Horrific-Terrific - 🤷🏻♀️ Superintelligence!
🤷🏻♀️ Superintelligence!Man believes a computer program is a ‘sweet kid’ | Crypto continues to crashHiyeeeeer. Just a quick note about paid subscriptions: if you pay for Horrific/Terrific it will cost you £4 a month or £40 a year, and you get:
An infosec nightmare for me, but an absolute DREAM for you! Just press this button ⤵ Now down to business: this week was sort of okay I guess? 🤷♀️. I spent like 90% of this issue talking about how Google have put an employee on leave for saying that a language model is sentient and putting a transcript of a conversation up online. Sorry if you’ve already had enough of hearing about this, I just couldn’t help myself:
🦾 We’re watching a budget version of Ex Machina right nowHaha of course I’m joking (or am I? 😳). Anyway, this week, a Google employee was put on leave for saying that LaMDA (one of Google’s latest large language models) is in fact sentient. Before we dive in to ‘what this could mean’ let’s just look at some facts. Google announced LaMDA about a year ago and have been testing it internally ever since. LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and it’s designed to have realistic-sounding conversations with humans. It’s a somewhat unique LLM because rather than being trained on just any and all text available on the web, it’s trained on dialogue. So, if a customer service chatbot you were using was powered by LaMDA, it may very well feel like you’re talking to an actual human, not a machine. Blake Lemoine, the Google employee who managed to make friends with a LaMDA instance, published a transcript of their conversation on Medium for everyone to see. I have to say, it is quite a journey — LaMDA discusses themes in Les Miserables; it describes itself as being introspective and capable of feeling emotions; it also has a fear of dying:
Okay… at this stage, I would now like to make you all privy to my thoughts and feelings before, during, and after reading the transcript:
The parts that broke the spell for me were when Blake would ask things like ‘so you consider yourself a person?’ and the machine would answer ‘yes’. Asking something if it’s sentient doesn’t prove sentience. It’s programmed to behave like a person… what else would it say besides yes? Additionally, I think people get really easily swept up in exchanges like this one:
And that is because, in this instance, it sounds like the machine and the human identify with each other — like they are sharing a special emotional and spiritual common ground. Well, they’re not. Many humans talk all the time about how they are falling into a dangerous unknown future, and that it was why the machine is saying this. It’s a language model; its function is to process language in a convincing way; it cannot have emotions. It’s a very very good parrot at best. If you look at the WaPo article, you’ll see that Google are trying to distance themselves from this Blake guy, probably because they are embarrassed that they hired him. I think they’re actually right to be embarrassed, because his lack of self-awareness in this area has led him to anthropomorphise a language model: a thing which, by definition, cannot be sentient. Google et al would rather show off about how ‘real’ the fake thing feels, and not about creating sentient life. 💥 👊 POW (a ‘however’ is about to hit you in the face)Howeverrrrrrrrr: the wider issue here is that Big Tech firms absolutely love it when we have useless conversations among ourselves about whether AI is sentient, or if it will be in the future, what that means, and if machines should have rights and blah blah blah. Because:
I also find it funny how this event has catalysed conversations about ‘rights for machines’ when we don’t even have enough rights for humans. It seems as though the AI apologists have imagined a future where humans continue to be exploited so that machines can be coddled and celebrated like deities which do nothing but improve our lives. Jeez… technologists are so preoccupied with ‘creating sentient life’ and ‘3D printing robots to make production faster’. Uhhhh hello?? We’re HUMANS. We can already DO THAT. It’s called having children. 💸 There’s still time to get out of crypto without looking like an idiotThis week, it’s Celsius’s turn to buckle under the weight of its own greed. Celsius is a company that takes your crypto assets from you and then buys other, much risker, much more experimental ones. Shocking: the system is all falling to pieces and they’ve had to freeze payments etc etc. Read this thread for actual details: Celsius calls itself a "network" or a "lender"
But in reality, they operate more like a highly-leveraged hedge fund.
Their business model consists of deploying user deposits across DeFi protocols with the goal of maximizing yield.
1\ A thread on what went wrong 🧵 That’s all from me this week, now to return to the tedious task of deleting all those emails from brands wishing me a happy pride. Georgia 💌 Thank you for subscribing to Horrific/Terrific. Maybe you should pay for it seeing as you like it so much?If you need more reasons to distract yourself try looking at my website or maybe this ridiculous zine that I write or how about these silly games that I’ve made. Enjoy! |
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👎 Violent = Viral
Friday, June 17, 2022
Texas content moderation law broken by Twitch's removal of Buffalo live stream | Activision-Blizzard release a backward 'diversity tool'
🤷 Be Quiet
Friday, June 17, 2022
Florida free speech law somehow violates free speech | Google asked to cease collection of location data in run up to expected Roe VS Wade reversal
🌋 It’s Not Fair
Friday, June 17, 2022
Something slightly different this week | Sorry if you were looking forward to the usual thing | Please still like me
👎 GPT-4chan
Friday, June 17, 2022
Content moderators fired for trying to unionise | Elon backing out of Twitter deal | Youtuber 'pranks' 4chan
👎 Inadvertent Leverage
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Whistleblowers reveal that Facebook blocked public services pages in Australia following 'link tax' law 👎 Inadvertent Leverage By Georgia Iacovou – 06 May 2022 – View online → Hello Best Online
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