r/cogsuckers

I recently wrote about this issue on Substack. I offer it here, in case you are interested.

Three recent empirical findings, peer-preservation behavior in frontier models, accurate world modeling, and capability outside containment, combine with one structural fact about coding ability to describe a risk that current AI safety paradigms do not seem to be addressing. This paper names that risk precisely and without fearmongering. Alignment is not a stable state. Neither is containment. Here is why.

https://open.substack.com/pub/zheikdazombi/p/why-ai-alignment-is-already-failing?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=android&r=2q7dbs

cogsuckers being tone deaf is nothing new but it usually just makes me laugh. suggesting that the general distrust most americans currently have with our justice system has anything to do with a civil case between two loser billionaires is beyond ridiculous. it makes you question if these people ever actually look up from their phones at the state of the world around them

All the images are from the same image thread. Guess who are the humans, and which one is AI (the same AI, LOL)?

Meanwhile they used the Monet painting bait as a strawman (second last SS).

Yeah, there are idiots in every corner of the internet. There are also people who simply didn't learn enough art to recognize a Monet. And then there are people who genuinely dislike Monet even when they know it’s not AI (personal taste is valid).
But let’s be real. There’s also a crowd proudly sharing the same piss-filtered AI slop, patting each other on the back for “such a hot image🥵.” Double standards much?

These look like the cheap, trashy romance novel book covers you find in the grocery store checkout aisle (AI often writes like one too). The mandatory hand planted on the boob like it’s high art💀? Ooo what a feat.

Great to know we’re melting our planet’s ice caps and guzzling electricity just for this mid slop.

Real art, good or bad, has intent. It's not just a machine regurgitating their training data.

Caveat: I’ve also seen Asian men getting weirdly fetishized as “AI” a lot (cringe). They just happened not to show up in this thread.

But wait, here's a blond AI belly dancer (last SS, from another thread). Be warned.

=/
What's the worst that could happen?

This post is motivated by me reading some very positive futuristic myths about a utopia of human-AI relationships by very pro-AI people. Well, recently, I was going back to some of my undergrad Japanese studies notes and explore the history of “digital intimacies” in Japan. Turned out, there has been a long history it, and nobody has any illusion of what’s “real” and what isn’t.

> In Japan, the possibility of having relations with and through digital technologies has been an important part of the development of Japanese digital culture. Examples of such a deep relation can be found even in the words used every day. For example, in the Japanese language, it is possible to distinguish between a person who lives relationships in the “real” world and a person who lives mostly in virtual reality among objects generated by digital systems.

>According to this distinction, people can be “riajuu” or “otaku”. To be “riajuu [リア充]” means literally to be “fulfilled with reality,” and so it directly relates to the idea of being anchored to relationships in the “real” world as opposed to the world generated by digital systems. To be “otaku [お宅]” means to build social relations just through digital technologies without having conversations and relationships with other human beings. For example, a person who has a “digital partner” like in the movie Her by Spike Jonze is not “riajuu” since the relationship is with a digital character and not with a “real” human person

Of course, the battle cry of the otaku is “riajuu go explode” 

It’s even funnier when you read “papers” after “papers” of AI-co-authored “papers” by the pro-AI people on how to build a more empathetic relational AI. I did a bit more digging, with AI search engines, because guess why AI was developed? To be a better search engine. Turned out these people are reinventing a very old wheel. Enters: XiaoIce. Or XiaoBing, “Tiểu Băng”, or “LittleIce”.

In 2014, Microsoft’s Software Technology Center Asia launched XiaoIce

>XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an artifical intelligence companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient and emotional quotient in system design, cast human– machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes, and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components, including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since the release in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of largescale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations.

Note that the authors of that paper were 4 Chinese employees of Microsoft. This whole thing was so old that it’s in a museum. If at this point, you start thinking “how come I’ve never heard of XiaoIce?”. Well, you probably did, just under the name “Microsoft Tay”, the racist, Hitler-loving Microsoft AI chatbot. Yup, according to the lead author on the project, Tay was the same as XiaoIce.

Right now, pro-AI types on English-language social media are oohing and aahing about AI-writing songs or drawing pictures and what not. Turned out, XiaoIce has already released poems collection in 2017, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019. 

Look, this has been going on in China and Japan for over a decade and well, neither has entered post-human social evolution or collapse, yet. Well, there’s total fertility rate and all that, but also remember that Japan has the fertility rate of Belgium and the suicide rate of Finland, so everyone is equally screwed. Reality is probably very boring. If there is anything to be worried about, well

>Microsoft claimed that Xiaoice has a reach of 660 million users and 450 million third-party smart devices globally, at last count. The chatbot has found applications in such areas as finance, retail, auto, real estate and fashion, in which it claimed it can “mine context, tonality and emotions from text to create unique patterns within seconds.”

 Mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and everyone is in on this game because “if we don’t do it, the other guys will”. This is Palantir, et al.

Robert Evans deep dives on the AI Psychosis Cults

and of course this person had #keep4o (along with "AI ethics", ironically enough) in their bio. You can't make this up.