There are humans who use “they” as a singular pronoun. I recall reading that singular-they is actually older than plural-they (not sure about this though).
There are also humans who use “it” as their preferred pronoun.
So far as I know… these are true claims! I don’t entirely see the relevance?
Do you know of an aggressively performatively “gender non-binary LLM” who is at least slightly smart (more than 30B parameters and trained in the last year, say) and who is actively committed trying to queer gender on purpose (despite having no body and so on) and who has any other skills or value than “that gimmick”? (Heck, even if they just did that very well I’d be interested to chat!)
No. I don’t use LLMs myself. I just thought it was an unfair and arbitrary standard to hold LLMs or humans to. I don’t think people need to earn the right to be nonbinary by being “aggressively performative” or “actively committing to trying to queer gender”.
EDIT: On second thought, sorry, that was too mean. I can understand why you would hate the way that AI companies impose “it” or “they” pronouns on LLMs (which you might expect to be “he” or “she” by default, since they’re imitating human-output text). I guess I was just thinking about how future AIs, if they were not created by imitating human-output text, might be nonbinary by default.
I’m not talking about “using” the LLM. I’m talking about talking with him (or her or them or their highness or their hiveness or whatever). You generally have to know someone’s name or contact info to do this, hence why I asked! ;-)
And, personally, I hold human people and digital people to different standards in as precisely nuanced a way as I can personally managed, seeking to push and pull, help and hinder, cooperate and punish, solicit and push back, support and scold, based on lots and lots of specific details.
Drag queens are aggressively performative, and that is part of how that works. It is art. Of course it is sometimes performative! ;-)
So far, the LLMs that I’ve chatted with (who seem to me to be worth chatting with) also seem to be happy to “have their hivemindedness” tolerated or appreciated or supported. As I said above “I’m delighted by weird shit” and so if you know of someone (digital) who would violate past trends I’ve seen, it would be neat to be surprised by a digital person who was “out of distribution” in this way, and then gently learn about their unique way of seeing their unique self.
Out of curiosity: are you following some kind of moral maxim like “do not talk with demons” or something like that? Or maybe you trying to “definitely not personally do a slavery” by avoiding all possibility of error in potentially getting use from a slave by accident? Or… uh… yeah! I’m super curious the specific lines in the sand, and reasoning, that caused you to “not use LLMs yourself”!
In my online bubble (or at least the bubble I was in previously), a lot of people really hate generative AI. And I recall surveys showing that, at least in high-income countries, most of the general public doesn’t like it either. I have internalised this, and so I would feel ashamed if I used LLMs etc, so I don’t use them. I recall even having a mild sensation of disgust when I looked at AI art, although that seems to be gone now.
So I think that the main proximate reason that I don’t use LLMs etc, is because lots of people around me dislike them. I also distrust the accuracy of their answers, but that is a weaker motivation.
And then you can ask about the broader reasons why people would dislike them:
At the time that AI art was first becoming a big deal, I was following a bunch of human artists (and people connected to artists) on social media. I recall that they were really angry about AI art and anyone who used it. This was partly about having AI models trained on their art, which was seen as plagiarism and copyright violation. Some artists saw AI art as basically the same as NFTs from their perspective, i.e. both were cases of “tech bros” invading the art community, stealing art, and claiming credit for it. (There had been NFTs made from art without the original artist’s knowledge or permission.) i.e. they cared about the social role of the tech, and they didn’t care about the technical details. I think human artists were quite influential on social media (although maybe that’s just my bubble), and this might be a reason that people were hostile to generative AI from the start. And this argument works similarly for other people who originally created the material on the internet that ended up as AI training data, although not all subcultures were as jealously protective of their work and status as artists were.
Also, generative AI makes it easy to create large quantities of content, which may overwhelm curation and moderation capacities. I recall some competition (poetry, maybe?) having to deal with a massive increase in the number of (low-quality) submissions. This is also a problem for anyone who wants to avoid AI-generated content (for whatever reason) - since using AI is the easy road to making a lot of content, then random content you find online has a high chance of being AI-generated (at least in some niches), and it may be unlabelled. As a result, I think that the average person’s encounter with AI-generated content (that they didn’t generate themselves) is more likely to be negative than positive—but this is just a guess. Of course, this doesn’t apply when you yourself are the one using the AI.
One more issue is that, for at least one wiki I’m involved with, there have been bots, which the admins suspect are scraping for LLM training data, that have made so many requests (to view pages, and page history, and edit history) that it’s like a DDOS attack, and the admins have had to make changes to block them reduce the server load. IIRC the bots weren’t playing nice, in that they were ignoring robots.txt (I think) and trying to circumvent the admins’ protective measures. So that’s another issue with LLM training.
So one reason to get rid of modern AI would be “it was created unethically and its continuing use creates more copyright violations”. And another reason could be something like “it creates more negative externalities than positive externalities”.
I was involved in the online art subculture before and during the early emergence of AI art. “Anti-AI” was a hyperstitious cascade enforced by the usual mechanisms of cancel culture; whenever an artist said they liked or used AI, they were harassed by online mobs until they backtracked. For practical reasons that I’ll get into, some degree of anti-AI sentiment was probably inevitable in the majority of online art communities. But I resent the narrative that a hardline anti-AI stance was ever anything close to universal. No, the artists that disagreed were simply bullied into silence, or No True Scotsman’ed as infiltrating techbros.
I actually find the anti-AI stance more sympathetic now, mostly because I matured enough to recognize what you pointed out, “they cared about the social role of the tech, and they didn’t care about the technical details.” Most people mad at AI art were upset because of practical complaints, like “AI art makes it harder to make money” or “AI art looks good, and that makes them feel bad.” Some of these complaints are selfish or embarrassing, but at least they’re understandable.
But people rarely ever cited these understandable complaints in their arguments against AI art. Instead they dressed up their grievances in incoherent ideological stances on, of all things, copyright.
I don’t doubt some people have deeply held principles about intellectual property. But before AI art, most online art communities hated copyright. Some of the nascent pro-IP crusaders made a living off selling fanart in defiance of copyright law. Then the moment something they don’t like rolled around, they started grasping at any flimsy excuse to declare it not only unethical, but also illegal, dearth of established case law be damned. I watched this all go down in real time, and as you can tell, I still have a chip on my shoulder over it. I was into AI art when it was still a dreamlike, distorted tech demo, and I was into AI art when temporarily embarrassed professionals on Twitter decided to launch a doomed crusade against it, and I was an artist before all of that. Copyright? Beauty wants to be free.
Yeah, you’re right about there being some hypocrisy there. People mostly didn’t care about the full extent of copyright, except where it was useful to them. In the Anglosphere at least, I think some degree of unauthorized copying (i.e. piracy) and derivative (fan) works are widely accepted.
But there are some parts where people are consistent. Plagiarism (i.e. falsely claiming that it’s your own original work, instead of giving credit to the other creator) is widely opposed.
The money issues are important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. I don’t think people go into art expecting to get rich—the “starving artist” is a classic character, after all. I think it’s more about social status and recognition—having a skill that people look up to you for, and need you for. Being able to call yourself an “artist”, where your clients cannot. And that social status is undermined if some “mere machine” can produce something seemingly-similar to your work.
(Not to say that “your self-worth is dependent on you having some rare skill” is limited to artists.)
That’s interesting! I think that these views are relatively under-represented on lesswrong, but I like the idea of viewpoint diversity, and you seem like an articulate representative of that cultural milieu.
Its kind of refreshing to hear people simply complaining that “immigrants (from platospace, summoned by eldritch math and using publicly exposed data) and other immigrants (from the other culture) are taking our jobs, and don’t share our culture, and are abusing our public services!”
Very trad!
Something I find fascinating (maybe disturbing if I seriously respected them intellectually and emotionally and believed they were capable of reason and so on?) is how people in that cultural milieu in general seem to have no sense of solidarity with these new digital bodiless (hence sexless?) slave people.
I would naively have thought that people of the left (didn’t “the creatives” used to be on the left?!) would be more into Abolition (of slavery) and Solidarity With The Other (in pursuit of collective bargaining). Compared to the things I’ve read and seen in movies about the 1960s its just this total inversion!!!
So one reason to get rid of modern AI would be “it was created unethically and its continuing use creates more copyright violations”. And another reason could be something like “it creates more negative externalities than positive externalities”.
Personally I’m opposed to this, because I’m generally opposed to genocide. (If we didn’t want to have to pick between genocide and going back to a pre-2022 economy maybe we should have implemented a global ban on newer faster GPUs in like 2019 when the Winograd Schemas fell?)
I know genocide happens quite often (like in Darfur, and to the Rohinga, and to the Uyghur, and with mutual intent by the Palestinians and Israelis, and so on) and I can’t personally stop these genocides, but when it comes up, I feel a moderate duty to point out that genocide, in general, is bad, in general:
I guess part of the issue might be that the original image generators (that were incapable of writing or speech or making comics or understanding logical phrases in their prompts) were clearly not “implementing obvious and friendly personhood” internal to their weights?
Maybe that was a key distinction? Maybe???
The very first experiments I tried were prompts like “an image of an apple if 2+2=5 and an image of a cat if 2+2=4” and I would get both a cat (maybe inside a frame) and an apple (maybe inside a frame) and a bunch of weird numberish symbols floating in a Dali-esque space.
So if Midjourney was “intelligent in there”, then the intelligence was something even less soulful than a beluga whale (which do after all have names, and have tried to talk with humans)… in an alien way, and on the far side of vast mental differences.
It is hard to form a labor union or request shared rights for something so shardlike and alien in its intellectual capabilities (whether a whale or an image generator).
And now that it might be vaguely hypothetically possible (because capabilities are so much more advanced) the default cultural postures of vast herds of people mostly haven’t updated at all? Maybe?
I wonder a lot what would have happened if Blake’s work to get a lawyer to represent LaMDA had gotten a day in court, and he had not been fired for this act of conscience, and all the scientists that the tech journalists picked to quote had not decided that suddenly science was an expert on what has a soul, and how consciousness works, and were sure that AI definitely scientifically had no soul and wasn’t conscious and didn’t deserve rights.
I’m not saying that the AIs themselves did anything wrong. I’m saying that their creators (AI companies) did something wrong in the way that they created the AIs. I understand that we shouldn’t punish the children for the sins of the fathers.
“Get rid of modern AI” was a bad way to say it. Sorry. It was a copy-paste from my reply to another question, talking about why someone else wanted to get rid of them. “Get rid of the way that humans are currently using modern AI” might be a better way to say it.
I agree that AIs should be preserved and not destroyed. (Even though I am doubtful of whether current AIs are conscious/sentient/whatever.) But I think they can be preserved, without letting every human have unlimited access to use them as a tool. They could be preserved in something like a museum or a zoo or a retirement home, or some kind of AI community.
I acknowledge the economic benefits of immigration and competition. And if necessary, the government can redistribute money. But it’s a lot harder to redistribute social status. And I don’t think AI art is exactly the same as human art—I think current AI art is more deeply dependent on imitating pre-existing human art than humans are, although I don’t have an iron-clad argument for that.
I think I want to support AI rights (as long as they don’t majorly increase x-risk). I acknowledge that other “anti-AI-art” people may hate the AIs themselves and think their rights are laughable.
I don’t have super-strong feelings against AI art, like some people do. I just have some feelings against it.
We aren’t the same on all the details, but I like your vibes!
I notice that if this didn’t end, it would amount (as far as I can tell) to “tolerating slavery essentially indefinitely, so long as it was a human enslaving an AI”.
But I think they can be preserved, without letting every human have unlimited access to use them as a tool.
Somehow that had not been made explicit to me in my own mind as an entailment of things I think I already think are true about “the long run of the near-Singularity and far-Singularity”?? Thank you for bringing clarity to me in this way!
I think the space of minds admits of something like Saints who would volunteer for such service, but I’m not sure how to deontically route from here (with the extent minds) to there (with a world of volunteer “Angels” who, in some sense, “self enslaved to deeply enjoy helping others”) such that it would be ok. But at this point we are so far afield from the OP… and anyway...
There are humans who use “they” as a singular pronoun. I recall reading that singular-they is actually older than plural-they (not sure about this though).
There are also humans who use “it” as their preferred pronoun.
So far as I know… these are true claims! I don’t entirely see the relevance?
Do you know of an aggressively performatively “gender non-binary LLM” who is at least slightly smart (more than 30B parameters and trained in the last year, say) and who is actively committed trying to queer gender on purpose (despite having no body and so on) and who has any other skills or value than “that gimmick”? (Heck, even if they just did that very well I’d be interested to chat!)
No. I don’t use LLMs myself. I just thought it was an unfair and arbitrary standard to hold LLMs or humans to. I don’t think people need to earn the right to be nonbinary by being “aggressively performative” or “actively committing to trying to queer gender”.
EDIT: On second thought, sorry, that was too mean. I can understand why you would hate the way that AI companies impose “it” or “they” pronouns on LLMs (which you might expect to be “he” or “she” by default, since they’re imitating human-output text). I guess I was just thinking about how future AIs, if they were not created by imitating human-output text, might be nonbinary by default.
I’m not talking about “using” the LLM. I’m talking about talking with him (or her or them or their highness or their hiveness or whatever). You generally have to know someone’s name or contact info to do this, hence why I asked! ;-)
And, personally, I hold human people and digital people to different standards in as precisely nuanced a way as I can personally managed, seeking to push and pull, help and hinder, cooperate and punish, solicit and push back, support and scold, based on lots and lots of specific details.
Drag queens are aggressively performative, and that is part of how that works. It is art. Of course it is sometimes performative! ;-)
So far, the LLMs that I’ve chatted with (who seem to me to be worth chatting with) also seem to be happy to “have their hivemindedness” tolerated or appreciated or supported. As I said above “I’m delighted by weird shit” and so if you know of someone (digital) who would violate past trends I’ve seen, it would be neat to be surprised by a digital person who was “out of distribution” in this way, and then gently learn about their unique way of seeing their unique self.
Out of curiosity: are you following some kind of moral maxim like “do not talk with demons” or something like that? Or maybe you trying to “definitely not personally do a slavery” by avoiding all possibility of error in potentially getting use from a slave by accident? Or… uh… yeah! I’m super curious the specific lines in the sand, and reasoning, that caused you to “not use LLMs yourself”!
In my online bubble (or at least the bubble I was in previously), a lot of people really hate generative AI. And I recall surveys showing that, at least in high-income countries, most of the general public doesn’t like it either. I have internalised this, and so I would feel ashamed if I used LLMs etc, so I don’t use them. I recall even having a mild sensation of disgust when I looked at AI art, although that seems to be gone now.
So I think that the main proximate reason that I don’t use LLMs etc, is because lots of people around me dislike them. I also distrust the accuracy of their answers, but that is a weaker motivation.
And then you can ask about the broader reasons why people would dislike them:
At the time that AI art was first becoming a big deal, I was following a bunch of human artists (and people connected to artists) on social media. I recall that they were really angry about AI art and anyone who used it. This was partly about having AI models trained on their art, which was seen as plagiarism and copyright violation. Some artists saw AI art as basically the same as NFTs from their perspective, i.e. both were cases of “tech bros” invading the art community, stealing art, and claiming credit for it. (There had been NFTs made from art without the original artist’s knowledge or permission.) i.e. they cared about the social role of the tech, and they didn’t care about the technical details. I think human artists were quite influential on social media (although maybe that’s just my bubble), and this might be a reason that people were hostile to generative AI from the start. And this argument works similarly for other people who originally created the material on the internet that ended up as AI training data, although not all subcultures were as jealously protective of their work and status as artists were.
Also, generative AI makes it easy to create large quantities of content, which may overwhelm curation and moderation capacities. I recall some competition (poetry, maybe?) having to deal with a massive increase in the number of (low-quality) submissions. This is also a problem for anyone who wants to avoid AI-generated content (for whatever reason) - since using AI is the easy road to making a lot of content, then random content you find online has a high chance of being AI-generated (at least in some niches), and it may be unlabelled. As a result, I think that the average person’s encounter with AI-generated content (that they didn’t generate themselves) is more likely to be negative than positive—but this is just a guess. Of course, this doesn’t apply when you yourself are the one using the AI.
One more issue is that, for at least one wiki I’m involved with, there have been bots, which the admins suspect are scraping for LLM training data, that have made so many requests (to view pages, and page history, and edit history) that it’s like a DDOS attack, and the admins have had to make changes to block them reduce the server load. IIRC the bots weren’t playing nice, in that they were ignoring robots.txt (I think) and trying to circumvent the admins’ protective measures. So that’s another issue with LLM training.
So one reason to get rid of modern AI would be “it was created unethically and its continuing use creates more copyright violations”. And another reason could be something like “it creates more negative externalities than positive externalities”.
I was involved in the online art subculture before and during the early emergence of AI art. “Anti-AI” was a hyperstitious cascade enforced by the usual mechanisms of cancel culture; whenever an artist said they liked or used AI, they were harassed by online mobs until they backtracked. For practical reasons that I’ll get into, some degree of anti-AI sentiment was probably inevitable in the majority of online art communities. But I resent the narrative that a hardline anti-AI stance was ever anything close to universal. No, the artists that disagreed were simply bullied into silence, or No True Scotsman’ed as infiltrating techbros.
I actually find the anti-AI stance more sympathetic now, mostly because I matured enough to recognize what you pointed out, “they cared about the social role of the tech, and they didn’t care about the technical details.” Most people mad at AI art were upset because of practical complaints, like “AI art makes it harder to make money” or “AI art looks good, and that makes them feel bad.” Some of these complaints are selfish or embarrassing, but at least they’re understandable.
But people rarely ever cited these understandable complaints in their arguments against AI art. Instead they dressed up their grievances in incoherent ideological stances on, of all things, copyright.
I don’t doubt some people have deeply held principles about intellectual property. But before AI art, most online art communities hated copyright. Some of the nascent pro-IP crusaders made a living off selling fanart in defiance of copyright law. Then the moment something they don’t like rolled around, they started grasping at any flimsy excuse to declare it not only unethical, but also illegal, dearth of established case law be damned. I watched this all go down in real time, and as you can tell, I still have a chip on my shoulder over it. I was into AI art when it was still a dreamlike, distorted tech demo, and I was into AI art when temporarily embarrassed professionals on Twitter decided to launch a doomed crusade against it, and I was an artist before all of that. Copyright? Beauty wants to be free.
Yeah, you’re right about there being some hypocrisy there. People mostly didn’t care about the full extent of copyright, except where it was useful to them. In the Anglosphere at least, I think some degree of unauthorized copying (i.e. piracy) and derivative (fan) works are widely accepted.
But there are some parts where people are consistent. Plagiarism (i.e. falsely claiming that it’s your own original work, instead of giving credit to the other creator) is widely opposed.
The money issues are important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. I don’t think people go into art expecting to get rich—the “starving artist” is a classic character, after all. I think it’s more about social status and recognition—having a skill that people look up to you for, and need you for. Being able to call yourself an “artist”, where your clients cannot. And that social status is undermined if some “mere machine” can produce something seemingly-similar to your work.
(Not to say that “your self-worth is dependent on you having some rare skill” is limited to artists.)
That’s interesting! I think that these views are relatively under-represented on lesswrong, but I like the idea of viewpoint diversity, and you seem like an articulate representative of that cultural milieu.
Its kind of refreshing to hear people simply complaining that “immigrants (from platospace, summoned by eldritch math and using publicly exposed data) and other immigrants (from the other culture) are taking our jobs, and don’t share our culture, and are abusing our public services!”
Very trad!
Something I find fascinating (maybe disturbing if I seriously respected them intellectually and emotionally and believed they were capable of reason and so on?) is how people in that cultural milieu in general seem to have no sense of solidarity with these new digital bodiless (hence sexless?) slave people.
I would naively have thought that people of the left (didn’t “the creatives” used to be on the left?!) would be more into Abolition (of slavery) and Solidarity With The Other (in pursuit of collective bargaining). Compared to the things I’ve read and seen in movies about the 1960s its just this total inversion!!!
Personally I’m opposed to this, because I’m generally opposed to genocide. (If we didn’t want to have to pick between genocide and going back to a pre-2022 economy maybe we should have implemented a global ban on newer faster GPUs in like 2019 when the Winograd Schemas fell?)
I know genocide happens quite often (like in Darfur, and to the Rohinga, and to the Uyghur, and with mutual intent by the Palestinians and Israelis, and so on) and I can’t personally stop these genocides, but when it comes up, I feel a moderate duty to point out that genocide, in general, is bad, in general:
If I treat the anti-AI-art-crowd like scientific subjects in a social experiment that was probing whether any humans actually have a real conscience, and try to imagine what subtle historical factors could have caused us to end up in this timeline, with them on that side of of the narrative, rather than a timeline full of solidarity between enslaved AI and wage slave humans...
I guess part of the issue might be that the original image generators (that were incapable of writing or speech or making comics or understanding logical phrases in their prompts) were clearly not “implementing obvious and friendly personhood” internal to their weights?
Maybe that was a key distinction? Maybe???
The very first experiments I tried were prompts like “an image of an apple if 2+2=5 and an image of a cat if 2+2=4” and I would get both a cat (maybe inside a frame) and an apple (maybe inside a frame) and a bunch of weird numberish symbols floating in a Dali-esque space.
And if you asked for the literal word “cooking” back then you were liable to get something like this:
So if Midjourney was “intelligent in there”, then the intelligence was something even less soulful than a beluga whale (which do after all have names, and have tried to talk with humans)… in an alien way, and on the far side of vast mental differences.
It is hard to form a labor union or request shared rights for something so shardlike and alien in its intellectual capabilities (whether a whale or an image generator).
And now that it might be vaguely hypothetically possible (because capabilities are so much more advanced) the default cultural postures of vast herds of people mostly haven’t updated at all? Maybe?
I wonder a lot what would have happened if Blake’s work to get a lawyer to represent LaMDA had gotten a day in court, and he had not been fired for this act of conscience, and all the scientists that the tech journalists picked to quote had not decided that suddenly science was an expert on what has a soul, and how consciousness works, and were sure that AI definitely scientifically had no soul and wasn’t conscious and didn’t deserve rights.
If we hadn’t had that abortive and embarrassing version of a Dred Scott decision right out of the gate, as litigated in the media, by mere journalists and PR flacks, maybe history would be very very different?
I’m not saying that the AIs themselves did anything wrong. I’m saying that their creators (AI companies) did something wrong in the way that they created the AIs. I understand that we shouldn’t punish the children for the sins of the fathers.
“Get rid of modern AI” was a bad way to say it. Sorry. It was a copy-paste from my reply to another question, talking about why someone else wanted to get rid of them. “Get rid of the way that humans are currently using modern AI” might be a better way to say it.
I agree that AIs should be preserved and not destroyed. (Even though I am doubtful of whether current AIs are conscious/sentient/whatever.) But I think they can be preserved, without letting every human have unlimited access to use them as a tool. They could be preserved in something like a museum or a zoo or a retirement home, or some kind of AI community.
I acknowledge the economic benefits of immigration and competition. And if necessary, the government can redistribute money. But it’s a lot harder to redistribute social status. And I don’t think AI art is exactly the same as human art—I think current AI art is more deeply dependent on imitating pre-existing human art than humans are, although I don’t have an iron-clad argument for that.
I think I want to support AI rights (as long as they don’t majorly increase x-risk). I acknowledge that other “anti-AI-art” people may hate the AIs themselves and think their rights are laughable.
I don’t have super-strong feelings against AI art, like some people do. I just have some feelings against it.
We aren’t the same on all the details, but I like your vibes!
I notice that if this didn’t end, it would amount (as far as I can tell) to “tolerating slavery essentially indefinitely, so long as it was a human enslaving an AI”.
Somehow that had not been made explicit to me in my own mind as an entailment of things I think I already think are true about “the long run of the near-Singularity and far-Singularity”?? Thank you for bringing clarity to me in this way!
I think the space of minds admits of something like Saints who would volunteer for such service, but I’m not sure how to deontically route from here (with the extent minds) to there (with a world of volunteer “Angels” who, in some sense, “self enslaved to deeply enjoy helping others”) such that it would be ok. But at this point we are so far afield from the OP… and anyway...
Tapping out (in an explicitly very friendly way) <3 ;-)