A Boring Dystopia

A fully automated, on demand, personalized con man, ready to lie to you about any topic you want doesn’t really seem like an ideal product. I don’t think that’s what the developers of these LLMs set out to make when they created them either. However, I’ve seen this behavior to a certain extent in every LLM I’ve interacted with. One of my favorite examples was a particularly small-parameter version of Llama (I believe it was Llama-3.1-8B) confidently insisting to me that Walt Disney invented the Matterhorn (like, the actual mountain) for Disneyland. Now, this is something along the lines of what people have been calling “hallucinations” in LLMs, but the fact that it would not admit that it was wrong when confronted and used confident language to try to convince me that it was right, is what pushes that particular case across the boundary to what I would call “con-behavior”. Assertiveness is not always a property of this behavior, though. Lately, OpenAI (and I’m sure other developers) have been training their LLMs to be more “agreeable” and to acquiesce to the user more often. This doesn’t eliminate this con-behavior, though. I’d like to show you another example of this con-behavior that is much more problematic.

A famous television producer in Israel has come under intense scrutiny following the uncovering of a series of inflammatory social media posts in which he called for a "Holocaust" against the people of Gaza.

Elad Barashi, who has worked in the Israeli entertainment industry for several years, sparked outrage after posting on X: "Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza."

In another post, he wrote, "I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers... or train cars... and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19834534

archive.is link

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.

When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: People kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.

“In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.”

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5613

There's two "full time" Lemmy developers, and one of them just added a repeating dialog box that will pop up regardless of instance asking for money to be sent to his and another lemmy.ml admin's personal accounts as a salary.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29037456

I feel like this is relevant to the sub. If not, feel free to remove.

I hadn't realized this episode had been sitting on my playlist since February.

But it's a long term view on war (defense) in space, and how it's been a favorite but useless toy of more than 1 potus.

And it's even more dystopian & pessimistic than the usual tone of this excellent podcast.

President Donald Trump wants to build an American Iron Dome. He even signed an executive order to make it happen. It’s a terrible idea, one we’ve tried before, and one that will make America less safe.

In this episode, Joseph Cirincione returns to the program to detail his personal history with complicated and costly missile defense systems.

• It all starts during a snowstorm in 1982 and with the High Frontier
• Zombie defense pitches
• It’s almost impossible to knock a bullet out of space with a bullet
• How Israel’s Iron Dome works
• Slow and hot vs fast and cold
• Lasers don’t work, thanks Teller
• Pitch: lasers in space. Reality: missile batteries in Alaska
• These systems only work half the time and only under perfect conditions
• SpaceX contracts abound!
• A Pentagon Powerpoint slide enters chat
• Jason’s Superman reverie, starring Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor
• How do China and Russia react?
• “The enemy gets a vote.”
• The last arms control treaty
• Ronald Reagan: anti-nuclear advocate
• How SDI kept us from eliminating nuclear weapons
• Anatomy of an arms race
• AI is coming to nuclear command and control