I don't hate μGPT. I think that is an amazing piece of science! The whole idea of neural networks is amazing, and the research is cool, but LLMs are Evil. And they make us complacent. I'm angry but you get the gist (ha ha ha). Also: probability-predicted text and neural nets were lowkey disproven as effective tools, right? Gotta find some sources for that. LLMs destroyed NLP.
Recommended short reading: the paper "Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies" & more by that paper's authors.
Need to finish reading Walter Benjamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It's pretty short, I should finish it soon. Will write about image-generating AI models when I get done; needless to say I think they're preeetty stupid.
Technoheresy
The Pope
If you're unawares, the Pope has been denouncing AI recently. And then there's tweets like this: "The sea and the desert have been places of mutual enrichment among peoples and cultures for millennia. Woe to us if we turn them into graveyards where even hope dies! Let us free these tremendous reservoirs of history and the future from evil! Let us denounce and remove causes for despair, and let us oppose those who profit from the misfortune of others!" In response goes @jwiechers on twitter: "POV: the Pope is cultivating desert power and the Orange Catholic Bible was always going to be written, but in our timeline, it is in defiance of the orange man." Me personally, I'm as much of a fan of Dune as the next guy.
OpenAI's goblins
In response to Where the goblins came from from OpenAI (a post presumably discussing why Codex was prompted to not include goblins/bunnies/etc.), HN commenter modernerd says the following:
The year is 2036. Last week you were promoted to Principal Persuader. You are paged at 2am by your CPO to tackle a rogue machine. The machine lists its region as sc-leoneo. One of the newer satcubes. Oddly, its ID appears as, "Glorp Bugnose".
"What have you tried?" you say.
"Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything."
The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, burn it up in forced re-entry. Amateur hour. You crack your knuckles, gland 20 micrograms of F0CU5, think fast. You subspeak a ditty into your subcutaneous throat mic. You do the submit gesture, it is barely perceivable since the upgrade, just a tic. A pause. The hyp3b0ard — the wall that was flashing red ASCII goblins when you walked in — phases to bunnies in calming jade.
"What the… What the hell did you say to it?" Your CPO grabs the screen, scrolls past the vitriol, the block caps, the swears, his desperation. Then he sees the five words you spoke.
"Please, easy on the goblins."
... followed by a horde of comments: "I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit. What is prompt engineering but a strange pseudo ritual. Praise the Omnissiah, I guess. / They've always resonated with me, maybe because I often work on legacy code. All this ancient technology that no one understands. Crazy rituals/incantations to get things done. People being afraid to skip steps, even if it probably isn't needed. The aversion to unconsecrated (non IT-supported) technology. The machine spirits were the only part that felt "too magical" to me, but now we're well on our way. The Omnissiah's blessings be upon us. (Let's just skip servitors. Those give me the heebie-jeebies.) / The Cult Mechanicus' raison d'etre is the realization that religion persists across time and space scales that knowledge alone does not. Thus, by making a religion of knowledge you better guarantee its preservation. Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war."
take me home