I didn’t try it, but unless your GPT conversator is able to produce significantly different outputs when listening the same words in a different tone, I think it would be fair to classify it as not really talking.
For example, can GPT infer that you are really sad because you are speaking in a weeping broken voice?
Most trans folk are still not transitioning.
But man, it only takes one.
Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?
I mean, being told by anyone “Hey, do you know that guy? Is a woman now.” would be enough. But it never happens! And this is the kind of rare gossip that I would expect most of my acquaintances to share, especially the least trans-friendly ones (like my grandma, who’s a devout Catholic and knows half the town by name).
Of course that trans people will go to the same grocery store and gas station as me! But for some reason I have zero of them in my social circle, like Scott has zero creationists (and the base rate for creationists is way higher than the base rate for trans people). Are we implying that no, at least some of Scott’s friends must be closeted creationist?
Just one example: are you familiar with the concept of people starting a conversation by specifying the pronoun they want used to refer to them?
I’m not. In the sense that I’ve literally never ever met one of these people. I read about them on the Internet every time I open rationalist-related media, but they may as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them in everyday life!
I am interacting with the Rationalist community basically through LessWrong only. As you could infer from my first post, I don’t live near SF or other notoriously queer-friendly cities, and I’ve never been to a Rationalist meetup in person. This is kind of the point: the average joe in the average mid-sized town could live for years and years without meeting a single obviously trans person (in the sense of someone who had visibly transitioned through medical procedures).
Right, I don’t claim to be able to spot trans people who didn’t start the transition, but at least for those who finished the transition, I assume that a prolonged interaction would at least reveal some clues. Take, I don’t know, my conservatory (at least 60-80 people I personally interacted with for years, including some of those gays and lesbians from the previous post). Even if with these people I talk mostly about music, I would be truly shocked to find out that one of them was trans all along.
Do you want larger numbers? My father runs a small business with ~1000 customers, and most of them have been the same for years. Even if he doesn’t personally know all of them, I am quite sure that he would notice if one of them transitioned. So far, he has not.
I can concede that maybe I’ve walked near trans passers-by who didn’t obviously look like trans people, but I’m still confident that 100% of people I interacted with verbally more than once are not trans. I suppose that homosexuals could pass as straight more easily than trans could pass as cis, but I did meet gays and lesbians nonetheless (indeed, most of them don’t obviously look like homosexuals).
To the best of my knowledge, there are no LGBT organizations in my town, but there are certainly some in the bigger city where my workplace is located. I’ve no doubt I would find a trans person there if I went looking. My point was that, despite having interacted with hundreds of people at this point, I’ve never met one by chance in the same way I met gays and lesbians.
I like this post, but I think that it underestimates a bit the strength of filter bubbles. Even if a trait is present in 1% of the general population, it doesn’t automatically follow that literally everyone has someone in their social circle with that trait.
If you walk around aggressively signaling the equivalent of “What!?? There ain’t no faggots in this town,” then it should be no surprise to you that your lived experience is that none of the people around you are gay (even though base rates imply that quite a few of them are).
I consider myself liberal enough to not project an anti-trans aura, but I still never meet trans people in person, like Scott Alexander never meet conservatives. Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t know of anyone who has. My best guess is that when they decide to change sex, they also relocate to a more queer-friendly place. Taking SF as an extreme case, in the Bay you can find companies entirely run by trans women, a thing that I’m pretty sure never happens in other towns.
Hu, I don’t know. I can totally imagine being mildly annoyed by this, especially if they end up inviting me to a social event on short notice.
Hu, actually I never tried just the face, I needed at least the upper torso and preferably the full figure.
Anyway, I spent a few hours today toying with that generator (I previously used mostly this). A very simple prompt like “An elf made out of green metal” can produce a somewhat okay result, but the elf will be either naked or dressed head to toe in green. You can try to add more bits to the prompt in a controlled manner: hair color/hairstyle, outfit/dress color, and the like, but the more details you add, the more the model is prone to forget some of them, and the first to be forgotten is often the most important (being made of green metal).
To be clear, the success rate is not 0%. I was eventually able to obtain an image kinda resembling what I wanted, but I had to sit through >200 bad images and it definitely wasn’t an easy task. For these kind of things, we are totally not at the point where image generation “just works” (if you instead need a generic fantasy elf, sure, then it just works on the first try).
I will add that even taking humans aside, the remaining comparisons seem still quite bonkers to me. 1 carp ~ 1 bee sounds really strange.
Indeed, but an image generator is supposed to be useful for something other than generating an endless scroll of generic awesome pictures with wonky details; this kind of thing becomes boring really quickly. What most people actually need from an image generator is a sufficiently good replacement for the drawing skill they don’t have.
To be clear, I share Portia’s frustrarion here. I’ve been trying to get image generators to generate DnD portraits for months, and if the character is something more complicated than a Generic Tolkienian Elf or similar, you have to play increasingly complex shenanigans to obtain passable results. For example, I really really couldn’t convince the AI to generate an elf literally made of green metal rather than just dressed in green (this was supposed to represent the effect of a particular prestige class turning the character into a construct).
I have a similar feeling… receiving a full-face smile out of the blue from a total stranger is vaguely creepy
I can confirm that this stereotype is almost nonexistent in Europe (at least in Italy and France, not sure about other countries). No one in Italy would immediately associate singing in the opera or playing the organ with being gay. The only classical music-related thing that can be considered stereotypically gay even in Europe is being a male ballet dancer.
Yup, having multiple people reporting on twitter the same bogus answer and then the answer being mysteriously correct the day after with the same prompt is a very suspicious pattern, especially considering that it already happened multiple times.
Also, i just broke GPT-4 again with just a slightly different prompt:
Sally (a girl) has k brothers. Each brother has j-1 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?
Answer (wrong):
Given that Sally has k brothers and each of her brothers has j-1 sisters, we can use this information to find out how many sisters Sally has.
If each of Sally’s brothers has j-1 sisters, then j represents the total number of girls in the family (because each brother counts all the sisters in the family, excluding themselves).
Since Sally is included in the count of j, the number of Sally’s sisters would be j-1.
So, Sally has j-1 sisters.
Tor + cleaning cookies + logging out of everything after using them + separate user profiles goes a long way. But it’s very inconvenient.
Uh, I’ve done this since forever and it doesn’t feel so inconvenient to me. I generally use Firefox in private browsing, configured to always throw away all cookies at the end of every session. Ten years ago it wasn’t even a privacy concern, I simply hate to exit from a webpage without proper logout, it feels like not closing the door when leaving your house...
In particular, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.
Actually, in Italy they take quite seriously every attempt to rebrand as “Italian” food from other countries (so-called “Italian Sounding”). My favorite anecdote related to this was a fake italian cheese sold in the US as “pecorino”… with a cow depicted on the wrapper, because they did’t even know the meaning of “pecorino” (from “pecora”, which means sheep).
This comparison seems kind of unfair. I bet that the city where your workplace is located, if it’s not London, is still significantly bigger than the home town of your colleagues. It’s not that difficult to find variety in large Italian towns.
That said, it’s true that food is a huge part of the Italian culture, and the reason why most small towns have approximately zero ethnic restaurants is that the locals won’t eat there in the first place. The YouGov data here are probably quite right: 99% of Italians do like Italian food, and they like it quite a lot (note that no other square in the table has such a high value: 99% manages to beat even the lizardmen constant).
The only Italian that I ever met who complained about food in his home town was a vegan from a town where all the traditional specialties are meat-based. He claimed that several restaurants outright refused to serve him anything at all (which kind of proves your point, but again, the median Italian is very fond of the traditional specialties). I strongly suspect that similar cases make up the majority of that 1% who claims to not like Italian food.
Well, I won’t, but I’m not a good data point since I belong to the “don’t want a relationship” group, and I’m not sure if I would go on a date even if assured that no one would yell at me.
Generally speaking, a 20% chance of being yelled at vs a 80% chance of wonderful date seems still a good bet, but I guess the actual numbers are more similar to 5% horrible date, 10% good date and the rest somewhat mediocre dates which are not actively unpleasant but still a waste of time (I fully understand why someone would not like to sit through 7-8 mediocre dates before the good one).
It’s probably worth mentioning that 2⁄3 of all Wikipedia contribution are done by its 1000 most active users, with single persons like this guy doing millions of edit. I suspect that people with OCD are a supermajority among Wikipedia greater contributors.