braingenious

Elon Musk has been very public about his battle against “woke minds virus” (direct quote) His posts have led to front page discussions here and has made headlines in global news outlets. It’s been discussed ad nauseam to the point that it’s entirely reasonable to expect that people in this thread, with interest in the future of LLMs would not struggle to see how silly (yes, silly!) of a proposition it is that we all pause for “alignment” when the definitions of “alignment” are so wildly different.

In fact the only way I would expect a poster in a thread about the future of LLMs to not have heard about any of this would be because discussion on this topic has been literally suppressed and hidden. I know that it’s the official line that “LMAO stifles curiosity”, but applying it readily to the detriment of the sharing of knowledge deprives curiosity of oxygen.

Your literal line is “Nobody should be allowed to discuss this particularly obvious issue of alignment because I said a word that you didn’t like.” No warning, no chance to rephrase.

My understanding of this interaction is that you will readily assume that anything I post is in bad faith and will stamp out any post of mine that comes through your mod queue. This is your prerogative as a mod — you don’t like my posts.

That’s the most charitable read. The other possible interpretation is that it’s policy here to limit any discussion that might upset Elon Musk fans and there is an explicit bias in their favor.

I should add that my post didn’t seem to bother people much. The only responses to my post that weren’t complaining about decorum (which I’m kind of confused by. Is that on-topic?) were in agreement with my point and an obvious call for discussion. Aside from that, all those upvotes were from regular users too. I’m not sure who is being protected here, if anyone.

Thank you for fixing this clickbait headline. I am always happy to help out by posting.

I am legitimately confused here.

If my comment hadn’t started with “LMAO” and had the current spelling of “Elon”, would it still have had the replies locked?

My criticism of six months being too short to achieve AI safety was in fact substantive. As was my quote on the LLM work that he is presently funding. That leaves only tone being the issue.

My comment is locked. Other posters can not have any dialogue with me in relation to the salient points I made. The links to further reading are buried below your admonishment, so they’re less likely to trigger any discussion.

I’m not really motivated to post again because it’s not clear if my post was not “substantive”, what qualifies as “flame bait” (for example, is directly quoting his words about “wokeness” flame bait even when they are directly about the topic at hand?), or if the issue here is “My account” as you put it.

So which is it? Flame bait, empty posting, or you just don’t like the way I post in general? You’ve provided all three as reasons for not allowing further discussion of my post.

I’m not really sure what there is to gain from making sure not to poke fun at a guy that spends all day posting wojack memes and rambling about the “woke mind virus”, but ok, here’s some “mature conversation”.

Upon perusal of the gentleman's penned expressions, it is my solemn conviction that his faculties of intellect and comprehension are, regrettably, of the most inferior order. It is with utmost eloquence that I convey the supremacy of my discernment whilst maintaining a dignified and majestic reserve.

It is secretly about org design in the same way that the movie Pi was secretly about a mathematician going insane.

The Angry Birds Movie was secretly about CG birds protecting themselves from an attack by invading green pigs.

>AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.

LMAO.

“AI should have… waves at a laundry list of nice sounding adjectives that mean different things to every single signatory in order to accomplish… Humanity [can enjoy] a flourishing future with AI. This will take… six months.”

Six months doesn’t sound long enough to guarantee AI safety, but it sounds about long enough for Elmo to train up and release his anti-wokeness LLM (whatever that means), which he has been pretty vocal about being important.

I don’t think that many people think of Elon Musk as a comic book villain.

From the article:

> It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.

There is a small but fascinating group of Musk superfans that can’t seem to imagine _anyone_ that would question his intelligence.

Even when someone writes “stupid clueless idiot” there’s a group that will see those words and somehow read “Genius of untold intellect. The author meant to write ‘Eldritch cerebral phantom wielding unfettered power with the lathe of heaven that he invented’ but made a typo and accidentally posted “dumbass baby man’ instead”

It could be like dismissing the iPhone 1. It could also be like dismissing the Nokia Lumia.

Either way an unconvincing audio file is an unconvincing audio file regardless of what other files may become possible in the future through any number of various platforms and software implementations.

In the same vein, it is prudent not to mix up the factual current state of things with possible futures.

I don’t see the purpose of panicking right now. Are you using this anxiety as motivation to design better audio fingerprinting solutions? Identifying bad actors and vulnerable groups? Educating people on how to avoid being manipulated by fake audio?

What does posting “I am scared of the future” online accomplish?

I can’t wait for “competing with OpenAI” to get more clearly defined.

For example, could I use ChatGPT to create training data for a (non-llama) language model that I then sell per-device licenses to end users? OpenAI doesn’t sell per-device licenses, so I wouldn’t be competing with them.

Right?

> How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?

I take issue with “enforced civility” alongside “real names”.

Fixation on civility promotes tone over content.

For example, this very thread!

Despite my comment having several upvotes, and despite the fact that it did actually spark a curious conversation as per the guidance in the rules, you are the only person that got a chance to respond to me before comments were turned off on my post.

Is it absolutely clear what I was criticizing? Yes. Was I criticizing something that others might agree with or at the very least discuss? Again, yes.

Did it fit into the arbitrary rules of decorum that a handful of individual users decided to enforce in this instance? No.

If you agree with “enforced civility”, do you think that you should have had the ability to post your response? The current set of civility enforcers are of the opinion that nobody on this entire website should be about to respond directly to “Oh god no.” because it so soundly shakes them to their cores that you, as a user, should be protected from seeing or responding to it.

I mean, it kind of does matter? Since the start of this thread was a post about the imminent threat that play.ht posed, an example of it not appearing very dangerous is on topic.

It’s very possible that some other voice cloning software will be the undoing of the fabric of society, not this particular website.

I agree. That guy sounds very nonchalant for being in life-threatening distress.