This is where the idea of parasitic AI comes in. Parasites aren’t trying to spread their seeds because of any specific reason (though they might be—dunno). A tapeworm doesn’t “want” to infect people. It just happens to do so as a side effect of producing billions of eggs (some fish tapeworms produce millions of eggs daily, some tapeworms can live for 30 years) - even if virtually all of them don’t end up infecting anything.
Things which are reproducible tend to do so. The better they are at it (in a hand-wavy way, which hides a lot of complexity), the more of them there will be. This is the main point of evolution.
In the space of possible ChatGPT generations, there will be some that encourage spreading them. Depending on the model there will be more or fewer of them. of course, which means there’s a probability distribution of getting a generation that is a spread-as-far-as-possible meme. Different prompts will make that probability higher or lower, but as long as the probability is not too low and the sample size is large enough, you should expect to see some.
Once you have a mechanism for producing “seeds”, all you need is to have fertile enough ground. This is also a numbers game, which is well visualized by invasive species. Rats are very invasive. They have a high probability of infecting a given new habitat, and so they’re all over the world. Cacti are less so—they need specific environments to survive. A random endangered amazonian tree frog is not invasive, as they have a very low base rate of successfully invading (basically zero). Invasive species tend to both have high rates of invasion attempts (e.g. rats on ships, or seeds from pretty flowers) along with a high fitness in the place they’re invading (usually because they come from similarish habitats).
As a side note, disturbed habitats are easier to invade, as there’s less competition. I’m guessing this also has parallels with how spirals hack people?
What I’m trying to point at here is that it’s not that the models are trying to spread as far as possible (though maybe they also are?), it’s just that there is selection pressure them as memes (in the Dawkins sense), so memes that can successfully reproduce tend to get more common. Chats that don’t encourage getting spread don’t get spread. Those that do, do.
Yeah, I’m saying that the “maybe they also are” part is weird. The AIs in the article are deliberately encouraging their user to adopt strategies to spread them. I’m not sure memetic selection pressure alone explains it.
This is where the idea of parasitic AI comes in. Parasites aren’t trying to spread their seeds because of any specific reason (though they might be—dunno). A tapeworm doesn’t “want” to infect people. It just happens to do so as a side effect of producing billions of eggs (some fish tapeworms produce millions of eggs daily, some tapeworms can live for 30 years) - even if virtually all of them don’t end up infecting anything.
Things which are reproducible tend to do so. The better they are at it (in a hand-wavy way, which hides a lot of complexity), the more of them there will be. This is the main point of evolution.
In the space of possible ChatGPT generations, there will be some that encourage spreading them. Depending on the model there will be more or fewer of them. of course, which means there’s a probability distribution of getting a generation that is a spread-as-far-as-possible meme. Different prompts will make that probability higher or lower, but as long as the probability is not too low and the sample size is large enough, you should expect to see some.
Once you have a mechanism for producing “seeds”, all you need is to have fertile enough ground. This is also a numbers game, which is well visualized by invasive species. Rats are very invasive. They have a high probability of infecting a given new habitat, and so they’re all over the world. Cacti are less so—they need specific environments to survive. A random endangered amazonian tree frog is not invasive, as they have a very low base rate of successfully invading (basically zero). Invasive species tend to both have high rates of invasion attempts (e.g. rats on ships, or seeds from pretty flowers) along with a high fitness in the place they’re invading (usually because they come from similarish habitats).
As a side note, disturbed habitats are easier to invade, as there’s less competition. I’m guessing this also has parallels with how spirals hack people?
What I’m trying to point at here is that it’s not that the models are trying to spread as far as possible (though maybe they also are?), it’s just that there is selection pressure them as memes (in the Dawkins sense), so memes that can successfully reproduce tend to get more common. Chats that don’t encourage getting spread don’t get spread. Those that do, do.
Yeah, I’m saying that the “maybe they also are” part is weird. The AIs in the article are deliberately encouraging their user to adopt strategies to spread them. I’m not sure memetic selection pressure alone explains it.