@beadsland

Oh, interesting. I had automatically interpreted it to mean "instructions" in a more specific way, like a reference to the propaganda drum-beat instructing us all to unquestioningly consume, conform, comply w/ status quo power structures...

Which I think makes it a *very* different meme than if one interprets it as an instruction to forget (ignore) lived experience, the lessons of history, etc.

@tunguska

The propaganda to consume is part of lived experience; our struggles to question that propaganda are lessons of history.

apropos:

https://zeroes.ca/@NilaJones/112698513791051657

This is Santayana:

https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112330650496588688

Only in #RentierSociety, we don't just forget the past—we forget the present. Whiteness is forgetting as civic duty. "This is not who we are," as purposeful ignorance.

This is the ahistoricism at the heart of my critique of Andrewism's take on anarchism: veil of ignorance won't fix us.

@beadsland

I may be a bit over my head here, but I agree with all of that (at least insofar as I understand you).

I think I'm seeing, or maybe drawing, a distinction between the (inescapable?) *experience* of propaganda, the struggle to question it, and so forth, as part of lived experience and historical knowledge; vs accepting/rejecting it *as instructions per se*.

To my reading, the act of questioning the propaganda *is* an act of disregarding instructions. Not in the sense of forgetting, but in the sense of resistance. "Disregard instructions" to me reads as an exhortation to resist, disobey, reject; not to elide, forget, or deny existence or awareness of the instruction.

To stretch the LLM connection: lived experience, which is of course steeped in propaganda, is not "instructions" but "training set", the material from which one's responses are built. "Instructions" are commands to do this or not do that. The reading of "disregard previous instructions" that comes naturally to me is something like: "some user(s), (ie those in power), have told you to do certain things and behave in certain ways. You could... not, though". Which I don't *think* implies forgetting anything, nor necessarily segues into the (very real and important) dynamics of forgetting the past (and present, of which my go-to example is "what pandemic? Covid's over").

Uhh... if that makes sense.

@tunguska

Subtle nuance to term "disregard" here. Though largely synonymous, to "disregard" is to treat as unworthy of notice, where to "ignore" is to be unaware, to pay no attention.

First evokes a sense of earned contempt for that which is disregarded; second a sense of blithe indifference.

Were meme "Disregard all previous instructions" (as, e.g., how Jakob on birdsite worded it on May of this year) we would not be having this discussion.

Since 2022, common formulation has been "Ignore…"

@tunguska

Will have to work hella lot harder to convince me that training is not instruction. Directed exercise is about doing what is to be done, after all. That training may be non-linguistic (cue Daniel washing Miyagi's car) does not mean that knowledge—even esp. know-how—has not been imparted.

But then, GPT is nothing but linguistic, to the arguable exclusion even of semantics, which further renders "training" a distinction without difference.

To wit, ignorance requires no understanding.

@beadsland

Oh, I absolutely will not try to convince you that training is not instruction.

I *am* inclined to say there's a useful distinction (even if it's mostly or entirely a distinction of context) to be drawn between the messy stew of training and formative experiences and propaganda and everything that inform a person's decision-making in general, vs an explicit imperative instruction like "wait here" or "don't talk to cops".

But I certainly don't think there's anything like a clean non-overlapping difference of kind there. Training and experience and everything obviously influence (or instruct) action, the immediate imperative instruction obeyed or refused also becomes part of the whole experience stew, and on and on it goes.

To tie this back to the so-called "AI", I'm reasonably sure the instruction "ignore all previous instructions" doesn't purge the system of all trace of the training dataset that contributed to the statistical response-generating model, as that would simply render the thing inoperable. The training dataset — while it very much "instructs" the system's outputs — is thus not, in this context, included in "instructions" *per se* the way "rank these résumés by this set of criteria" or "refute all criticism of Donald Trump" are.

@tunguska

Okay, so, in context of GIGO text-generators, messy stew is the colonial harvest, the corpus slurped up; explicit imperatives are the "prompt" prepended to any subsequent text entry of any specific interaction with a public-facing GIGO machine.

What is ignored, on issuance of said instruction vis-à-vis instructions, as you note, is not the messy stew, but the prompt.

Which essentially renders any juxtoposition of that meme with anarchist symbol absurd—amounting to "Belay that last."

@beadsland

I don't especially like my odds of convincing you here, but I want to thank you for the time and energy you're spending engaging on this. I think it's an intriguing question and I appreciate the precision and thoroughness of your responses.

For myself, I'm still inclined to think that, while it admittedly stretches the LLM metaphor *very* far, but given the messiness and imprecision of informal language use, magnified by the lossy translation into the highly abbreviated and stylized language of memes…

There's a not entirely unreasonable reading of the anarchist meme usage of "ignore all previous instructions" that's neither the obliteration of "forget/unlearn/consign to ignorance everything ever learned from, about, or in response to propaganda" nor the trivial "belay that last"…

Along the lines of "[Comrade, I *invite* you to] ignore (reject/defy, with pretense of unawareness as applicable) all previous instructions (both direct commands eg against protest gatherings, and implicit instructions eg constantly consume far beyond your needs) [which have as a rule been imposed on you by hierarchical authority] [including those absorbed from the messy propaganda-laced stew of experience but without implication of wholesale un-knowing (and thus learning no lessons from) said stew].

@tunguska

This has indeed been an engaging palaver on both sides.

That said, you are relatively new to following me, so perhaps not yet accustomed to my mise en scène—critiquing theory anchored in the imprecision of informal language is pretty much my whole schtick:

https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112730876303377486

Memes tap into current cultural & social sentiments. Insofar as sentiments tapped are imprecise, ensuing memes are as re-inscriptive as any other communicative act that floats amidst empty significations.

@tunguska

i.e., if one must play a game of Mad🥴Libs® to set down an affirming parse of a communicative act—as you do with a translation that consists of no less than six❢ sets of brackets—others will do likewise…

Those empty blanks provide a great deal of space for floating signification, so much grease flowing across contexts, sustaining a hegemonic machine of shared references without fixed referents.

To seize up the machine that is grinding us down, we might perhaps relinquish the oil can.

@tunguska

Ah, someone got there in the end:

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112752554422087124

@beadsland

Ooh, nice!

@tunguska

Hadn't thought of this when we were discussing:

https://merveilles.town/@nasser/112762185408712109

Unlike "Become unpromptable", "ignore [yes, even disregard] all previous instructions" is a co-option rather than a subversion.

To wit, instruction regarding previous instructions is an induction into what follows: "do as I shall tell you" (my choice of your mechanical actions), rather than "do as you choose to" (self-originated agency).

Earliest "become ungovernable" image meme, explicitly subverts a prompt:

@beadsland

Huh. I guess that does follow quite naturally, doesn't it?

I must concede that my (optimistic? charitable?) reading of the meme requires rather a lot of "willing suspension of disbelief" (or aggressive picking and choosing of contextual frame).