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I don’t know anything about AI but this is just inherently very funny to me

Furthermore, compared to many other things AIs have learned to do, if you consider the task of running a responsive text dungeon, it seems relatively possible to ask a (relatively unusually) introspective human author to write down their thoughts about how and why they would generate the next prompt from the user’s input.

well, we don’t have any relevant technical skills, but we are (relatively unusually) introspective. for this reason i propose doing ai research via dungeons and dragons

The reason for our focus on this particular project of visible thoughts isn’t because we believe it to be better or more fruitful than Circuits-style transparency (we have said for years that Circuits-style research deserves all possible dollars that can be productively spent on it), but just because it’s a different approach where it might also be possible to push progress forward.

this other project is much better, but don’t worry, we have no actual way of helping with that one, so let’s do this instead

Note that proponents of alignment strategies that involve human-esque thoughts (such as those linked above) do not necessarily endorse this particular experiment as testing any of their key uncertainties or confusions.

ok i know I just implied our project was similar to that other one but actually there’s no reason to believe this will lead to meaningful results in that area either

In this case, we tried to execute this project in a closed way in mid-2021, but work was not proceeding fast enough.

imagining eliezer spending months writing reams and reams of terrible text adventures and eventually giving up because he got bored

I (Nate) don’t know of any plan for achieving a stellar future that I believe has much hope worth speaking of. I consider this one of our key bottlenecks.

this sure is a way to begin a new paragraph

Offering prizes for small projects such as these doesn’t address that bottleneck directly, and I don’t want to imply that any such projects are going to be world-saving in their own right.

don’t worry guys, he didn’t want to imply that

we need people who can not only lead those projects themselves, but who can understand the hope-containing heart of the idea with relatively little Eliezer-interaction, and develop a vision around it that retains the shred of hope and doesn’t require constant interaction and course-correction on our part.

god forbid anyone working for you diverges from Eliezer’s ideas even slightly

That said, whether or not we decide to pay for a run is entirely and unilaterally up to Eliezer Yudkowsky or his delegates

definitely not a cult btw

Aren’t they worried the AI will convince the dungeon master to let them out

Jesus fucking Christ

The great part is that if anyone does try and write all this crap, MIRI can just turn around and say “oh this doesn’t meet our standards, so sorry that you wrote 1 million words worth of shit to try and claim .2 mil.”

They’re so incompetent that they can’t even attempt to hire people to do this, or to do a request for proposals… just a handwavey “do the thing and send to us, and maybe we’ll pay you”. Sure, I’m pretty willing to do 20K worth of work without any idea if I’ll get paid or not.

(Not to mention how stupid the whole thing sounds)

Working for Trump has a higher chance of getting paid, I surmise

Effectivest altruism to donate to a non-profit for playing Zork.

Ah, going that route instead of Nethack?

And this is why the AGI hates skeletons.

W-wait a minute, but I... I have a skeleton! *cue ominous music* ^ That's why alignment is a hard problem.
*beep boop* > I have a skeleton! [[Beep booping stops]](https://tenor.com/view/terminator-nope-t1000-finger-wag-no-gif-17843471) E: [alternative clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtfw6iP4Sw0)

Can’t they just like

Copy the captions from Critical Role or something

That was essentiall the first thing that came to my mind aswell. With an initial budget of 200k they could easily message some well known DnD content creators to ask them if they can use their runs for their research and hire someone to transcribe what happens like in the format they described. They could produce a basic dataset to their liking in a few months with only a fraction of the resources that they are offering here.
Heck, for the more popular DnD podcasts (Critical Role, TAZ), there are already fan transcripts available for a ton of episodes, including the episodes where the creators explain a bunch of the decisions they made in constructing and running their worlds. But I suppose if you already have datasets to work with it's a lot harder to explain why you haven't done anything useful with them...
> But I suppose if you already have datasets to work with it's a lot harder to explain why you haven't done anything useful with them... Even funnier considering that, as pointed out in the comments under the LessWrong post, the samples Elizier wants are actually too long for GPT-3 to handle. Literally willing to spend over a million dollars on movie script length DnD runs that aren't even useful for an actual experimental run. Imagine if that money actually went to legitimate scientific endevours instead of Elizier's barely disguised excuse to use research money on his fanfic hobby.
Yeah like it's a good idea to plan for the future, getting data that you might not be able to use now but which is on the horizon for what you want to do, and doing so can be expensive, but this is just a little silly.

Holy Shit why do they have so much money for this nonsense …

they tapped into the crypto nerds

Thoughts:

Head empty