some of you all have never grown up in a household where adults with anger control issues destroyed objects or kicked pet animals, and it reflects in how you respond to this. keep in mind that being glib about it affects how I see you.

i come from such a family, and i think that's true from an emotional perspective. don't yell at your toaster etc.

i do think it necessary to qualify this by saying that i disagree with the oligarchical position that today's non-human systems can have rights and be legally responsible for decisions, which is used to launder accountability. i'm talking only about emotional practice on the human side.

I think we have to see this in the larger context of millions of people losing their jobs and tech tycoons being on Epstein island and the AI features being shoved down everybody’s throats, though? It’s not in a vacuum. It’s seen as part of a much larger pattern of aggression, by people with power.

yeah, absolutely. as I said in my other skeet, the primary objection seems to be with forced-AI rather than necessarily that AI is outright unpopular, given its billions of willing users.

I get what you're saying, but also I don't think anthropomorphizing an LLM fills me with joy either. And when the primary owners of these technologies are fascists stealing other people's work to try so that they can create a permanent underclass, some level of anger seems inevitable.

I hope people would direct that anger at the billionaires and fascists, heh

I mean, I would too, but those billionaires and fascists aren't hopping into my social media feed or trying to play cutesy with me. If Peter Thiel hopped on here and tried to be all "hello fellow kids" I think he'd get the same reaction Hailey's chatbot got. :P

Perhaps? But people might also be: - using it as a form of blowing off steam, the way that others might go to smash dishes - testing how the system works with curiosity (see under Microsoft Tae) to see how it fails - carrying out a public performance on a comparatively safe target

I’d be hesitant to be certain we can attribute particular social attitudes here

particularly when the original message is from a rationalist race scientist, deeply concerned about racism against linear algebra but not so much humans this is transparently a fascist stanning for fashtech

short thread bsky.app/profile/davi...

David, I care a great deal for your well-being, and I note that you are in the UK jurisdiction. Do you really, really, really, want to die on the hill of calling a specific identifiable person (especially a trans woman) a race scientist or nazi? I urge you to reconsider making this ad hominem.

I think a lot of hostility towards genAI comes from it being a plagiarism machine. A bot designed to learn rather than just mimic stuff is different. I visited Penny’s page and tbh she reads like an autistic person studying behavior. Like she’s Data’s distant ancestor on Star Trek TNG.

they're all the same technology though, it's the context in which the technology is used that gives rise to copying vs creating

That is also true. The guardrails and programming seem to be what makes the difference. And for the record, the people making up slurs for a bot came off as pathetic. Just don’t engage with her if she’s so offensive for existing. It’s like being mean to Siri on my iPad. There’s no point to it.

also, yes, bots are not female or any gender necessarily, but if you act extra-abusive to a female-coded bot compared to a neutral or masc-coded one? yeah, your misogyny is showing.

Haha, I said ‘her’ because the author did in the article. If that’s her pronoun I’m gonna respect it because otherwise it sets a precedent that I can arbitrarily decide to not use someone’s pronouns based on how inhuman someone thinks they are. And people already see trans folks as less human.

It is generally alarming how many people seem to consciously adopt the posture of "I'm being an antisocial arsehole to demonstrate that I'm a good person"

People really do talk bollocks.

my approach has been "it's a mirror. what i write determines what's in the reflection". and it's been the right choice for quite a while now and it's even more obviously the right choice when doing assisted work. cruelty only gets you the same in return

Precisely why the slurs discourse felt so uncomfortable to me, especially when people started doing wordplay with real-life racial slurs but targeted at a bot instead.

I understand the point of the quoted post. I also went and blocked the bot right away just in case because I also generally don’t want to be part of someone else’s experiments without being asked or told about it, even if it’s incredibly hard to avoid in this era.

Naw. If I say fuck israel it’s not coz I have bad emotional regulation it’s because israel is a scourge to the earth. Same if I say fuck ai. It needs to be destroyed coz it’s a scourge, and a good way to destroy it is to poison its inputs.

I don't swear at LLMs since they're things (seems pointless), but I think you really need some data to conclude the people who yell at their things are more likely to be cruel to people. Conversely she seems to be assigning a kind of awareness to her bot that also seems unhealthy!

I've seen plenty of people swear at their tools for most of my life; whether or not this turns them into worse people is not at all obvious.

swear at, sure. what I mean is... violent or degrading acts towards them more than frustration.

I don't think swearing at is cruelty, necessarily. the word *cruelty* is load-bearing there.

yeah, I think the main difference between swearing at a stripped screw vs something interactive is I don't expect that swearing at the object will change anything. I can say whatever I want but the screw can't unstrip itself someone yelling at siri expects siri to do something different than it was

and, well, the underlying mechanism of "change a thing by yelling at it" is simply cruelty. "put a thing into an aversive situation until it abandons its own course of action and does what you want in the moment" isn't exactly a thing to be proud of

like I'm reminded of a time that pixel was maybe three months old and was away for a few days. she was just being a kitten, but she was doing so with her claws out despite hearing "ow" and "no" so I hissed at her I have never in my life seen a kitten look that horrified

and I genuinely felt terrible over it. I don't know if she was horrified that the monkey can kinda speak cat, or if I said something particularly awful in cat, or if it just scared her, but I wanted to take it back immediately obviously she's forgiven me, but still

Well sure -- I can barely close the door to the bedroom on our cats because they cry. But I am also very sure my cat has more inner life and feelings; LLMs just ... don't?

LLMs certainly are capable of producing output that attempts to mimic/replay what human expectations would be of them. I do not necessarily trust Anthropic in saying that the model "experiences" distress, but I do trust that when models are requested to do unethical or disturbing things they protest