TechTakes

Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

I guess self-driving cars are not killing people fast enough and they're diversifying.

After a decade of cryptofascism and failed political activism, our dear friend jart is realizing that they don't really have much of a positive legacy. If only there was something they could have done about that.

Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I've refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I'd post to say the very final installment is done.

I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it's ridiculous.

Anyway now the series is done I'm going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture's propensity to far-right politics. I'll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that's your jam.