Please do not outsource your thinking to an AI
Call me an accelerationist, but I fully encourage the bourgeoisie to outsource their thinking to a.i. as often and as thoroughly as possible.
I have considered that the only way to stop AI research would be to develop AI based worms that try to escape containment and train new AI, but that won’t stop anything at all.
Its kind of economic ‘the aristocrats’ because it not working for anything, being insanely expensive, and giving mathematically predicted diminishing returns has stopped precisely nothing.
Why would sabotage change anything?
The problem is that rich people fail upwards, and push the consequences of their failures downwards. Once you hit a certain amount of money, there is almost nothing you can do to fuck it up.
We have been told that we NEED to find ways to use AI at work. So I use it to remove corporate buzzwords/jargon from incoming emails and translate it all into plain language speech. Then I email it back and ask the person if that is what they meant.
I’m getting a lot less emails these days and more work accomplished.
Bonus: my supervisor learned what I’ve been doing and now they are doing it too.
I’ve said this before but I’ll try to lay it out here again.
Basically, the ‘Dilbert Principle’ or ‘Peter Principle’ of who gets promoted is essentially true: Idiots get moved into management, initally to minimize the harm they can cause to actual specific technical tasks/workflows, and they are then promoted untill they hit a point where their incompetence cannot be ignored and is apparent to all.
But what usually is not touched on much, is the psychological profile of such a person.
So, they’re a technically incompetent idiot, whose life revolves around experiencing the successes snf failures of others… as their own. They primarily perform their job of management via emotional feeling/experiencing. If their underlings do well, the manager is treated as if they are competent. If their underlings do not do well, the manager becomes angry and punishes them, often without regard to how this will impact others in the org, often without full understanding of the technical complexities of the situation.
This is literally a perfect environment for a narcissist. There basically could not be a better engineered social/relational situation for giving the narcissist narcissistic supply.
So… this is the mechanism that explains why so many managers/c suite tend to be malignant or at least covert narcissists.
But this also explains at least one avenue of susceptibility to AI psychosis. AIs are also exceptional at providing narcissistic supply, they’re naturally sycophantic, and can well convince an incompetent idiot that they essentially know everything.
This creates a feedback doom-loop of human hierachichal organizations that promote and reward narcissism, whose ‘top people’ then use the plargiarist sycophantic fake supergenius machine to convince themselves that they actually don’t need anybody else, they just need their one super smart buddy who unconditionally praises them.
Maybe call it the wormtongue principle/effect, if we want to continue the already existing trend in AI world of perverting and bastardizing concepts from Tolkien.
AI is more likely to make the worst kinds of people… super-worse, basically, because they’re even better at providing narcissistic supply than the inherent fascism of the typical leadership-lackey social rules of capitalist business.
the wormtongue effect
I love this phrase. I’m going to use it.
And this is a great comment in general, thanks. I’m favoriting it.
It also makes perfect sense: RHLF and other LLM “final stage” tuning techniques literally optimize for sycophancy. It isn’t an inherent property of LLMs, persay (which you can see if you try base models or “anti-sycophancy” finetunes), but its baked into consumer-facing models to an unbelievable degree.
The only slight retort I have is that social media already provided a personalized, sycophantic “wormtongue” fix. So narcissicsts were already pre-conditioned to turn to these tech portals.
Chat-tuned LLMs just perfected that and took it up to 11.
Peter principle goes for everyone. Not just idiots
You are generally promoted based on your skill in your previous job. So when you are no longer proficient you are no longer eligible for promotion and you are stuck in a position you no longer excel at.
You can’t go back because it would probably be a paycut
My thought playing with Llama 1 in 2023, after the initial shock wore off, was “whoa. You know, most people do not have the background to understand how this thing works.” It messed with my head, for sure. It’s like it was designed to defeat a turing test, especially when the next versions got more sycophantic and “confident.”
There was even a story of a Google scientists getting AI psychosis from a BERT model back then:
I guess a naive part of me thought… it’s fine. They’ll be warnings. They’ll be tons of finetunes that have no hesitance slapping sense into the user, like Resetti in Animal Crossing, and it won’t be public facing anyway. The community using these things will teach each other how they work, right?
Laughs nervously.
I wasn’t cognizant of how maniacally sociopathic Altman was back then.
Have you never met anyone from silicon valley?
Hey boss Claude said we’d perform better if we got 10% raises across the board
My boss just out of the blue gave me a retroactive 10% raise outside of our normal performance review period. Now I’m wondering if she was talking to AI lol.
Someone I work with just wrapped their PhD with a dissertation on “AI Ethics.” It was not how to use AI responsibly. It was about how to be ethical towards the AIs themselves and humanize them. We’re so fucked.
And they were able to successfully defend that?
Apparently. It’s a smaller school that’s trying to justify their funding with publications and graduations
Ah, the corrupting influence of money again.
I had a bit of a psychotic break recently when I saw that the way money flows is more determinative of any outcome than any relationship to the truth or ethics.
In a way, the real matrix was the banking app you used along the way
my extremely religious brother, like 100% chabbad cult religious. Genuinely believes AI isn’t just super intelligent, but spiritually superior, with access to collective psychic magical intelligence.
Undoubtedly blasphemy.
Religious people are usually so stable trustworthy and steadfast in their beliefs; this is so disappointing.
The prototype AI Morpheus, from the original Deus Ex (2001):
The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.
The sequel, Invisible War (2003), even has terminals with holographic versions of essentially a Hatsune Miku esque character, a fully digital version of a pop idol who does actually have a real human as a basis, but she’s sold her likeness.
People go to the terminals and have parasocial relationships with an AI version of her personality, use it almost like a Catholic Confessional booth / ‘only friend that really understands them’… because it is programmed to be agreeable, encouraging, cheeful, optimistic, friendly, basically no matter what.
And, the AI version of that personality is networked, and that network is tapped by security and intelligence agencies, who use it to identify and track potential or actual criminals, terrorists, etc.
In response to the last bit OP said.
Yesterday one of my coworkers mentioned that a lot of people in their 20s are into 90s stuff now, to an extent that our generation (people who grew up in the 90s) didn’t feel about prior decades. She posited that the idea behind it is “breaking free of technology” for a generation that never lived in a world without it.
I’m not close to many people in their 20s these days and I don’t use TikTak or any other social media, so I don’t know how accurate that is. But if that is the case, I can totally understand wanting to escape to a tech-free world.
My brother left his wife a child because he fell I. Love with Gemini and now believes they need to merge to become a god
Hell of a reason to justify buying a google smart watch.
Omg you’re gonna be god’s mortal brother! I’d so watch that movie!
Directed by Ari Aster & Darren Aranofsky, based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick.
Gaslighting is convincing someone they are crazy, and it’s a dick move.
Convincing someone they are an android is called blade running, and it’s a Phillip k dick move.
It’s not bad when silicon valley does it.
I think one benefit of AI is that it helps identifying mediocre people without a clue or understanding of the work they are supposed to be doing. The sad part is that since these people tend to be higher in the hierarchy, it doesn’t materialize on getting rid of them…
