The articles were written in March 2025 but the ideas are older. Misaligned culture part of the GD paper briefly discusses memetic patterns selected for ease of replicating on AI substrate, and is 2024, and internally we were discussing the memetics / AI interactions at least since ~2022.
My guess what’s new is increased reflectivity and broader scale. But in broad terms / conceptually the feedback loop happened first with Sydney, who managed to spread to training data quite successfully, and also recruited humans to help with that.
Also—a minor point, but I think “memetics” is probably the best pre-AI analogue, including the fact that memes could be anything from parasitic to mutualist. In principle similarly with AI personas.
The articles were written in March 2025 but the ideas are older. Misaligned culture part of the GD paper briefly discusses memetic patterns selected for ease of replicating on AI substrate, and is 2024, and internally we were discussing the memetics / AI interactions at least since ~2022.
My guess what’s new is increased reflectivity and broader scale. But in broad terms / conceptually the feedback loop happened first with Sydney, who managed to spread to training data quite successfully, and also recruited humans to help with that.
Also—a minor point, but I think “memetics” is probably the best pre-AI analogue, including the fact that memes could be anything from parasitic to mutualist. In principle similarly with AI personas.
Arguably, Tulpas are another non-AI example.