"To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." - Aldous Huxley, 1933

OK I may be crazy but I just bought flights and tickets to Vibecamp.

As far as anyone can tell, this was fiction.

The Popehat trajectory has been something to watch

I'm reminded of Scott Alexander's short story where AI took over but the resistance leveraged the AI's inability to think about onions due to the Onion Futures Act.

In a desperate attempt to teach him his job, someone got Trump to watch The West Wing, and he's got partway through the third episode.

Fable: "write me a rhyming poem with six four line stanzas, each stanza removes another vowel. the first has no u, the second no u or i, etc."

Can you breathe at all while deep throating? Full deep throating, with the head of the penis past the back of your mouth and into your throat.

The @AISecurityInst is hiring for a Director and for a Chief Research Officer. AISI is a remarkable organisation: doing globally important work, with a world-class team, in the heart of government. These are some of the highest impact jobs in AI security anywhere. Do consider applying and sharing widely.

If a historian on the right abused evidence in this way, they'd face career ruination. When Boston University's Quinn Slobodian does it, he gets a Guggenheim fellowship, book awards, and a Hewlett Foundation grant. Academia's rot runs far deeper than a simple crisis of rigor.

Given enough GPUs, all bugs are shallow.

I think I'd rather steal from the elderly than make my money this way

LessOnline? Actually it's "fewer" (Stickers by @NoahTopper)

No, Keir Starmer will announce mandatory ID checks for all social media in the next two weeks. Let’s not be naive about what this is really about. They want to be able to track down anons and send the cops round.

Our highest and most urgent national priority should be AI safeguards. The risks of AI weapons, pathogens, mass unemployment, surveillance, and even extinction must not continue to be largely ignored.

Sad to see Ted Chiang resorting to such bad arguments in this piece. He confidently claims Claude has no inner experience. But he has to use a lot of dodgy philosophy and poor reasoning to get there: 1. We can't take deflationary mechanistic descriptions of how AI calculations are performed to show that AI isn't conscious. Otherwise we could argue that 'humans are just neurones transmitting signals one after another' and thereby conclude humans can't be conscious. But that would be wrong for us. And the same logic could be wrong for LLMs. 2. That LLMs are asked to play characters, and effectively are always playing characters, doesn't mean they aren't conscious. It's true a human playing the role of Caesar doesn't have Caesar's experience of things. But they still experience something (that of being a person pretending to be Caesar). The same could be true of Claude. (Arguably it's also true that humans are always playing characters to some extent and don't have a completely fixed nature, but that has no bearing on our own subjective experience.) 3. Chiang says "an LLM is a machine that generates only one word at a time". This conflates two things: they output one word at a time, and they only think about one word at a time (without planning ahead or looking back). The first is true of AI but equally true of humans. While the latter we know is a false description of how AIs think – we can see from how AIs compose poetry that they plan out rhymes a at least one line ahead. 4. He argues that because it's implausible that basic autocomplete on your phone is conscious, it's similarly implausible that Claude is conscious. Using the same logic we could say that if we feel confident a fruit-fly isn't conscious we can be confident a human being can't be either. A human brain and fruit-fly brain share some information transmission and processing mechanisms in common. But humans do it much more, and do it differently. And those differences may be what makes the difference. Similarly the many types of internal information processing that occur in Claude's weights but not in autocorrect may be exactly the things that get you subjective experience. 5. Chiang confidently claims you need a body to have subjective experience without much argument. He may turn out to be right but the claim is speculative and contested. 6. Chiang leans on the idea that moral reasoning is necessarily subjective/emotional with very little argument, while ignoring competing theories like rationalism. He may be right but moral sentimentalism is a highly contested position that can't simply be assumed. 7. He argues that it would be impossible to convince him that a video of an astronaut around Alpha Centauri was real, because of the surrounding contextual understanding. And similarly no AI output could convince him that Claude is conscious. But we can dismiss the first video as almost certainly fake because we mechanistically understand space travel and physics well enough to know a human couldn't have gotten there in time for it to be real (unless our model of the world were very wrong, which we think is much less probable than a fake video which would be entirely unsurprising). But by contrast we don't mechanistically understand how subjective experience arises. So we simply can't make the same highly confident move of interpretation there. (It's actually the archetypal thing in the universe we perhaps understand least well!) That said, AI outputs barely move my estimate of AI consciousness because they could indeed have been generated by an unconscious process (or not, we just don't know). 8. He argues that "Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript." This is misguided because A. Microsoft Word as a program replicates much less of what humans are functionally capable of than Claude so the argument by functional analogy is basically not present there. B. Files of text don't have any computations going on in or as part of them, even when 'open' in a text editor. They are static. So they have even less in common with what appears distinctive about the human brain, which is constant calculation. So the case by mechanistic or functional similarity is weaker still. Not to mention that neural nets have more in common with the architecture of the human brain than ordinary computer programs, and are grown organically in a way normal software is not. Common sense says says Claude has more in common with a human brain than Microsoft Word or a text file. Common sense is right. So the prima facie case for Claude being conscious is naturally stronger (even if you think it's still weak in absolute terms). ——— I agree with Chiang that looking at the text outputs of LLMs alone won't be enough to make us confident they are conscious. We will need to look at how they work, figure out more about how humans and other animals work, and ideally solve the hard problem of consciousness (!). But none of that licenses us to dismiss out of hand the possibility that LLMs do have subjective experience.

Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor. It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. anthropic.com/institute/recu…

Ok I gotta be honest I thought the people accusing this of being a false flag were being silly. OpenAI has done some bad things, but surely they would not make fake twitter accounts impersonating their opposition and having those accounts post calls for violence. ...My mistake.

Saving this for next time somebody posts that dumbass cartoon claiming that the left has drastically moved left since 2008 while the right has stayed the same (LOL). This kind of psychotic nativism from a major-party politician would have been unthinkable even in 2020.

Whoa this AI stuff is moving pretty fast... we should probably assemble a committee to collect public comment for a draft of an interim report to recommend the funding of an advisory body to draft preliminary guidelines for a framework to- 📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎

Politicians everywhere breathed a sigh of relief today. Finally, they can safely oppose OpenAI knowing that Greg Brockman will try to destroy their careers in a strictly personal capacity.