The point was that both images are stupid and (in many places) unsupported by evidence, but that LW-folk would be much more willing to criticize the friendly-looking one while making excuses for the scary-looking one. (And I think your comment here resolves my prediction to “correct.”)
(This is too gotcha shaped for me, so I am bowing out of this conversation)
I think I communicated my core point. I think it’s a good image that gets an important insight across, and don’t think it’s “propaganda” in the relevant sense of the term. Of course anything that’s memetically adaptive will have some edge-cases that don’t match perfectly, but I am getting a good amount of mileage out of calling LLMs “Shoggoths” in my own thinking and think that belief is paying good rent.
If you disagree with the underlying cognition being accurately described as alien, I can have that conversation, since it seems like maybe the underlying crux, but your response above seems like it’s taking it as a given that I am “making excuses”, and is doing a gotcha-thing which makes it hard for me to see a way to engage without further having my statements be taken as confirmation of some social narrative.
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.”
(This is too gotcha shaped for me, so I am bowing out of this conversation)
I think I communicated my core point. I think it’s a good image that gets an important insight across, and don’t think it’s “propaganda” in the relevant sense of the term. Of course anything that’s memetically adaptive will have some edge-cases that don’t match perfectly, but I am getting a good amount of mileage out of calling LLMs “Shoggoths” in my own thinking and think that belief is paying good rent.
If you disagree with the underlying cognition being accurately described as alien, I can have that conversation, since it seems like maybe the underlying crux, but your response above seems like it’s taking it as a given that I am “making excuses”, and is doing a gotcha-thing which makes it hard for me to see a way to engage without further having my statements be taken as confirmation of some social narrative.
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.