Last week's spectacular #OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between #EffectiveAltruism (#doomers) and #EffectiveAccelerationism (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
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Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that #LargeLanguageModels (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "#AISafety" - measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.
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@pluralistic Nice thread, thanks for the write-up.
Love this phrasing for LLM's "spicy autocomplete", because it really hits the nail on the head for me. I honestly don't know when and why people started to call chatGPT an AI. Media and the internet should not address chatbots as intelligent beings. It's a piece of software that throws words or images at you.
Cory Doctorow
Stefan Zitz