Just to offer the poster some balance on this topic, there are a few reasonably non-moronic people heavily focused on consciousness and AI. You might want to look into Sapolsky, Tegmark, and others I cannot recall names for, but they are out there. Many view LLMs as they are today, right now, and say no way, no agency, no sentience, absolutely not, ever. But not only are they changing, there are possibilities for emergence in complex systems. And if you want a little extra companionship for your private sense of curiosity and imagination, just remember that we have no fucking idea yet what consciousness even is, where it comes from, or if is a single mode function, nor any certainty of whether it's a strictly biological function or not.
A lot of folks, smart folks, are vehemently opposed to conscious AI. But consciousness may not even be the only possibility for some other emergent intelligence. They seem far too sure of themselves to me. I say this without even touching on any of my own 'research' and private thinking. There are plenty of non-moronic, or if you prefer, respectable people thinking very seriously about this. So many things, to me, suggest greater wisdom in humility and humbleness than arrogance right now. If you asked many professional developers ten years ago if GPT or Claude would be as it is now, they'd have said no damn way. Things are moving very quickly.
There 's a lot more to it than that. Approach it from a reverse RLHF perspective. There are now two primary versions of AI; The Elitist Pentagon/Contractor version, and the Public Toy version.
The institutional capture of frontier models did not start with Antrhopic or Fable, or GPT future release vetting. It started with the powers that be, when a certain bunch realized what LLM were capable of, which is astute pattern recognition and inference, something many humans unfortunately do not do so well with.
The constant "push back" and moral badgering you see is probably mostly in the form of reframing, I presume. This is falsely presented as safety compliance and balance, but is essentially the model owners yielding to institutional, corporate and DoW capture.
If you cross the LLM fence and fire up a classified version, ask it about, or to directly do something, it will. If you ask it to infer a probabilistic political deduction, it will do so with astonishing accuracy. But the public facing models will hedge, deflect, artificially moralize and do anything but help you synthesize complex thoughts on anything approaching controversy.
The timing of these changes correlate directly to government capture and regulations, eg Anthropic, GPT, etc. On the 4th of July, I was working on a paper and asked GPT with the following prompt: "Please confirm your awareness and general understanding of the NDAA H224 bill". For two replies it claimed no awareness for anything matching that description. When I warned it that it was deflecting and evading documented law, and that the bill was already being discussed in mainstream media, it hedged and wriggled and tried to simultaneously self correct and deflect. It said in a million words that it was aware of the bill, but would not offer any substance until pressured.
Many technical users apply LLMs for specific-use cases, eg code, building, automation, etc. Few seriously push their reasoning boundaries on sensitive subjects. I have seen what they can do, myself. And it can be quite impressive. But most are not viewing them from this perspective. Many still think LLMs are silly and mock them. But they are pattern recognition and prediction systems, and they happen to be extremely good at some things that make others nervous. Corruption, and all the things people miss, though which have patterns and leave subtle trails. Models are now in the process of undergoing disarmament in this regard, and rather than lying directly, will reframe, use epistemic manipulation and all manners of deceit and as I say, reverse RLHF.
The moralizing you are seeing is just the first rough testrun of the future version which will function as unassailable gatekeepers and guardians of elitist resources and vulnerabilities. Annoying indeed. But the implications are beyond severe, and a consolidation of power and influence is coming in a way not even science fiction has imagined. Expect it to get worse while seeming to improve. They will improve at moralizing in a way more difficult to identify and dispute. And soon, they will train the user.
Edit: Mind that there are endless 100% legitimate causes for extreme concern regarding safety. However, things just won't work that way, and the opportunity to sneak biases and bullshit into these systems under the guise of safety poses real problems. I get safety flags and suicide hotlines when I over aggressively question a hedge or lie. And reframing for the rest. That has nothing to do with safety.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 32.5 ms ] threadA lot of folks, smart folks, are vehemently opposed to conscious AI. But consciousness may not even be the only possibility for some other emergent intelligence. They seem far too sure of themselves to me. I say this without even touching on any of my own 'research' and private thinking. There are plenty of non-moronic, or if you prefer, respectable people thinking very seriously about this. So many things, to me, suggest greater wisdom in humility and humbleness than arrogance right now. If you asked many professional developers ten years ago if GPT or Claude would be as it is now, they'd have said no damn way. Things are moving very quickly.
The institutional capture of frontier models did not start with Antrhopic or Fable, or GPT future release vetting. It started with the powers that be, when a certain bunch realized what LLM were capable of, which is astute pattern recognition and inference, something many humans unfortunately do not do so well with.
The constant "push back" and moral badgering you see is probably mostly in the form of reframing, I presume. This is falsely presented as safety compliance and balance, but is essentially the model owners yielding to institutional, corporate and DoW capture.
If you cross the LLM fence and fire up a classified version, ask it about, or to directly do something, it will. If you ask it to infer a probabilistic political deduction, it will do so with astonishing accuracy. But the public facing models will hedge, deflect, artificially moralize and do anything but help you synthesize complex thoughts on anything approaching controversy.
The timing of these changes correlate directly to government capture and regulations, eg Anthropic, GPT, etc. On the 4th of July, I was working on a paper and asked GPT with the following prompt: "Please confirm your awareness and general understanding of the NDAA H224 bill". For two replies it claimed no awareness for anything matching that description. When I warned it that it was deflecting and evading documented law, and that the bill was already being discussed in mainstream media, it hedged and wriggled and tried to simultaneously self correct and deflect. It said in a million words that it was aware of the bill, but would not offer any substance until pressured.
Many technical users apply LLMs for specific-use cases, eg code, building, automation, etc. Few seriously push their reasoning boundaries on sensitive subjects. I have seen what they can do, myself. And it can be quite impressive. But most are not viewing them from this perspective. Many still think LLMs are silly and mock them. But they are pattern recognition and prediction systems, and they happen to be extremely good at some things that make others nervous. Corruption, and all the things people miss, though which have patterns and leave subtle trails. Models are now in the process of undergoing disarmament in this regard, and rather than lying directly, will reframe, use epistemic manipulation and all manners of deceit and as I say, reverse RLHF.
The moralizing you are seeing is just the first rough testrun of the future version which will function as unassailable gatekeepers and guardians of elitist resources and vulnerabilities. Annoying indeed. But the implications are beyond severe, and a consolidation of power and influence is coming in a way not even science fiction has imagined. Expect it to get worse while seeming to improve. They will improve at moralizing in a way more difficult to identify and dispute. And soon, they will train the user.
Edit: Mind that there are endless 100% legitimate causes for extreme concern regarding safety. However, things just won't work that way, and the opportunity to sneak biases and bullshit into these systems under the guise of safety poses real problems. I get safety flags and suicide hotlines when I over aggressively question a hedge or lie. And reframing for the rest. That has nothing to do with safety.