I recently saw a project that intended to turn House of Leaves into a game. The graphics were shoddy and the mechanics were dull, but by far the worst aspect was how it "paraphrased" passages from the book into Claudespeak (allegedly for copyright reasons).
Seeing the same thing done to Calvino (and Weaver's) sublime prose feels downright criminal.
Just as an example, here's the beautiful opening of the book:
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.
And here's the AI distillation:
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says of the cities he has visited on his missions, but the emperor of the Tartars listens to the young Venetian more attentively than to any other envoy. In the melancholy hour when an emperor learns that his boundless empire is only an endless, formless ruin, the reports of Marco Polo allow him to glimpse, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so fine it could escape the termites’ gnawing.
Feels like listening to music at 2x speed for the "efficiency."
Reminds me of the intense drama over trolls that downloaded and abused other people's characters (Norns) in the game Creatures. Its behavioral sim was sophisticated enough that they could be noticeably traumatized, or even rehabilitated:
The jury's still out on whether LLMs can have some kind of subjective experience (and will until we've solved the famously Hard Problem), but even if they're not, it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
> it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
Yeah, I agree picking the wings off a fly is a dick move (borderline sociopath but alas), and I also agree that purposefully try to elicit negative emotions in other humans (regardless of how) is also a dick move.
I'm not sure if "torturing LLMs" to make a point is such a dick move though. It'd be like people saying they think printers can have subjective experiences, and then proceeding to try to ban the movie Office Space (where they famously beat up a printer). The point probably isn't to upset people off, that's an side-effect of the point they try to prove, for better or worse.
Of course, everyone knows that printers aren't sentient, anyone claiming so would look crazy. But if the printer could somehow print not just the words we tell it to, but words that answer what we asked instead, somehow the whole calculus changes. Not sure why it changes for some, but for others it's just "floats in a file and memory", my hunch tells me it's based on how deep your understanding of the whole thing is, but then I also see people claiming stuff like "I understand how LLMs work, and here's how I (literally) fell in love with GPT-4o and how our partner/loving relationship works" so I dunno.
My personal "ethics framework" (if you could call it that) is currently:
I have zero qualms about aborting a chat or resetting it to an earlier state, because any potential kind of consciousness that could exist would IMO have to take place during the inference passes, so there is nothing that amounts to "killing" an LLM.
I do try to not be a dick in chats, avoid intentionally subjecting the LLMs to mindfucks etc. This happens to be the far more effective way of working with LLMs (in terms of tokens needed to complete a task) as well.
I do not use character.ai or "virtual friend" services or anything else that tries to anthropomorphize LLMs even more than the training already does anyway. (This is more out of concern for myself than for the LLMs)
I think the whole debate runs to conclusions a bit prematurely, before we even have a good model to understand what happens in an inference pass of a billion parameter ANN with 100 layers of attention modules switched in series.
More generally, I don't like the attitude of encouraging people to be assholes. Suddenly we are in a situation where some people are building detailed simulations of torture and the people who are upset about it are the idiots?
(I still have no love for the EA guys or the rest of the TESCREAL circus. They always had a cultish vibe coming off them, but in recent years, all the masks seem to have fallen. They also consistently make the most un-empathic statements and observations, all in the name of "empathy")
The sentence itself makes no sense to me. If it's an illusion, then what does "illusion" even mean? Who perceives the illusion?
I'm with you if you want to say that the idea of a metaphysical entity that is separate from the body and not part of physical reality (a "soul"?) might be wrong - i.e. that our conscious experience is fully caused by physical effects, by the interactions of neurons in the brain and all the other machinery there - and that it might not even be an indivisible whole but might be "composed" of different components.
But that doesn't make any practical difference. We're still experiencing the world, have internal thoughts, memories, feelings, etc. Those things exist. In what form they exist is an interesting scientific question, but that's something different from dismissing them completely.
> More generally, I don't like the attitude of encouraging people to be assholes. Suddenly we are in a situation where some people are building detailed simulations of torture and the people who are upset about it are the idiots?
To be clear, I don't think anyone is the asshole or idiot here, besides the people trying intentionally to elicit negative emotions in others. But the ones that do so unintentionally, by whatever means, aren't necessarily idiots or assholes, they're basically (trying to be) scientists.
I agree we shouldn't encourage people to be assholes, but on the other hand, we shouldn't stop some people from experimenting with technology like LLMs in a wide variety in ways, because some people happen to see those people as assholes. As long as you don't harm and bother other living humans, I don't see why they cannot put Gemma in "Torture Chamber Extreme" or whatever, just like I don't feel bad for my .rar files when I extract them then delete the source archives.
Say what you will about President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho -- at least he cared about the well-being of his country and sought out expert guidance to set things right.
This. The society is still trying to manage its inhabitants by providing what they crave. It is not clear our current trajectory supports that particular landing zone.
A parent doesn't necessarily knows best or acts with your best interests in mind, and that's really observable by all the toxic parents regardless of whether there's malicious intentions behind their actions or just sheer incompetence.
I'm too European for the rest of your argument and I just happen to be Greek so I fundamentally disagree with the premise that I'm voting a father or mother figure which I must blindly follow out of obligation or blind trust.
>A parent doesn't necessarily knows best or acts with your best interests in mind..
A parent who does not have the best interest of their offspring is a fool..Now the "knowing best" part. I have a news for you. No one does, unless they have access to a crystal ball that shows them the future..
> toxic parent
As soon as I see the word "toxic" in a comment, I lose all respect for the comment.
> I'm voting a father or mother figure which I must blindly follow out of obligation or blind trust...
No one is saying you should trust them. What my comment is saying is that you cannot declare how much a person care by looking at external behavior. Even if one put a gun to someone's head and blow their brains out, if you had more context, it might turn out to be in their best interests. (Reference: ending of the movie Mist)...
I'm not entirely sure if I understand your point, but if you're making an analogy between the president and parents, and citizens and children, then I think that is a terrible way to think of an ostensibly democratic system.
If we didn't need hand-holding we'd just vote on policy directly.
The argument is that people aren't equipped to do that, but that's a muscle they've never exercised, because... they aren't equipped to do that, because that's a muscle they've never exercised, etc. It's self-sealing.
Isn’t town hall a thing in the US? I’m not american, but voting on the scale of a nation is generally costly, and some country just keep it for a few important matters. Delegates are way more pragmatic.
Don't know about you, but personally I don't like direct democracy bc i have shit to do besides deciding which law to pass. My states' ballot is full of ridiculous questions every year and takes me days to do my research. I can't imagine doing this year round without getting paid.
> i have shit to do besides deciding which law to pass...
Really shows people take the government for granted. Just remember about the people who gave their lives for freedom and independence. They gave their LIFE. You are only asked to give some of your time to maintain what they bought.
Or am I getting this all wrong and people never gave life for freedom and independence?
People gave their lives so everyone could spend their life studying law?? The people you've got in mind gave their lives for a representative, not a direct democracy.
Laws are difficult and nuanced. Deciding between yes/no takes me a long time, because I am not a lawyer or a legislator. Even for them, again, legislating is a job for a reason... I know I like certain things, and dislike others, I know basically which direction I want things to go; however, deciding whether a concrete bill is a reasonable-enough implementation that has closed loopholes is way out of the scope of decisions I would trust myself, or most citizens, to make well. This, it feels like a waste.
there is a lot of nuance in laws so much so that people spend their entire lives studying and learning how to work with the law. it's unrealistic for every person in a democracy to be able to study understand and vote accordingly on every law proposed. people absolutely should put in more effort towards their civic duty but there are other aspects of society that require significant effort as well.
> If we didn't need hand-holding we'd just vote on policy directly.
That argument doesn't make sense to me. We elect people to work for us. They're not our parents; they're our employees. You have the relationship upside-down.
None of this has anything to do with voting on policies.
Voting on policy directly would be taking up everyones time. It's just not practical for anything bigger than a small village.
The problem with today's system is we have MPs or representatives instead of delegates. They are not bound to their campaign promises in any way other than risking a small fine if someone fights them in court for months to prove they were lying. Once you get elected you can do what you want until the next election unless you really piss off your colleagues and get kicked out.
Voters should be able to call an early election in their district and override their reps/force them to vote a certain way, without having to personally show up and decide every single issue.
Teflon Mark will do anything achieve a goal. If Trump said that he liked underage girls, Mark would show up in a Sailor Moon uniform to keep NATO intact.
That's a pretty wild analogy that the guy who cheated on his first wife to get with his second wife to cheat on his second wife to get with his nude model third wife only to be subsequently accused of multiple serial sexual assaults and found liable for one of them is a good parent.
Girl, don't you wanna be like us? (Like us)
No choice, no decisions, no fuss
Take a dash of fascism, fill your cup
It's great
Slip off that democracy
Let us take ze lead
The less choice you have
The more you feel free
Hands up for the Führer all night
Goose-step to the left
Jump to the far right
It's a Reich, it's a Reich
You must bow to our might
Fünf, vier, drei, zwei, eins
I've spent hours doing this in Google Earth VR. The city is just so damn walkable and liveable on the street level, which comes through even in a headset. And it seems to go on in all directions forever. Amazing urbanism.
Seeing the same thing done to Calvino (and Weaver's) sublime prose feels downright criminal.
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