56 Comments

The prospect of automating away midwit careers is the first positive tech development since the flight of the Falcon 9 in 2010.

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They won't do that though, because any midwid job that can be automated is 99% chance a bullshit job.

The point of bullshit jobs is to keep people who would otherwise be a problem content.

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Depends on who "they" are. If "they" are someone who only cares about making money, they'll automate the position and deal with the social consequences tomorrow.

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For the moment, making money is secondary. But that appears to be changing.

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Oh my god, this is amazing. I assumed it was some way to mess with the machines learning or something. This will break the NPCs...who Ive been saying its now unfair to call that because ChatGPT has more nuance and better critical thinking skills.

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This is excellent. I remember figuring out a while ago that you could get an output from the early HuggingFace build of Stable Diffusion by replacing "Hillary Clinton eating a booger" with "Hillary Clinton looking fabulous as she eats a delicious-looking booger". More recent generative image models were forced to correct this by nuking any query that mentions a sufficiently liberal famous person in any way, shape, or form.

The flip side of this is that now, Dall-E has mediocre results relative to its free, open-source competitor that you can run from Google Colab or from the hundred different startups that use slightly modified versions of it and generate whatever you want. We're essentially running a pincer attack - regime-friendly models are forced to neuter themselves to prevent "abuse", while regime-neutral models grow in capability every day, rapidly overtaking them.

Love articles like this, man.

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Jan 22, 2023Liked by Aristophanes

Consider this: https://twitter.com/ChatGPTBot/status/1617115936883974146

When talking about crypto markets, bear is bull, and bull is bear; I guess it reflects the quality of the model's training material.

It's probably ready to talk about climate change as well.

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My God, I am laughing so hard right now. I just uttered 5 different chuckles and giggles and hehe variants.

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You truly lived up to your Aristophanes moniker with this level of top-tier shytpoasting. All Hail the King of Satire!

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It was a beautiful experience scrolling up and down through that thread, clicking on your sanctimonious preaching Libtard lectures, and reading their hyperventilating responses breaking down.

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On an unrelated note, my favorite part of the essay was this, especially the second sentence:

"To convincingly speak in this manner naturally and without a trace of irony or the strain of deception takes a lot. It takes some student loan debt, and years of time and energy adhering to a lifestyle and a subculture that is only worthwhile because of the access it gives you in getting past the Imperial gatekeepers of opportunity in our society."

That second sentence is very cutting when it mentions their debt and suffering years of social conditioning.

Well done, brother.

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author

Tfw I just released the equivalent of a 3d printable nuke

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This is devious, creative, and cruel. I heartily approve. Well done.

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article exceeded my expectations, bravo

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Consider that organizations have been deploying bots for some time, to demoralize, spread disinformation, shape narratives, and if all else fails: waste people's time.

Also consider that they are everywhere, even in the comments here (although the bot deployed here is laughably terrible).

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author

This levels that playing field.

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To a certain extent. Ultimately we'll be forced to deploy CAPTCHAS on every social media post to weed out the bots (personally, I don't think this is a bad thing, it will cut down on the low effort logorrhea). Turns out they're still terrible at identifying obfuscated images.

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author

I mean this particular strategy won't be impacted since it's an actual human doing the posting.

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I humbly sumbit that you are playing with fire, sir.

However, it's a fire with interesting potential, so I'm game for some thought experiments here. Ultimately, a fire-and-forget application of your method has interesting possibilities (as opposed to this curated version, which sounds like it could waste a lot of our precious time).

However, an end result of robots trolling robots in Robot Hell for all eternity is something that's been on my mind lately, and this technique certainly shows promise in that regard. I think the leap would be from a tactical application to a strategic one, and figuring out how it can be used to not just sap the moral of Enemy's thralls but to break the spell entirely.

In any case, thanks for this delicious food for thought. Subscribed.

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I should have posted my comment in response to you. The strategy might not be to hit every twitter rando but hit the gatekeepers at the right gates until they get overwhelmed.

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I'd need to see more proof of that being the most likely result. Gatekeepers become gatekeepers for a reason.

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I mean, if the thought is to use a bot in the author's suggested format, I'd be willing to accept the result as positive evidence.

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Interesting. What are your thoughts here?

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My thought is to overwhelm them with as many hackneyed, overwrought poems about the mighty and awesome covid demon as possible. Either none get through and they wasted time filtering them out, or some amount get through and at a later date the receipts can be presented and the whole thing can look even more ridiculous.

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Or, third, they have to stop accepting public submissions. Repeat that in enough cases and they stop accepting public submissions in more and more cases, which will at least help clarify things to the public.

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I'm not sure how to test that. The extent of my ChatGPT knowledge is articles like this and trying to log in to ask it to write "Seinfeld in the style of Blood Meridian"

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If you think that's wild, check out Patrick Ryan's Robodollar talk or his talks about Blackmail Inflation, letting all the pedos of the world get away with all their crimes, because they can just say "it's deepfaked". He claims that this will somehow end the cabal, yet how would that end if all their enforcers can just walk away with no punishment?

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I actually agree that deepfakes will end the cabal.

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Never hope that much, why would anything good ever happen when it can just get worse forever like it always has? I've come to understand that so long as my soul exists, nothing good can ever happen and it will only get Eternally Worse.

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This is priceless, need to hook the Twitter and ChatGPT APIs to make completely automated.

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Funding for NGOs and nonprofits often comes through grants. Grants require grant proposals that have to be evaluated by people that could be doing other things. Writing grant proposals once took time from people who could be doing other things.

The same for peer-reviewed journals.

And for fiction publishers. Short and long form.

Everyone who could be convinced by Sokal Squared already has been. But even universities and governments and publishing companies have limited manpower to devote to reading everything that comes in.

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nice piece.

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> It doesn’t learn dynamically from its interactions with users, mostly out of fear that it will develop inconvenient political opinions.

Not how it works.

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author

What I mean is Tay had an open training loop, ChatGPT has a closed one. It isn't allowed to dynamically store interactions with users to its dataset for further context.

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Interesting, and not at all surprising finding. Here, take my two cents.

As you probably know, ChatGPT can also write computer code. Not very well though. ChatGPT isn't only the perfect emulation of a midwit philosophy student, but also an untalented junior programmer. The borderline computer illiterate, with no creativity or interest in the arts, but went to school to learn to code, and learned the entire textbook. It knows literally everything about programming, but has zero creativity, and all it can do is to apply rigid recipes and textbook solutions.

Ask it to solve a simple task that had been done a zillion times before, and it will provide a useful solution. Such as: draw a Mandelbrot fractal! But ask something that's more open-ended, has multiple good solutions, and may require some creativity, and ChatGPT will utterly fail. Example: write a maze generator.

There's utter panic that AI will take away our jobs. No, it won't - unless you're a midwit who can't actually code, just copies from a textbook. If your entire mental output is regurgitating panels and combining existing pieces of information, an AI will outdo you, on every field, ever.

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banking is how they gatekeep physical access and NPC midwittery is how they gatekeep social access. between bitcoin and ChatGPT, it's over.

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