I'm still working my way through your archives, so apologies if I missed this (or have yet to encounter it), but the mention of cosmic horror tickled my brain into recalling the AI as shoggoth meme that has been around the block a few times:
"In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called 'reinforcement learning from human feedback,' or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model."
"Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath."
"@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth 'represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.'"
"Comparing an A.I. language model to a Shoggoth, @TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable."
"'I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.'"
I imagine a dinner with The Hof(stadfter) would result in a sort of thought hangover.
One might treat it with careful doses of Saturday morning cartoons (do such things still exist?).
I'm still working my way through your archives, so apologies if I missed this (or have yet to encounter it), but the mention of cosmic horror tickled my brain into recalling the AI as shoggoth meme that has been around the block a few times:
"In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called 'reinforcement learning from human feedback,' or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model."
"Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath."
"@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth 'represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.'"
"Comparing an A.I. language model to a Shoggoth, @TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable."
"'I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.'"
(NYT Gift Link) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=AHkkKMWX5sfr2Ra_rBmg8V1lXAR4qNx0u0MI9yMIoosYuwyxSR622jIDwlbIRuMAn01rwtE30hzia6lbH8Z-gbt6-BD_mvDnukhNA_7-_TESvJ6aJZwLgzSnvrirLQjdOTpvGMhkWrjRXiBHuCjevErFvW4_Sns9yd8MrcEGpnqurxLSSOlVuZRvj_wb_mYaWZq9Mf3CyRqoM_NIVGHJ7-JsQJrlT4OdDS6ulwbgm1_wOhiT6dagveXzZapWwKlGDycddRqhA_RJYZkpG7AtxmizbE9jEZj9hnQpNwl6X90ITEA4-bkV8jR62wtoqulzcIANQaKhCAxY0fFjkg&smid=url-share