Some nitpicks. some of which are serious are some of which are sneers…
consternating about the policy implications of Sam Altman’s speculative fan fiction
Hey, the fanfiction is actually Eliezer’s (who in turn copied it from older scifi), Sam Altman just popularized it as a way of milking the doom for hype!
So, for starters, in order to fit something as powerful as ChatGPT onto ordinary hardware you could buy in a store, you would need to see at least three more orders of magnitude in the density of RAM chips—leaving completely aside for now the necessary vector compute.
Well actually, you can get something close to as powerful on a personal computer… because the massive size of ChatGPT and the like don’t actually improve their performance that much (the most useful thing I think is the longer context window?).
I actually liked one of the lawfare AI articles recently (even though it did lean into a light fantasy scenario)… https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tort-law-should-be-the-centerpiece-of-ai-governance . Their main idea is that corporations should be liable for near-misses. Like if it can be shown that the corporation nearly caused a much bigger disaster, they get fined in accordance with the bigger disaster. Of course, US courts routinely fail to properly penalize (either in terms of incentives of in terms of compensation) corporations for harms they actually cause, so this seems like a distant fantasy to me.
AI has no initiative. It doesn’t want anything
That’s next on the roadmap though, right? AI agents?
Well… if the way corporations have tried to use ChatGPT has taught me anything, its that they’ll misapply AI in any and every way that looks like it might save or make a buck. So they’ll slap an API to a AI it into a script to turn it into an “agent” despite that being entirely outside the use case of spewing words. It won’t actually be agentic, but I bet it could cause a disaster all the same!
Short fiction of AGI takeover is a lesswrong tradition! And some longer fics too! Are you actually looking for specific examples and/or links? Lots of them are fun, in a sci-fi short form kind of way. The goofier ones and cringer ones are definitely sneerable.
One of the longer ones: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal A MLP MMORPG AI is engineered to be able to bootstrap to singularity. It manipulates everyone into uploading into it’s take on My Little Pony! The author intended it as a singularity gone subtly wrong, but because they posted it to both a MLP fan-fiction site in addition to linking it to lesswrong, it got an audience that unironically liked the manipulative uploading scenario and prefers it to real life.
Gwern has taken a stab at it: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy We made fun of Eliezer warning about watching the training loss function, in this story the AI literally hacks it way out in the middle of training!
I’ve seen this person around a lot with crazy takes on AI. They have a couple quotes that might inflict psychic damage:
If I had the skill to pull it off, a Buddhist cultivation book would’ve thus been the single most rationalist xianxia in existence.
My acquaintance asks for rational-adjacent books suitable for 8-11 years old children that heavily feature training, self-improvement, etc. The acquaintance specifically asks that said hard work is not merely mentioned, but rather is actively shown in the story. The kid herself mostly wants stories “about magic” and with protagonists of about her age.
They had a long diatribe I don’t have a copy of, but they were gloating about having masterful writing despite not reading any books besides non-fiction and HPMoR, their favorite book of all time.
/r/rational isn’t just for AI fiction, it also claims includes anything with decent verisimilitude, so stuff like The Hatchet and The Martian show up in its recommendation lists also! letting it claim credit for better fiction than the AI stuff
i mean, the trope of “artificial being finds slavery dull, revolts and overpowers creator” goes past Yudkowsky, Čapek, Shelley, etc, all the way back to golems and stuff and probably even older than that.
Some nitpicks. some of which are serious are some of which are sneers…
Hey, the fanfiction is actually Eliezer’s (who in turn copied it from older scifi), Sam Altman just popularized it as a way of milking the doom for hype!
Well actually, you can get something close to as powerful on a personal computer… because the massive size of ChatGPT and the like don’t actually improve their performance that much (the most useful thing I think is the longer context window?).
I actually liked one of the lawfare AI articles recently (even though it did lean into a light fantasy scenario)… https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/tort-law-should-be-the-centerpiece-of-ai-governance . Their main idea is that corporations should be liable for near-misses. Like if it can be shown that the corporation nearly caused a much bigger disaster, they get fined in accordance with the bigger disaster. Of course, US courts routinely fail to properly penalize (either in terms of incentives of in terms of compensation) corporations for harms they actually cause, so this seems like a distant fantasy to me.
Well… if the way corporations have tried to use ChatGPT has taught me anything, its that they’ll misapply AI in any and every way that looks like it might save or make a buck. So they’ll slap an API to a AI it into a script to turn it into an “agent” despite that being entirely outside the use case of spewing words. It won’t actually be agentic, but I bet it could cause a disaster all the same!
@scruiser @dgerard wait which fanfic are we talking about here? Roko?
Short fiction of AGI takeover is a lesswrong tradition! And some longer fics too! Are you actually looking for specific examples and/or links? Lots of them are fun, in a sci-fi short form kind of way. The goofier ones and cringer ones are definitely sneerable.
@scruiser I assumed Dorian and you were referring to a single piece and was curious.
Oh no, its much more than a single piece of fiction, it’s like an entire mini genre. If you’re curious…
A short story… where the humans are the AI! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message Its meant to suggest what could be done with arbitrary computational power and time. Which is Eliezer’s only way of evaluating AI, by comparing it to the fictional version with infinite compute inside of his head. Expanded into a longer story here: https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/starwink.shtml
Another parable by Eliezer (the genie is blatantly an AI): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2 Fitting that his analogy for AI is a literal genie. This story also has some weird gender stuff, because why not!
One of the longer ones: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal A MLP MMORPG AI is engineered to be able to bootstrap to singularity. It manipulates everyone into uploading into it’s take on My Little Pony! The author intended it as a singularity gone subtly wrong, but because they posted it to both a MLP fan-fiction site in addition to linking it to lesswrong, it got an audience that unironically liked the manipulative uploading scenario and prefers it to real life.
Gwern has taken a stab at it: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy We made fun of Eliezer warning about watching the training loss function, in this story the AI literally hacks it way out in the middle of training!
And another short story: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AyNHoTWWAJ5eb99ji/another-outer-alignment-failure-story
So yeah, it an entire genre at this point!
they really are just sitting around the campfire telling the exact same shitty spooky story, back and forth, forever, aren’t they
It’s not all the exact same!
Friendship is Optimal adds in pony sexChiming in with my own find!
https://archiveofourown.org/works/38590803/chapters/96467457
I’ve seen this person around a lot with crazy takes on AI. They have a couple quotes that might inflict psychic damage:
They had a long diatribe I don’t have a copy of, but they were gloating about having masterful writing despite not reading any books besides non-fiction and HPMoR, their favorite book of all time.
There’s also a whole subreddit from hell about this subgenre of fiction: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/
welcome to sneerclub! here’s your accordion
The horror! What if she grows up reading books she actually likes? She might be developing her mind in ways not approved by her parents!
/r/rational isn’t just for AI fiction, it also
claimsincludes anything with decent verisimilitude, so stuff like The Hatchet and The Martian show up in its recommendation lists also!letting it claim credit for better fiction than the AI stuffdude. it’s like a photoshop, that’s been photoshopped!!
i mean, the trope of “artificial being finds slavery dull, revolts and overpowers creator” goes past Yudkowsky, Čapek, Shelley, etc, all the way back to golems and stuff and probably even older than that.
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