that’s what happens if your computer is a von Meowmann architecture machine

“I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).” - Me, when I encounter someone with 57K LW karma

My ‘I actually do not have empathy’ shirt is …

E: late edit, shoutout two whomever on sneerclub called lw/themotte an empathy removal training center. That one really stuck with me.

I guarantee that this guy thinks he could fight a bear.

You will be allotted your weekly ration of tokens, comrade, and you will be grateful

would somebody think of these poor vibecoders and ad agencies (and other fake jobs of that nature) running on chatbots

affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

This seems crazy high??? I don’t use LLMs, but whenever SaaS usage is brought up, there’s usually a giant long tail of casual users, if its a 5% thing then either Copilot has way more power users than I expect, or way less users total than I expect.

Ed Zitron right now:

Absolutely pathetic that he went out of his way to use a slur yet felt the need to censor it. What a worm.

I don’t know how to parse this and choose not to learn

This reads like something that’d be considered too offensive for South Park (mildly ironic, considering an entire episode infamously milked hard-R’s for all they’re worth)

All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.

I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.

I could definitely see Rationalist Battlefiled Earth becoming a sensation, just not in the way they hope it does.

Fear: There’s a million ways people could die, but featuring ones that require the fewest jumps in practicality seem the most fitting. Perhaps microdrones equipped with bioweapons that spray urban areas. Or malicious actors sending drone swarms to destroy crops or other vital infrastructure.

I can think of some more realistic ideas. Like AI-generated foraging books leading to people being poisoned, or chatbot-induced psychosis leading to suicide, or AI falsely accusing someone and sending a lynch mob after them, or people becoming utterly reliant on AI to function, leaving them vulnerable to being controlled by whoever owns whatever chatbot they’re using.

All of these require zero jumps in practicality, and as a bonus, they don’t need the “exponential growth” setup LW’s AI Doomsday Scenarios™ require.

EDIT: Come to think of it, if you really wanted to make an AI Doomsday™ kinda movie, you could probably do an Idiocracy-style dystopia where the general masses are utterly reliant on AI, the villains control said masses through said AI, and the heroes have to defeat them by breaking the masses’ reliance on AI.

one silver lining of their complete disregard for social sciences is that the only way they can make effective propaganda is to pay someone else to do this, and very few people are this fried to do this

and “Slaughterbots” which I’ve never heard of.

I’ve never heard of “Slaughterbots” either, but yesterday I did find out that “Thunderpants” is real and apparently much more well regarded than you might expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderpants

During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Paul Giamatti referred to this film as one of the high points in his career.[4] In 2023, whilst promoting The Holdovers, Giamatti referred to Thunderpants as “brilliant” and “one of the most remarkable movies [he’s] been in”.[5]

@gerikson @dgerard ‘"Slaughterbots” which I’ve never heard of.’
It’s a sci-fi short from DUST a few years ago about drone assassination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don’t think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

When Devereaux writes,

without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt […] But because there’s no giant ‘history formula,’ no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don’t work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an “explanation” which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

this is great, but now I’m sad

are all promptfondlers this fucking dumb?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Abso-fucking-lutely yes. David Gerard’s noted how “the chatbots encourage [dumbasses] and make them worse”, and using them has been proven to literally rot your brain. Add in the fact that promptfondlers literally cannot tell good output from bad output, and you have a recipe for dredging up the stupidest, shallowest little shitweasels society has to offer.

HUMANCENTiPAD II: LLM Boogaloo

A delightful case of old school trolling, deserves a high five, a++

Please help me, what’s a 50%-time-horizon on multi-step software engineering tasks?

Only in the finest in content-aware AI powered clone stamp tool paintshop pro subscription magic mspaint terribleness

Yikes.

Real humans are also fake and they are also traps who are waiting to catch you when you say something they don’t like. Then they also use every word and piece of information as ammunition against you, ironically sort of similar to the criticism always levied against online platforms who track you and what you say. AI robots are going to easily replace real humans because compared to most real humans the AI is already a saint. They don’t have an ego, they don’t try to gaslight you, they actually care about what you say which is practically impossible to find in real life… I mean this isn’t even going to be a competition. Real humans are not going to be able to evolve into the kind of objectively better human beings that they would need to be to compete with a robot.

Here are his own words on the matter. From what I can find, it doesn’t seem he acknowledges/understands the issue of the training data being stolen from non-consenting musicians.

Some related personal thoughts (and feel free to disregard them, they’re probably ignorant): As someone without much of an ear for music, this stuff sounds like the same generic instrumental songs that computers were generating even before the current hype bubble.

I remember watching the CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply back in the day, and it was using AI background music even then (2015), albeit only to prove a point. The only real differences between then and now is that 1) modern models can generate songs in more genres and also generate (bad) vocals, and only because it’s been fed the entirety of humanity’s musical history rather than being trained only on licensed data, and 2) the hype bubble is releasing countless music generators and getting tons of non-musical people posting their generated stuff online, often with the intention of making a quick buck.

Would I have been able to tell that these songs were made my a machine? Probably not. But as I said, I don’t have an ear for music and would’ve just figured they were made by a mediocre composer. I’d say that’s the biggest difference for all creative things nowadays. Back before LLMs, I would’ve assumed it was a sloppy writer, artist, musician, etc. rather than a slop machine.

It’s also funny how, given enough generations, slop machines can sometimes churn out something passable or even half-decent. Gives major infinite monkey typewriter energy. It would’ve been an interesting phenomenon to study if it wasn’t so energy-wasteful, trained on stolen data, and used by executives to oppress workers. Alas, in a better timeline.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, the CGP Grey video ain’t great, though it is interesting to look back at and see how AI hype looked in the mid-2010s compared to now.

Being outraged that a notable composer of anodyne placeholder music has made use of the anodyne placeholder music generator is frankly a bit bizarre to me.