Someone tried Adobe's new Generative Fill "feature" (just the latest development in Adobe's infatuation with AI) with the prompt "take this elf lady out of the scene", and the results were...interesting:

There's also an option to rate whatever the fill gets you, which I can absolutely see being used to sabotage the "feature".

OpenAI has stated its scanning users' conversations (as if they weren't already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago.

So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job.

(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

Top AI Experts Concerned That OpenAI Has Betrayed Humankind

In a scathing open letter, luminaries from the AI industry are calling on OpenAI to prove that it has not betrayed humanity.

^{Noor Al-Sibai (Futurism)}

Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?

It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.

And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.

We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This

"We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This" is a quote from the Netflix sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.

^{Adam B. (Know Your Meme)}

argmin.net/p/the-banal-evil-of…

Once again shilling another great Ben Recht post. This time calling out the fucking insane irresponsibility of "responsible" AI providers to do the bare minimum to prevent people from having psychological beaks from reality.

"I’ve been stuck on this tragic story in the New York Times about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his life after months of getting advice on suicide from ChatGPT. Our relationship with technological tools is complex. That people draw emotional connections to chatbots isn’t new (I see you, Joseph Weizenbaum). Why young people commit suicide is multifactorial. We’ll see whether a court will find OpenAI liable for wrongful death.

But I’m not a court of law. And OpenAI is not only responsible, but everyone who works there should be ashamed of themselves."

The Banal Evil of AI Safety

Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

^{Ben Recht (arg min)}

It's a good post. A few minor quibbles:

The “nonprofit” company OpenAI was launched under the cynical message of building a “safe” artificial intelligence that would “benefit” humanity.

I think at least some of the people at launch were true believers, but strong financial incentives and some cynics present at the start meant the true believers didn't really have a chance, culminating in the board trying but failing to fire Sam Altman and him successfully leveraging the threat of taking everyone with him to Microsoft. It figures one of the rare times rationalists recognize and try to mitigate the harmful incentives of capitalism they fall vastly short. OTOH... if failing to convert to a for-profit company is a decisive moment in popping the GenAI bubble, then at least it was good for something?

These tools definitely have positive uses. I personally use them frequently for web searches, coding, and oblique strategies. I find them helpful.

I wish people didn't feel the need to add all these disclaimers, or at least put a disclaimer on their disclaimer. It is a slightly better autocomplete for coding that also introduces massive security and maintainability problems if people entirely rely on it. It is a better web search only relative to the ad-money-motivated compromises Google has made. It also breaks the implicit social contract of web searches (web sites allow themselves to be crawled so that human traffic will ultimately come to them) which could have pretty far reaching impacts.

One of the things I liked and didn't know about before

Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.

That is hilarious! Kind of overkill to be honest, I think they've really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks. But I like the author's overall point that this shut-it-down approach could be used for a variety of topics.

One of the comments gets it:

Safety team/product team have conflicting goals

LLMs aren't actually smart enough to make delicate judgements, even with all the fine-tuning and RLHF they've thrown at them, so you're left with over-censoring everything or having the safeties overridden with just a bit of prompt-hacking (and sometimes both problems with one model)/1