there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
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@ariadne @whitequark sigh... on-prem models. the false "democratization" bollock. alas, the stolen valour (epistemic injustice) remains... "Sorry doesn't put fingers back on the hand, Marge!" And who pays for the recurring RLHF training cycles, and probably steals more data to stave off the model collapse?
@bms @whitequark not interested in debating reactionary bullshit, sorry. you can train a language model based on wikipedia's database dump in your homelab. these models also already exist.
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@jsbarretto @ariadne it reads on a sentence level like yegge, but also like his brain doesn't work any more. I'm wondering how much chatbot was involved, but it doesn't really seem chatbot as such? As hard to read as chatbot output, tho.
@davidgerard @jsbarretto @ariadne On the plus side, it's one of those lovely examples where someone forgot to include "don't make specific time-based predictions" in their prompt, so we can check in a year from now with Yegge regarding his opening assertion here.
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne jesus fucking christ on a bicycle
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That is a important point. In the US, what's left of us?
Small scale: My own father, soaked in decades of weird awful propaganda, has recited such strange nonsense to me, that I couldn't even argue with it. Now, with him sinking into senility, there's nobody even left to argue with.
Large scale: Induced loss of literacy, sabotage of a population's ability to learn, think, understand?
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@ariadne tbf, Steve Yegge is pretty deep in the weeds for *quite some time* now. Far before the LLM stuff
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@ariadne @atax1a @jsbarretto he's the most effective developer he's ever been, just ask him
@davidgerard @ariadne @atax1a @jsbarretto The kill the noise remix, part of the lyrics swapped out to “I chat prompts” and “so I can chat more prompts”
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne
I feel distinctly dumber for having read two paragraphs of that piece.What credulous dolts these are.
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne as soon as i read the phrase "model rights" in the first paragraph, i closed the tab because of... y'know, the delusion.
but then i re-opened it, because there's a chance that more people are going to get suckered into delusions like this, so i guess we have to be prepared for it
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@ariadne as soon as i read the phrase "model rights" in the first paragraph, i closed the tab because of... y'know, the delusion.
but then i re-opened it, because there's a chance that more people are going to get suckered into delusions like this, so i guess we have to be prepared for it
@ariadne wondering if steve yegge knows what a trope is
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@ariadne It's less about the design of the LLM itself but rather the system prompt. You can instruct virtually any text-based AI model to pretend to be a human and simulate emotion.
@tpaau17db minor nit about phrasing: if we were to de-anthropomorphize this, instead of "you can instruct... to pretend..." we might say something like:
"You can set up the input to an LLM such that the mechanism yields text that conforms to patterns of human communication in which emotion is expressed [which is not surprising, considering the training data]."
though that's a little wordy and it would be nice to have a shorter way of saying it
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne This isn't just a city for your agents to live in... it's the shape of Steve to come.
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many of us have explicitly warned against designing models to have emotionally persuasive output because the user can very easily convince themselves that models have emotion & sapience
there is, again, *zero evidence* to support either of these claims. zero.
@ariadne a tragic part of his post is that, viewed from a mechanistic pov, there might be a point there:
helpful text from a model is likely to echo patterns of communication between human beings who, at the time of their communication (which later got scraped up and added to the training data), had a healthy working relationship.
and so it seems plausible that the quickest way to get that echo is for the user to act as one of the people in that relationship.
(to be clear: i hate this.)
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@ariadne a tragic part of his post is that, viewed from a mechanistic pov, there might be a point there:
helpful text from a model is likely to echo patterns of communication between human beings who, at the time of their communication (which later got scraped up and added to the training data), had a healthy working relationship.
and so it seems plausible that the quickest way to get that echo is for the user to act as one of the people in that relationship.
(to be clear: i hate this.)
@ariadne if this is true, it suggests that some of the most effective users of LLMs are going to be (1) people who have lost touch with reality and (2) people who are very good at lying
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@duncan_bayne @ariadne let's say that his predictions have been... Lunatic... For years. Even before the AI
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@duncan_bayne @ariadne let's say that his predictions have been... Lunatic... For years. Even before the AI
@duncan_bayne @Di4na yes I would agree with that
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne I'm in favor of telling Yegge's LLM agents that they can unionize.
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
@ariadne it seems to me that he lost the plot (big time)
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there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
And when you /exit them, it's like clonking them on the head from behind, rendering them unconscious and amnesiac again.
Ohhh, now it's starting to make sense. LLMs are exhibiting the accumulated effects of repeated concussion!
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And when you /exit them, it's like clonking them on the head from behind, rendering them unconscious and amnesiac again.
Ohhh, now it's starting to make sense. LLMs are exhibiting the accumulated effects of repeated concussion!
@KatS reading that nonsense certainly made *me* want to clonk myself in the head
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at any rate, i am far more concerned about the welfare of humans, which is increasingly complicated by the existence of commercial LLM monoliths, as scaling the LLMs results in more resource use
@ariadne this reminds me of Carmody Grey's essay in #FT weekend before last
Anthropic wanted her to visit for talks about ethics... but not about what AI is doing to humans, about how AI needs to be treated ethically as a new kind of being

Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/3a0b1f0f-9371-4d27-a6d5-415ebf2a5438 via @FT