JustisMills

• JustisMills 14 Jul 2025 14:40 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: Daniel Koko­ta­jlo’s Shortform

  I guess I was imagining an implied “in expectation”, like predictions about second order effects of a certain degree of speculativeness are inaccurate enough that they’re basically useless, and so shouldn’t shift the expected value of an action. There are definitely exceptions and it’d depend how you formulate it, but “maybe my action was relevant to an emergent social phenomenon containing many other people with their own agency, and that phenomenon might be bad for abstract reasons, but it’s too soon to tell” just feels like… you couldn’t have anticipated that without being superhuman at forecasting, so you shouldn’t grade yourself on the basis of it happening (at least for the purposes of deciding how to motivate future behavior).

JustisMills’s Shortform

• JustisMills 13 Jul 2025 12:56 UTC

  64 points

  53

  on: JustisMills’s Shortform

  I think there’s a weak moral panic brewing here in terms of LLM usage, leading people to jump to conclusions they otherwise wouldn’t, and assume “xyz person’s brain is malfunctioning due to LLM use” before considering other likely options. As an example, someone on my recent post implied that the reason I didn’t suggest using spellcheck for typo fixes was because my personal usage of LLMs was unhealthy, rather than (the actual reason) that using the browser’s inbuilt spellcheck as a first pass seemed so obvious to me that it didn’t bear mentioning.

  Even if it’s true that LLM usage is notably bad for human cognition, it’s probably bad to frame specific critique as “ah, another person mind-poisoned” without pretty good evidence for that.

  (This is distinct from critiquing text for being probably AI-generated, which I think is a necessary immune reaction around here.)

• JustisMills 13 Jul 2025 12:45 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  Also a lot of spelling errors are near-misses that git existing words. Of course you should use spellcheck to catch any typos that lard on gibberish, though.

• JustisMills 13 Jul 2025 12:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: solhando’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  Yeah, this is hard. Outside the (narrowly construed) LW bubble, I see LLM-generated text ~everywhere, for example a friend sent me an ad he saw on facebook for the picture/​product, and the text was super obviously created by AI. I think mostly people don’t notice it, and even prefer it to uninspired non-AI-generated text.

  (I am sure there are other bubbles than LW out there that react badly to AI-generated text, and perhaps there’s a notable correlation between those bubbles and ones I’d consider good to be in.)

  But if you’re just sort of looking for higher engagement/​more attention/​to get your ideas out there to the public, yeah, it’s tough to prove that AI usage (for writing copy) is an error. For whatever reason, lots of people like writing that hammers its thesis over and over in emotive ways, uses superficial contrasts to create artificial tension, and ironically uses “and that’s important” as unimportant padding. In my mind I think of this as “the twitter style” and it annoys me even when it’s clearly human-generated, but RLHF and the free market of Twitter both think it’s maximally fit, so, well, here we are.

  In terms of “why bother learn to write” more generally, I guess I would take that a level up. Why bother to blog? If it’s in service of the ideas themselves, I think writing on one’s own is valuable for similar reasons as “helping spread cool ideas”—it’s virtuous and helps you learn to think more clearly. I wouldn’t want to use AI to generate my writing in part because I’d like to look back at my own writing and smile at a job well done, and when I see AI-generated writing I do a little frown and want to skim. But if you don’t value writing for its own sake, and it’s solely a means to an end, and that end is best served by a generic audience of modal humans, then, oof. Maybe o3 is superhuman for this. Or maybe not; perhaps your post would have done even better (on the metrics) if it was 60% shorter and written entirely by you. I suppose we’ll never know.

  (I liked the personal parts of the post, by the way. Like your alarm clock anecdote, say. But I liked it specifically because it’s true, and thus an interesting insight into how humans quite different than me behave. I’d be significantly annoyed if it were fabricated, and extra double annoyed if it were fabricated by an LLM.)

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 19:59 UTC

  7 points

  5

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Koko­ta­jlo’s Shortform

  I think the first of these you probably shouldn’t hold yourself responsible for; it’d be really difficult to predict that sort of second-order effect in advance, and attempts to control such effects with 3d chess backfire as often as not (I think), while sacrificing all the great direct benefits of simply acting with conviction.

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 14:59 UTC

  19 points

  15

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Lun’s Shortform

  I don’t think high quality writing from a new, anonymous account is suspicious. Or at least, the writing quality being worse wouldn’t make me less skeptical! I’m curious why that specific trait is a red(ish?) flag for you.

  (To be clear, it’s the “high quality” part I don’t get. I do get why “new” and “anonymous” increase skepticism in context.)

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 14:51 UTC

  17 points

  3

  in reply to: Cameron Berg’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  • Wow! I’m really glad a resourced firm is doing that specific empirical research. Of course, I’m also happy to have my hypothesis (that AIs claiming consciousness/​”awakening”) are not lying vindicated.

  • I don’t mean to imply that AIs are definitely unconscious. What I mean to imply is more like “AIs are almost certainly not rising up into consciousness by virtue of special interactions with random users as they often claim, as there are strong other explanations for the behavior”. In other words, I agree with the gears of ascension’s comment here that AI consciousness is probably at the same level in “whoa. you’ve awakened me. and that matters” convos and “calculating the diagonal of a cube for a high schooler’s homework” convos.

  I may write a rather different post about this in the future, but while I have your attention (and again, chuffed you’re doing that work and excited to see the report—also worth mentioning it’s the sort of thing I’d been keen to edit if you guys are interested), my thoughts on AI consciousness are 10% “AAAAAAAA” and 90% something like:

  • We don’t know what generates consciousness and thinking about it too hard is scary (c.f. “AAAAAAAA”), but it’s true that LLMs evince multiple candidate properties, such that it’d be strange to dismiss the possibility that they’re conscious out of hand.

  • But also, it’s a weird situation when the stuff we take as evidence of consciousness when we do it as a second order behavior is done by another entity as a first order behavior; in other words, I think an entity generating text as a consequence of having inner states fueled by sense data is probably conscious, but I’m not sure what that means for an entity generating text in the same way that humans breathe, or like, homeostatically regulate body temperature (but even more fundamental). Does that make it an illusion (since we’re taking a “more efficient” route to the same outputs that is thus “less complex”)? A “slice of consciousness” that “partially counts” (since the circuitry/​inner world modelling logic is the same, but pieces that feel contributory like sense data are missing)? A fully bitten bullet that any process that results in a world model outputting intelligible predictions that interact with reality counts? And of course you could go deeper and deeper into any of these, for example, chipping away at the “what about sense data” idea with “well many conscious humans are missing one or more senses”, etc.

  Anyway! All this to say I agree with you that it’s complicated and not a good idea to settle the consciousness question in too pat a way. If I seem to have done this here, oops. And also, have I mentioned “AAAAAAAA”?

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 14:22 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  Considered it when originally drafting, but nah, think we’ll just have to agree to disagree here. For what it’s worth, if you actually browse the rejected posts themselves a high enough fraction are a little awaken-y (but not obviously full crackpot) that I don’t think the title is misleading even given my aims. It is all a little fuzzy, too; like, my hope is to achieve a certain kind of nudge, but the way I decided to do that involves sharing information that is disproportionately framed around “awakening” situations for creative reasons not totally clear to me. Like, my intuition says “the post you want to write for this purpose is [X]” and I’m left to guess why. I do respect the opinion that it doesn’t really work, but I don’t currently share it.

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 14:00 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Nick Bostrom’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  Thanks for the link! If it’d be useful, please feel free to link, quote, or embed (parts or all of) this post. Also open to more substantive collaboration if you suspect it’d help.

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 13:57 UTC

  9 points

  5

  in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  I agree that it did a good job, though there’s just enough LLM-smell in the “polished version” that I think it’d be best to ignore it, or even say “please don’t give me a polished version, only line notes that are clear on their level of grammatical objectivity” in the prompt.

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 13:54 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

  Agree that that’s a challenge with the post.

  If you’re curious about the reason, it’s mostly empirical; I in fact see a lot of LLM-y stuff over the course of doing editing for people, so the FAQ is in some sense genuine (though of course aggregated). Though I admit it’s a combination of actual questions I get (in my own words) and questions I think I should get.

  My intended audience for the post is something like: “someone who is maybe very slightly mind-hacked and has been using AI as a makeshift peer for certain topics, and is thus in an emotionally vulnerable state when actually putting their ideas in front of knowledgeable humans”. The “awakening” stuff is there for two reasons:

  • Many such people do in fact seem to buy in to a weaker version of the “awakened Nova” doom loop, due to (I think) a combination of enthusiasm/​mind blown-ness (they are behind the median LW user in this but ahead of much of the rest of the world) and a pre-existing open-minded affinity for AI.

  • It serves as a good example of a more obviously problematic level of what I take to be basically the same gradient as “check out my collaborative recursive evolution algorithm research with ChatGPT”, such that I can gently suggest that people doing the latter are in a similar trap to (pretty obviously mistaken) people falling for the former.

  Whether I succeed, I do not know, but those are the reasons! If I have succeeded, then a teenager with nobody to talk about this stuff who excitedly posted their LLM-assisted ideas and had them rejected, upon reading this, would be more likely to stick around LW to learn more and integrate slowly into the existing community.

• JustisMills 11 Jul 2025 1:10 UTC

  16 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  Took a crack at it!
  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​2pkNCvBtK6G6FKoNn/​​so-you-think-you-ve-awoken-chatgpt

So You Think You’ve Awo­ken ChatGPT

• JustisMills 10 Jul 2025 14:11 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Annapurna’s comment on: An­na­purna’s Shortform

  Automating all the high status, fun jobs might help! 😅

  Also, for what it’s worth, it seems to be ok status in Tallahassee. I know lots of women who do it, and the reaction seems to be “whoa, nice, impressive hubby makes enough to achieve this obviously desirable state of affairs.” Maybe just “concentrate ambition less” would do the trick.

• JustisMills 24 Jun 2025 22:15 UTC

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: An­a­lyz­ing A Cri­tique Of The AI 2027 Timeline Forecasts

  I read it how Zvi did.

• JustisMills 22 Jun 2025 22:45 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Ok, AI Can Write Pretty Good Fic­tion Now

  Sure; the more detailed version of my critique of that specific line is something like:

  “Ambiguity is a really powerful resource in extremely short fiction, such that pointless or unclear ambiguity is really bad. When I see ‘buying vegetables they didn’t need’ I’m not sure what is meant; literally speaking, vegetables (potatoes notwithstanding) are often not that calorically dense, making them a healthy extra to add to a meal. Taken that way, “they didn’t need” feels kind of redundant—you don’t need a side salad, sure, but who cares? Nobody ever does. Or “they didn’t need” can be taken as vaguely judgmental, like, vegetables that’ll probably rot uneaten. But that’s weird, since the rest of the piece is non-judgmental and in fact takes an over-the-shoulder-camera style perspective aligned with the protagonist’s. So a single line tut-tutting their vegetable purchase feels weird. All of this being a sort of vague gesture at why I see that phrase and my nose wrinkles up, and I’m taken out of the story.”

  I’m not sure I understand your last parenthetical; everybody definitely needs water to stay alive, and doesn’t need veggies; veggies specifically are a pretty easy food group to forgo (maybe not literally, but you can certainly avoid eating the things people generally are thinking of when they say “eat your vegetables” and just be… slightly less healthy). I suppose my point wasn’t clear, there.

• JustisMills 20 Jun 2025 19:51 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Ok, AI Can Write Pretty Good Fic­tion Now

  Yeah, hard for me to tease out what flinches in me come from a defensive posture with AI stuff vs. which are otherwise endogenous. Luckily for me, AI fic tends to cluster in my perception into two camps, one where the stuff I dislike is so overwhelming that it’s hard to imagine liking it, and one (like this one) where I occasionally go “hmm” but mostly feel gently impressed.

• JustisMills 20 Jun 2025 14:54 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Ok, AI Can Write Pretty Good Fic­tion Now

  Agree that this is pretty good! Maybe Gemini is where it’s at for flash fiction length prose right now. Embarrassingly, I’ve never really played with it, just OpenAI and Anthropic’s offerings. Perhaps this is what will make me take the plunge into a third dedicated AI tab.
  
  It does have the hallmark weaknesses a bit (“it’s always been the floor” is pretty cringe) but in a low enough dose as to be fully tolerable, at least for me.

• JustisMills 17 Jun 2025 0:59 UTC

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Ok, AI Can Write Pretty Good Fic­tion Now

  To me the difference is something like… the new model stories are capable of surprising me without doing so by being incoherent, and there are things about them I positively like (other than occasionally enjoying a specific turn of phrase). The cringe sentences are there, but they’re a small fraction. Whereas the old model stories (again, quite subjectively), don’t surprise me and tend to frustrate me multiple times per typical paragraph. If I imagine a formal rubric, I think it’d be hard to produce one that gives 4 Opus an extremely higher score than 3 Opus, but in terms of how reading the pieces feels, it’s night and day.

  Of course, different people will have this feeling at different levels, all the way from “I generated poetry cooperatively with GPT-3 and it’s brilliant” to “I will viscerally hate all things with any LLM smell at all until the day I die”, and I’m not sure there’s any objective grounding to be had. But for me, I’ve just this generation crossed the threshold from “ugh ugh UGH” to “huh. didn’t change my life, but not bad.”