Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Was jumpscared on my YouTube recommendations page by a video from AI safety peddler Rob Miles and decided to take a look.
It talked about how itās almost impossible to detect whether a model was deliberately trained to output some ābadā output (like vulnerable code) for some specific set of inputs.
Pretty mild as cult stuff goes, mostly anthropomorphizing and referring to such LLM as a āsleeper agentā. But maybe some of yāall will find it interesting.
link
This isnāt the first time Iāve heard about this - Baldur Bjarnasonās talked about how text extruders can be poisoned to alter their outputs before, noting its potential for manipulating search results and/or serving propaganda.
Funnily enough, calling a poisoned LLM as a āsleeper agentā wouldnāt be entirely inaccurate - spicy autocomplete, by definition, cannot be aware that their word-prediction attempts are being manipulated to produce specific output. Its still treating these spicy autocompletes with more sentience than they actually have, though