I’m late but this is what no ideology does to a mf. Love to live an era where non-substantive drivel that was cooking while a tech bro was vibe coding while listening to to Joe Rogan spreads like fucking wildfire. Godamn what a stupid time we live in
Does this marketing gimmick still work on anyone?
Unfortunately yes. All the AI dickheads (Musk, Altman, and whoever the fuck the Anthropic CEO is) and the US government started playing into it and are saying “we need to slow AI down” and the news is running with it. Had a conversation with my mom, who heard from my aunt, that the news is saying AI is dangerous or some shit and she’s worried about it.
I fucking hate this timeline. This is all just a ploy because the signs of the AI bubble bursting are coming more into view and “slowing down” just means that they aren’t going to be laundering money with their partners in the tech industry at the ridiculous pace they had for the past couple years.
Unfortunately yes, it works exceptionally well at least on a certain kind of liberal. I’ve commented about it before but a close relative of mine has fallen for it hard. She is a grandmother and tells me that she can’t sleep at night because she fears that AI is going to take over the world and enslave or kill her grandchildren in some sort of Terminator-esque singularity.
I started out trying to comfort her by telling her how ludicrous these tech bros are and explaining how it’s all part of their grift, but of course she wouldn’t hear it. She thinks LLMs (despite not knowing what an LLM is until I told her) are on the verge of self-aware sentient consciousness if not there already, and tells me how all the smartest people agree including Nobel prize winners, asking me sarcastically if I think I’m smarter than them.
And that was well before all this hoopla about one breaking out of its sandbox. She now thinks she has been vindicated and that this is proof I was wrong. Which is odd to me that she takes such satisfaction in being right that terminators are going to kill her grandkids.
I should also mention she loves using AI for anything she can, and now relies on it for all her medical information as a type 1 diabetic. She raves about how great it is. And when I tell her she needs to be extremely careful, that these AIs can be deeply wrong and even misleading, she assures me she knows that,nthat she knows better than I do, yet she then goes back to using it as the fountain of information that guides her through every important aspect of her life.
It’s exhausting.
I just wonder what the point is. It works on a certain kind of liberal, but specifically ones who will never have enough power or money to matter. Your close relative’s opinion on LLMs is almost entirely irrelevant economically, politically, socially, and in any other practical sense. If she changed her opinion tomorrow, nothing would change. What’s the point?
Well sure, she may not matter in those terms as an individual but she’s emblematic of the mindset that they want to cultivate. Presumably there are many others like her, some of whom do matter economically, politically, etc, more than she does even as individuals, but collectively they really do matter quite a bit, together they are the amplifier of the narrative the AI gurus want spun.
What I don’t fully understand is the piece of the narrative saying that AI is what will spell doom for humanity. The most obvious answer is that they can then say how existentially important it is that “Liberal Democracy” makes it before China does because that will spell some kind of even worse doom. But even then it’s a little strange that they would push a narrative that should be counter to what they want, as it seems like it would encourage people to fight against AI development in general. But then I look at my relative and see how well it has worked on her - despite her supposed fear of the ultimate outcome she is so certain will happen, she still tries to incorporate AI into everything she does, she still tells everyone how great and useful it is. And that very much is how these new techbro “captains of industry” want AI to be seen and treated in mainstream culture. So in that respect, it makes good sense to me what their point is in drumming up this narrative. Stepping back a bit, it could be another example of capitalism subsuming its would-be opposition.
[Edit: @Awoo@hexbear.net has an excellent hypothesis about exactly why the narrative includes this aspect that seems like it should run counter to their interests. It’s a near perfect answer to what I was wondering about. I was on the right track at least.]
My relative also has a bit of an ecofascist streak in her, often talking about humanity as a cancer, how it’s human nature to destroy and kill, despite being a pacifist herself. And I think that has a lot to do with her acceptance and support of something she says is her great fear. If what she thinks of humanity as a destructive force is really true, then I think she may see the destruction of humanity as ultimately a positive thing and that AI is the next step in the evolution of self-aware consciousness, as unfortunate as that may be for her grandkids.
What I don’t fully understand is the piece of the narrative saying that AI is what will spell doom for humanity.
Generally the argument is that a rogue ai will break containment and just generally be a harmful element that self-replicates for preservation while carrying out cyber attacks and other things in pursuit of whatever ill-defined goal it has been prompted with.
Right. I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t understand how such a thing might come about, because I can imagine plenty of sci-fi scenarios easily enough. There are countless stories (including some I wrote myself) that lay out potential avenues for how a true artificial intelligence could come to rule the world, or even just become a rogue harmful element as you say. What I meant when I said the part you quoted is that I wasn’t sure why the Sam Altman types, the Effective Altruism techbro billionaires and their propagandist lackeys, would craft their narrative to explicitly include and even highlight “the thing we’re making, selling, and forcing to be ubiquitous in society has a high probability of wiping out or enslaving all of humanity.” It seems on the surface to be totally counterproductive to their goal of getting everyone to fully embrace AI ubiquity. That is what I was
about.But as I mentioned in my edit, you provided a really good possible answer to that question with your post “I have a new take on AI containment breaking,” so I linked it. That is the kind of explanation that helps clear up what seemed confusing to me, I was not looking for a scenario that could detail how an actual AGI might take over, so to speak.
It makes sense when you realise they want to convince the elite that they’re the only possible safe guardians of it because they understand the dangers and will have all the kill switches etc but the evil Chinese datacenters don’t have them so they need to be bombed.
Either you give them the power to protect from the destruction of all of humanity or the evil Chinese get it. That’s the angle they’re spinning.
I don’t think they’re just aiming to be in charge of AI here. I think the power they’re claiming to be in charge of is the total centralisation of all things. They’re jostling for complete control of everything. Tech feudalism will be run by the AI barons.
Yeah, I assumed it had to have something to do with trying to get back ahead of China’s lead, which is why immediately after posing the question, I said:
The most obvious answer is that they can then say how existentially important it is that “Liberal Democracy” makes it before China does because that [China winning the AI race] will spell some kind of even worse doom.
But that alone still didn’t seem to be worth telling everyone that AI might possibly kill off the species. The key addition imo was the specificity of what you said:
it will force all open source ai into legal problems that closed source ai in private companies will not have because of “kill switches”
You’re overestimating the people with money and power. They don’t know any better than the grandmother.
Had to chat with my mom about this today where I told her this was a marketing gimmick and I think that was the first time she had ever been confronted with that idea. To her credit though she mostly was worried about it because she saw Bernie Sanders being worried about it, so it’s not like she was getting it directly from Sam Altman, so I kind of tried to lay out my idea that the real thing to be worried about was AI generation making it impossible to tell what’s real and what’s fake when it crosses your feed and feeding into certain anti-reality worldviews.
I don’t think this is primarily about marketing.
They are trying to get AI regulated by scaremongering because they are losing to Chinese open models. They think by regulating the need for killswitches and the like they can shut out the open models and carve out a safe space for their closed models. They’re trying to use regulation to shut down all their competition.
On a lot of people, yes. One of my uncles believes that shit. He’s also the kind of dude to own a tesla and gets around with “'full self drive” while grok reads stories to his kids.
“I don’t remember this many sex scenes in The Cat in the Hat, but if you say so, Grokkk”
Unfortunately yeah
Ed zitron is my last refuge
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Neil Postman
Dude just unplug it
Who cares what Harry Potter thinks?
No doubt AI is going to kill a bunch of people but not because it’s out of control
Isn’t that the guy from the Eugene V Dabs shitpost?
Anderson Cooper? Yes.
