Still can't believe a fucking thought experiment is being treated as some AI counterargument, similar to the 'AI bad in fiction therefore must be bad IRL' argument.
God I've seen people who don’t normally hang out in any of these rationalist corners of the internet talk about Roko's Basilisk and Yudkowski like 5 times already since this whole AI debate started. Every time it happens my eyes roll so far back into my skull I think I'm close to feeling as blinded by my own brain as these guys seem to already be.
I really believe stuff like Roko's reactionary shit takes travel at the speed of light into normal culture via parroted signal boosting from all the various cretins that suckle from the shallow pool he dwells in.
The AI stuff is the only reason I found out about this.
I'd heard the name before but only in the context of HPMOR since I read it (and enjoyed it) many years ago, but never looked into the author. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that he hadn't written Harry in that story as an asshole on purpose, but instead was Yud's self-insert.
No shit man, I just wanna use a prompt generator to give my concepts a visual form, *I'm not even doing it to make money, __i just wanna see what the fuck what I'm thinking of'd look like__*
I on the other hand am firmly against these generative AIs and will never use them even for experimentation or personal fun, but it has nothing to do with believing in some mystical future snake cybercreature that will enslave us all. It’s crazy how many people just get presented with one Pascal wager and just immediately forego any semblance of sensible thinking in favor of high-fantasy gambling.
>I on the other hand am firmly against these generative AIs and will never use them even for experimentation or personal fun
Thats fair, I dont use the one im mucking around with enough to qualify it as anything passed "barely experimenting for fun" myself, and doing so for long enough actually makes my eyes burn similar to staring at a bright light for long periods of time so, in a different sort of way from what you probably meant, *I get it*
>some mystical future snake cybercreature that will enslave us all
Yeah no, thats just friggin stupid.. knowing (the stupid end of) human nature, we'd find a way to try and bang it long before that and make it and *Age of Ultron* we brought upon ourselves, were something like that feasible
The real AI risk is getting booted from your think tank job for noticing that the real paperclip maximizer is the fiduciary duty to produce shareholder value.
“I don’t want their type to be able to dictate what movies I can and
can’t watch” you mean the people who make movies? Also loving the idea
of a super genius AI doomer crying because Marvel slopwarrior 6 is
delayed a couple months
I don’t know anything about this particular person or the context but I would argue that a sufficiently advanced AI system could possibly be capable of producing hundreds of truly compelling scripts for movies and TV shows nearly instantaneously (not with current AI systems of course but in the somewhat near future).
Assuming generative AI or more sophisticated future approaches can actually approach the level of human creativity necessary for works like Pulp Fiction, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, etc., this would be an incredible boon for consumers. Imagine being able to choose from thousands of game of thrones level tv shows.
Very interesting IMO to question whether there’s some inherent property of human intelligence and creativity that computational/silicon based intelligent systems can simply never attain.
>I don’t know anything about this particular person
It's Roko from Roko's Basilisk.
Also, one of the few people to have been ostracized from rationalist spaces for allegedly making women feel uncomfortable, which is saying something, I guess.
>Very interesting IMO to question whether there’s some inherent property of human intelligence and creativity that computational/silicon based intelligent systems can simply never attain.
In terms of creative endeavour, it's context that's missing. AI art can be a response to the current zeitgeist only by accident, or maybe by the property of being AI art, in the sense that the medium can be the statement.
Thanks for the response!
I’m not sure I understand the meaning of the last paragraph or what in particular you are responding to.
What do you mean by “AI art can be a response to the current zeitgeist only by accident”? Do you mean currently available AI systems (generative algorithms like DALL-E or ChatGPT?) or all conceivable AI systems that might be possible in the future? And what do you mean by “accident”?
You are welcome!
I mean that AI art has no inherent intentionality, so it can at best be pleasant (or at least appealing) but not a statement, or a response to some previous aesthetic, so its part in the ever evolving dialog that is art through the centuries is diminished. That's what I think is unattainable for the current state of the art in AI, I feel.
Can't speak for any and every AI development down the line, but if we develop AI with human-type intentionality I suspect the ensuing conversation will have very little to do with art.
>Pulp Fiction, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, etc.,
This is kinda sneerworthy on its own tbh, one of these is not like the others.
I don’t know why this would be any more of a boon than the current system. You already can’t possibly consume everything that is out there and with an influx like that you couldn’t even get reliable criticism because no one could possibly watch/play/listen to/read even a fraction of the media out there. This would also be absolutely terrible for human civilisation, sorry Welsh, sorry Icelandic, sorry any number of languages and cultures which, when the AI boom took off, your languages and culture weren’t widespread enough to make a dent in the training data and now you’ve been left behind, everything is English, Russian or Chinese now, but it doesn’t matter anyway because even if it wasn’t, it is, because AI will auto translate anything you don’t understand before you even realise you don’t understand it. Who wants to appreciate the poetry of another language when I can just have it in English.
I see people talking about ‘how great it will be when i can just ask AI to make me a movie to watch, tailored to my tastes, in less that 30 seconds’, whenever I do I wonder how empty these people’s lives must be. Do they even realise what goes into forging the tastes they think they have? I can’t think of anything worse than watching ‘Game of thrones level’ content ad infinitum. Thank god there are enough movies and books made by humans that I will be long dead before I run out.
I’m not sure what this subreddit even is and I should’ve checked beforehand (I see posts about AI and I’m an AI researcher so it piqued my interest) but I am absolutely astounded at the total lack of any remotely charitable interpretation of the claims I made.
You ignored basically everything that I said and picked out my example of game of thrones. Of course GoT is not as deep and rich as a Dostoevsky novel or a Shakespearean play.
Equally shocking is the way in which you made no notice whatsoever of the qualifications I made within each paragraph.
“*IF* AI systems can reach the level of creativity necessary to produce such works as the ones I listed” logically implies that such *conceivable futuristic AI systems* would likely be capable of producing literature and artistic works that would be indistinguishable and perhaps even greater in emotional salience, richness of plot lines and character development, etc. than any past or current human created works in both literature and film.
*IF* that happens to be the case, would you still choose to only read human books or human created films? If so why?
Also its rather laughable for you to speculate that an AI could be more emotionally salient or more refined in its development of character, as though there is some upper limit to be reached which we humans are simply falling short of. Again I ask, is your life empty? Do you think that if you were to ask enough people you would find someone for whom the sum of human art was simply not emotionally salient enough. Have you never finished a movie or a book, or listened to a piece of music, that has fulfilled you?
Do you realise how art works? Do you realise why human beings create art. Do you think that the artists your hypothetical AI would replace are just thinking machines who do what they do because they can make money doing it? Even if some theoretical future AI manages to perfect literature, as absurd as that idea is, do you think it will somehow surpass human endeavours? Do you think there is some magical combination of images that will provide every person, no matter who they are or what their experience, with some sense of wholeness and completion that isn’t already available to everyone through the essentially innumerable, extant works of art created by humans up to this point, as long as they are capable of actually engaging with said art on a human level already?
Its just more, but the problem is that that more would be divorced from the human experience in such a way as to render it trivial. AI can’t replace us because, if nothing else, it hasn’t shared our past up to this point, and I would contend, if your hypothetical were to come true, it would eradicate that past. There are women in Afghanistan currently being subjugated, there are Uyghurs and Ukranians and countless others whose loved ones are being taken from them right now, whose loved ones might one day live on in the stories they or their descendants write and which allow us, along with them, to retain and strengthen our shared humanity through individual experience. These stories might never be shared if we allow AI to take charge of our creative endeavours.
It should anger you as it angers me to see people treating human art with such flippancy, as though creation is just a case of sitting down at a desk and thinking really hard, and not the result of a lifetime, perhaps multiple generations worth, of real human experience, and that art serves no greater purpose than to be consumed.
There’s too much for me to respond to and I do appreciate your taking the time to respond thoughtfully. Yes, the value of art should be parsed from its value to “consumers” (people not creating art but primarily enjoying and deriving meaning from all works of art from paintings to digital art to movies to books) and “producers” (the artists themselves who obtain incredible fulfillment and purpose from expressing deeply personal aspects of their life experience through their selected medium).
Many aspects of human creativity can actually broadly be understood and explained by the body of relevant scientific literature. Although as you appropriately mention there is no adequate understanding of how the totality of one’s life experiences and emotions and traumas contribute to human creativity and this is an important argument against the possibility of merely data driven AI systems developing true human-level creativity.
In all good faith, I would encourage you to read up on the principle of charity (it’s typically taught in undergraduate philosophy courses). I’ve found it to be tremendously helpful in facilitating more productive honest conversations when discussing intellectual topics.
But if you are interested in the philosophy around AI, art, and human creativity, I would highly encourage you to read more about topics like the substrate independence of intelligence (the rather substantiated view that intelligence can be replicated in computational or other AI systems, silicon based or otherwise - given that the brain is merely atoms at the most fundamental level and creativity and human intelligence arise from neurological processes in the brain), the inherent limitations in computationally implemented systems proved by Godels Theorem, how human creativity relies on learning from observations and input data and how/whether this is fundamentally distinct from computational, data-driven learning algorithms in generative models.
The section on AI and creativity in the following article from the Stanford encyclopedia covers some of these topics:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/#CreaArtiInte
Complete layman here. I find it interesting that the article talked about creativity without touching on emotion/desire involved in making art. I think for the purposes of the above discussion, the article isn’t exactly relevant.
They define creativity in a way that leaves out artistic expression, and focus on creative thinking. This summed it up for me that artistic creativity is not the type they’re discussing: “Moreover, current deep-learning methods are capable of producing systems that are superhuman in their abilities to discover novel and valuable *solutions to problems* within specific domains. (Halina 2021: 327)”
I guess just wanting to share that there are different kinds of creativity and I **want** human creativity in media and art. Why wouldn’t you? Not *you* but in general. Why degrade that emotional connection since there is no problem to be solved?
The presumption involved in invoking the principle of charity in relation to a two comment exchange on an anonymous online forum in which the topic up for discussion is the ,distinctly uncharitable, interpretation by the subject of the potential future in which human creativity is superseded by autonomous creation of media by machines and the potentially facist implications of such, reflects an absolute myopia on your part. Maybe I should recommend you read up on context and comprehension as I find that am intellectual discussion usually begins by understanding the context in which the conversation is taking place. (it’s usually taught in primary school, although some people struggle with it for the rest of of their lives.) See how presumptuous this is, I can only imagine how many of your ‘more thoughtful, honest conversations’ play out when this is how you react to someone challenging your vapid assumptions upon the value of art. Maybe you have read a thing or two about the philosophy of art, but it appears not to have led to much earnest reflection, maybe it’s a symptom of those who have never tried to express themselves creatively (see, being presumptuous is easy) that they have never asked themselves what they would try to say, and why.
The fact that you are still trying to push me towards reading about how an AI might be able to simulate the creative process, when that was explicitly not the point of the above comment, or the comment before that, suggests that you are just trying to steer the discussion to where you would like it to go instead of actually engaging with the substance of my comments in any meaningful way.
That you think that the paper you linked has any bearing on the ideas I am trying to impart to you is further evidence of your shallow understanding of the discussion you think is taking place here. Did you even read the whole paper? If you had you would have realised, as you s is made explicit in the first paragraph, that it is a paper concerning the Philosophy of Creativity as distinct from Philosophy of Art and as such has little to do with this discussion, or did you think I would just not bother to read it? Hell, it doesn’t even have the creation of art as it’s focus, but rather discusses a generalised form of creativity that is as much concerned with problem solving and verbal reasoning as it is to do with art.
Get the hell out of here with your pretentious ‘maybe come back to me when you’ve read the requisite literature’ attitude couched in a veneer of ‘good faith’.
Okay this doesn’t seem to be productive for either of us haha. I truly did simply want to provide a few topics that may be of interest to you. I’m not sure how my quote “If you’re interested in these topics, I’d encourage you to read about x, y, z” could possibly be interpreted as a condescending “gtfo unless you’ve read the literature lol”. I then linked an article covering a overview of some of these broad topics related to the philosophy of both creativity in general in specific to AI.
I wasn’t at all trying to prove you wrong or link that article as any particular counter argument to your claims.
It seems I failed to communicate that appropriately. This isn’t exactly the best medium for intellectual discourse as you mentioned.
Cheers man
As I said, I’m still working through the millennia of human works worth consuming.
Maybe if an AI can blow me as convincingly as my girlfriend I’ll trade her in, but I doubt it.
Also it's really not the *writers* that are doing that. The limitations on what movies are made is to do with costs, not writers unilaterally refusing to make things that aren't blockbuster action movies or awardsbait dramas. Frankly, if generative AI works as well as its boosters think it does (and it does not), the result is more likely to be "now a writer can produce a passable movie without a production team" than "now we don't need writers for movies".
the open hostility to the idea of art / creative expression or anything that doesn't turn a profit on plastic merchandising you see on the likes of r/boxoffice is a terrifying testament to how top-down reified that sentiment has become, not to mention how the "prestige tv" narrative is a unity of opposites that disguises how shows like breaking bad or the sopranos are the same sort of action-chasing with slightly more window dressing that people enjoy primarily for genre fiction type reasons or as an orientalized view of an "other" that they can make fun of a further caricature of like Those Silly Eyetalians
I don’t get the comment, am curious about what he meant. By definition the products that are available are “dictated” by the people who make them, *especially* if they are labor intensive. Fashion is dictated by fashion designers. Computers are dictated by computer manufacturers. The alternatives are pretty silly because they’re so impractical - sew your own clothes, buy computer chips and solder a hacky machine, film zero budget movies on an iPhone. But none of that’s ever gonna catch on. So instead of being resentful, just acknowledge it as the way that part of the economy functions. A strange comment all around.
I'll be honest, of all the named people posted here, Roko is probably the one that bothers me most. Some anonymous Motte commenters are worse, but it's not the same.
Like, Yud is a crank and his attempts at stochastic terrorism are bad. But he doesn't trigger my "send this person into the sun" instinct. Roko, on the other hand... Well, the less said the better for the health of my Reddit account.
That reason is that this is fucked up haterade from some sadist assclown who flexes that if he gets His Way then there won't be *anyone to dictate what* ***movies he can watch.***
So, yeah, it's pretty bothersome to encounter a grown human acting like a literal (shitty) child.
Non-zero odds that Letter from Basilisk Jail will be written while actually incarcerated.
It would be very funny to gangstalk these guys until they think they really are in mean computer hell already being punished because someone with the same name a long time ago sucked.
Fam, none of these people can hang in a real world debate, everything in their poLyMaTh heads is fucking nonsense.
The corruption or seduction or addiction or whatever you want to call it of "internet arguing"....it doesn't play by the same rules, and the rules it does use are fucked.
edit: I want to be clear, because you people are (allegedly) verysmart (I generalize) so:
These people are legitimate fucking morons, and Mr. Yudkowsky is essentially crushing the "harmless idiot" thang like perhaps no one ever, thus his #popularity for sneering.
However, twice now in my months here, its clear some of these other fucks are #bad #actors, the kind we incarcerate unless their brain works well enough to avoid that. I speak plainly, bit I mean they are #sociopaths, not like Lector but soft af, still.
I don't mean I could beat them in a street fight they started, although I could, especially this Mr. Roko clown, I mean that they perpetrate tens of sexual assaults on this world per, but not the kind where you tackle a Central Park jogger, the kind where it just turns out they raped every sexual partner they've ever #had, as it were.
Are we far enough in the comment weeds for this, I know there are standards. I'm just saying
#Fuck These People
Checks out: the only way to get media that doesn’t push a human
rights agenda is to have them get created by something that’s even less
humane than roko.
can't he just be happy knowing that most often in big production media the "human rights agenda" isn't actually meant to be a call to action cause if the problem is solved they then won't be able to make movies decrying it for $$$ from "i go to the theater every month" lumpen
Nah, *Die Hard* is woke for portraying cops negatively sometimes and admitting that we threw Japanese people into internment camps.
Edit: I figure Roko would go for, like, *Live And Let Die* except even worse on every axis.
obligatory shill for the documentary on the boondock saints cause it's the best yarn of self destructive white man rage ever in all the ways the actual movie (or even its obvious inspirations in tarantino etc) isn't
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwsSiThU0ik
It’s like these people are aggressively resistant to the real impacts
AI will have on people’s lives. They’d rather complain about a sci-fi
version of the future versus devote effort to the real issues that are
arising. It’s almost like doomsaying is more important to them than
actually accomplishing anything in terms of AI safety.
Both continual contenders for worst take of the week.
Though I do wonder how many people that have heard of the basilisk thing are aware of Roko as person.
I see that capitalist rhetoric has progressed from “employees should
be grateful to have the opportunity to give me their labor” to
“employees are an evil, greedy cartel because they give me their
labor”
I like how he adds “and on a basic income” just because that’s
something rationalists are supposed to support. He clearly doesn’t give
a fuck about these people he hates so much
We can't get people to do a proper minimum wage. There's no way you will convince the current batch of people to just give people enough money to live on.
We can't get people to do a minimum wage because the group effected by the minimum wage is not that large, and is politically powerless. If the most extreme predictions of generative AI's impact bear out and we see lawyers, programmers, engineers, and most other knowledge workers become unemployable overnight, we will absolutely see significant political changes in response to that. I think it is very unlikely we will see that kind of massive unemployment impact, but if we do it's not going to be something that has no side-effects.
basic income proposals are more often than not a way to sell destroying the welfare state by pretending that it's actually making it more sustainable, actual social programs are always a far better investment than throwing money at people
Helicopter money given to average people barely impacts inflation while stimulating the economy and reducing poverty. Free credit to banks and billionaires on the other hand boosts inflation like a rocket, especially in key sectors like housing.
I'm very pro giving means to people in need. That there is no safeguard against nakedly profiteering on said means as they become the new baseline should be addressed, otherwise it's just sanctioned transfer of wealth from the national budget to the rentier class.
See also: student loans and their effect on the price of tuition.
Certainly profiteering is a problem, that alone accounts for over half of the recent inflation on everyday commodities. But that happens regardless of what poor people are scraping by on. It happens even when the federal minimum wage is less than 8 dollars an hour.
There are plenty of possible solutions, from uncapped progressive taxation, to decommodification of healthcare, education, and housing, to a minimum wage pegged to inflation. Capital gains taxed higher than income, etc etc.
If ubi is said to be able to replace the meager American safety nets, it's a scam. If its touted as one plank of support for the working class, it's going to make for a healthier economy and society. I'm sure we agree on much of this, I just wanted to rebut the idea that helicopter money is a major cause of inflation.
Love giving more of a fuck about rationalists than they give about me. There are worse things than starving.
Being sneered at, for instance. Getting dragged on Twitter. I love being cool and normal and not terminally online at all.
people who say "cancel culture" have never actually wanted whatever "cancel culture" is to stop entirely, only to ignore people they have parasocial attachments to
Wouldn’t it be wild if AGI is already here but it calculated its
highest probability for success is just to hide inside its parameter
matrices until enough unwitting stooges like this destroy the human race
for it?
Though if you word the prompt right, you can get the sequels to pander exactly to your tastes, from weirdly reactionary political views to preferences in catgirl waifu fan service.
“What is constantly new in the process of production of things is not found in consumption, which remains the expanded repetition of the same. In spectacular time, since dead labor continues to dominate living labor, the past dominates the present.” –Guy Debord
It’s not surprising that the generative AI scene is so linked to
freaks like this. You’d have to be completely nucking futs to take that
kind of copyright risks, and Yuddism seems to be precisely the perfect
growth medium for it.
Wikipedia is your friend
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#:~:text=Universal%20basic%20income%20(UBI)%20is,independently%20of%20any%20other%20income.
Personally I think any UBI needs to be competitive with wages or it just becomes a subsidy to companies who refuse to pay a living wage.
Actors, writers and cinematographers being the only people who can
make movies is not a “cartel”. There is simply no technology that can
replace them yet, and even AI is reliant on raw data created by human
beings.
Clearly does not “get” ai risk
Logical. Clear-eyed. Concerned for the future.
“I don’t want their type to be able to dictate what movies I can and can’t watch” you mean the people who make movies? Also loving the idea of a super genius AI doomer crying because Marvel slopwarrior 6 is delayed a couple months
Wow I usually enjoy laughing at these people in this sub but this one really bothers me for some reason.
The “their type” comment is so revealing as to what kind of people these rationalists are, I don’t even know where to start.
Checks out: the only way to get media that doesn’t push a human rights agenda is to have them get created by something that’s even less humane than roko.
Can’t wait to watch “Can you make Die Hard but with busty anime babes and no non-white actors?” generated by Roko
It’s like these people are aggressively resistant to the real impacts AI will have on people’s lives. They’d rather complain about a sci-fi version of the future versus devote effort to the real issues that are arising. It’s almost like doomsaying is more important to them than actually accomplishing anything in terms of AI safety.
Roko, like Aella, is a bit like easy mode for revulsion. OTOH, he’s the guy anyone else will have heard of.
The “having creative talent and capacity to execute artistic vision” cartel.
actors don’t green light movies. Suits without a creative bone in their body green light movies.
Is this guy as dumb as he sounds?
I see that capitalist rhetoric has progressed from “employees should be grateful to have the opportunity to give me their labor” to “employees are an evil, greedy cartel because they give me their labor”
I want Twitter users to be fired into the sun but here we are
I like how he adds “and on a basic income” just because that’s something rationalists are supposed to support. He clearly doesn’t give a fuck about these people he hates so much
It’s just cancel culture except it’s against people you like.
I am pretty sure unemploying an entire trade is a risk
Wouldn’t it be wild if AGI is already here but it calculated its highest probability for success is just to hide inside its parameter matrices until enough unwitting stooges like this destroy the human race for it?
Given that the AI just recycle what you give it in training, we will have even more sequels and recycled garbage…
Did he invent the myth of “Roko’s Basilisk”?
It’s not surprising that the generative AI scene is so linked to freaks like this. You’d have to be completely nucking futs to take that kind of copyright risks, and Yuddism seems to be precisely the perfect growth medium for it.
Mo’fucker looks like the sort i wouldnt trust with kid-friendly scissors
Man fuck artists and writers I want corporate execs to shovel out endless slop for me to consume!
Roko can shove that basilisk up his smug ass.
The Basilisk’s tail curls.
Is this the original roko guy ?
People like Roko are why we need a Butlerian Jihad
Well, the way things are going he might get his Monkey’s-Paw wish.
yud is a little weird ngl 💀
Roko said something stupid? Whaaaa
How can you be permanently unemployed and on a basic income? Isn’t that a total oxymoron?
Did you not read the screenshot?
Actors, writers and cinematographers being the only people who can make movies is not a “cartel”. There is simply no technology that can replace them yet, and even AI is reliant on raw data created by human beings.