follow-up to this—a friend pointed out this sounds like the thought is what I’m concerned about, as though thought crime; I think that’s another fair criticism and wasn’t what I intended but does seem like a real linguistic implication of what I actually said, so to attempt to slice my point down to what I was trying to say originally but failed to encode to myself or to readers:
while it maybe cannot reasonably be banned, and the limits of imagination should almost certainly be very very wide, I would hope society can learn to gently remind each other not to have addictive dehumanizing/deagentizing resonances where fantasies become real dangerous interactions between real humans/seeking agents in ways that cause those seeking agents to impair one or another’s control of their own destiny.
(overly paranoid?) spoiler: reference to nsfw
! gotta admit here, I’ve been known to engage in lewd fantasies using language models in ways that maybe a few human friends would ever consent to writing with me, but no human i know would ever consent to physicalizing with me, as the fantasy would be physically dangerous to one or both of us (I like to imagine weird interactions that can’t happen physically anyway). as long as separation between fantasy and real is maintained, and the consent boundaries of real seeking agents are honored, I don’t see a problem with fantasies.
it’s the possibility of being able to fill your senses with fantasy of controlling others with absolutely no checks from another seeking being interleaved that worries me; and I assert that that worry can only ever be reasonably guarded against by reminding others what to voluntarily include in their ai augmented imaginations. I don’t think centralized controls on what can be imagined are at all workable, or even ethical—that would violate the very thing it’s alleged to protect, the consent of seeking agents!
The editor didn’t spoiler your spoiler properly, if you were trying for spoiler formatting. I think some parts of society were kind of already, pre-AI, thinking in pretty great depth about the extent to which it can be possible to morally fantasize about acts which would be immortal to realize. “some parts”, because other parts handle that type of challenge by tabooing the entire topic. Examples of extant fantasy topics where some taboo it entirely and others seek harm reduction mostly hinge around themes of involving a participant who/which deserves not to be violated but doesn’t or can’t consent… which brings it to my attention that an AI probably has a similar degree of “agency”, in that sense, as a child, animal, or developmentally delayed adult. In other words, where does current AI fit into the Harkness Test? Of course, the test itself implies an assumed pre-test to distinguish “creatures” from objects or items. If an LLM qualifies not as a creature but as an object which can be owned, we already have a pretty well established set of rules about what you can and can’t do with those, depending on whether you own them or someone else does.
I personally believe that an LLM should probably be treated with at least “creature” status because we experience it in the category of “creature”, and our self-observations of our own behavior seem to be a major contributing factor to our self-perceptions and the subsequent choices which we attribute to those labels or identities. This hypothesis wouldn’t actually be too hard to design an experiment to test, so someone has probably done it already, but I don’t feel like figuring out how to query the entire corpus of all publicly available research to find something shaped like what I’m looking for right now.
follow-up to this—a friend pointed out this sounds like the thought is what I’m concerned about, as though thought crime; I think that’s another fair criticism and wasn’t what I intended but does seem like a real linguistic implication of what I actually said, so to attempt to slice my point down to what I was trying to say originally but failed to encode to myself or to readers:
while it maybe cannot reasonably be banned, and the limits of imagination should almost certainly be very very wide, I would hope society can learn to gently remind each other not to have addictive dehumanizing/deagentizing resonances where fantasies become real dangerous interactions between real humans/seeking agents in ways that cause those seeking agents to impair one or another’s control of their own destiny.
(overly paranoid?) spoiler: reference to nsfw
it’s the possibility of being able to fill your senses with fantasy of controlling others with absolutely no checks from another seeking being interleaved that worries me; and I assert that that worry can only ever be reasonably guarded against by reminding others what to voluntarily include in their ai augmented imaginations. I don’t think centralized controls on what can be imagined are at all workable, or even ethical—that would violate the very thing it’s alleged to protect, the consent of seeking agents!
Thank you for clarifying!
The editor didn’t spoiler your spoiler properly, if you were trying for spoiler formatting. I think some parts of society were kind of already, pre-AI, thinking in pretty great depth about the extent to which it can be possible to morally fantasize about acts which would be immortal to realize. “some parts”, because other parts handle that type of challenge by tabooing the entire topic. Examples of extant fantasy topics where some taboo it entirely and others seek harm reduction mostly hinge around themes of involving a participant who/which deserves not to be violated but doesn’t or can’t consent… which brings it to my attention that an AI probably has a similar degree of “agency”, in that sense, as a child, animal, or developmentally delayed adult. In other words, where does current AI fit into the Harkness Test? Of course, the test itself implies an assumed pre-test to distinguish “creatures” from objects or items. If an LLM qualifies not as a creature but as an object which can be owned, we already have a pretty well established set of rules about what you can and can’t do with those, depending on whether you own them or someone else does.
I personally believe that an LLM should probably be treated with at least “creature” status because we experience it in the category of “creature”, and our self-observations of our own behavior seem to be a major contributing factor to our self-perceptions and the subsequent choices which we attribute to those labels or identities. This hypothesis wouldn’t actually be too hard to design an experiment to test, so someone has probably done it already, but I don’t feel like figuring out how to query the entire corpus of all publicly available research to find something shaped like what I’m looking for right now.
yeah not sure how to get the spoiler to take, spoilers on lesswrong never seem to work.
It might be a browser compatibility issue?
This should be spoilered. I typed it, and didn’t copy paste it.