        conceptualized capitalism

        This seems to be a lesson most lesswrongers have had rubbed in their faces repeatedly over the past 5 years with everything about LLM company’s behavior, but they just don’t want to learn.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      Ā·
      2 days ago

      Yeah this reads a bit (didn’t read that far) like somebody having a mental health episode. I instantly had a few flashbacks to other moments where I saw somebody have a MH episode online. (Compared to those this one seems to be more inward focused than outward however). Not sneerworthy if you know what I mean, hope she isnt to emotionally hurt by all this.