In retrospect, I do wish I had written my comment less aggressively, so my apologies on that front! I wish I’d instead written things like “I think I made some obviously correct narrow points about the shoggoth having at least some undue negative connotations, and I wish we could agree on at least that. I feel frustrated because it seems like it’s hard to reach agreement even on relatively simple propositions.”
I do agree that LLMs probably have substantially different internal mechanisms than people. That isn’t the crux. I just wish this were communicated in a more neutral way. In an alternate timeline, maybe this meme instead consisted of a strange tangle of wires and mist and question-marks with a mask on. I’d be more on-board with that.
Again, I agree that the Shoggoth meme can cure people of some real confusions! And I don’t think the meme has a huge impact, I just think it’s moderate evidence of some community failures I worry about.
I think a lot of my position is summarized by 1a3orn:
I just think this point about the amorality of LLMs is much better communicated by saying “LLMs are trained to continue text from an enormous variety of sources. Thus, if you give them [Nazi / Buddhist / Unitarian / corporate / garbage nonsense] text to continue, they will generally try to[1]continue it in that style.”
In retrospect, I do wish I had written my comment less aggressively, so my apologies on that front! I wish I’d instead written things like “I think I made some obviously correct narrow points about the shoggoth having at least some undue negative connotations, and I wish we could agree on at least that. I feel frustrated because it seems like it’s hard to reach agreement even on relatively simple propositions.”
I do agree that LLMs probably have substantially different internal mechanisms than people. That isn’t the crux. I just wish this were communicated in a more neutral way. In an alternate timeline, maybe this meme instead consisted of a strange tangle of wires and mist and question-marks with a mask on. I’d be more on-board with that.
Again, I agree that the Shoggoth meme can cure people of some real confusions! And I don’t think the meme has a huge impact, I just think it’s moderate evidence of some community failures I worry about.
I think a lot of my position is summarized by 1a3orn:
Although I do think this contains some unnecessary intentional stance usage.