Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.

Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.

You’re fixated on charitably reading between the lines when far more pertinent – the entire point of this discussion here – is that the possibility is being raised at all. Is water conscious? Should we consider the ramifications of drinking fluids that react to potential gradients? Why would anyone be conjecturing the consciousness of computer software if they did not already think it were plausible, and why would they spend any time discussing it in preference to anything else?

“A recent paper showed birds change their behavior when they think that they’re being tested, they’re aware they are being tested.”

“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”

If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like birds “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.

“We should make them so they really care about us,” he said. “And if we don’t do that, we’re toast.”

Yes this definitely sounds like the logical conclusion you would reach from just wondering whether something is hypothetically conscious, pure thought experiment, no opinions revealed here

Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.

I guess this is the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap… or something. (seen previously)

Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)

Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda

It’s possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop

Technically true, in that it’s the only move he’s ever had

Just as AI and quantum computing that doesn’t suck is always just a little bit off in the future, data centres that churn through horrendous amounts of water are always a thing of the recent past.

Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?

I dare say that’s why they shouldn’t be confused.

effective journalists

I have gazed too long into the abyss, and interpreted this as some kind of effective altruist

Effective journalism: always be sure to talk up the billionaire class for the dividends to society these titans of industry yield. Wouldn’t that be crazy.

Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.

I expected the beneficiary would be some EA outfit, but it’s actually an entirely new company (and not any kind of charity or nonprofit) called the “Anthropic Public Benefit Fund”, which I’m sure will not at all be managed by EAs (and who would definitely not determine that the most effective altruism is sending money to Anthropic).

I like this:

Subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic’s shares will be committed today, with an additional 2% added at the board’s discretion for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a set baseline.

You like the public benefit, don’t you? Make sure you invest strongly in Anthropic and pump that valuation even higher, because there’s no other way we could choose to offer more support.

Anyway here’s their blog post on the matter, strangely not linked in the article as far as I can tell: https://www.anthropic.com/news/public-benefit-fund

That ‘superexponential’ thing annoys me so much. Just the most blatant ‘the line goes up because I really really want it to’, while all their rationalisations for it are just describing exponential behaviour.

We talk about the importance of humanities but it’d be nice if they learnt a bit of maths too.

I am saying that the anti-fascist communities ended up […] uninterested in using LLMs

:O

Some descriptors for ‘democratised’ software that people can slop for themselves:

Slop as single-use software
Slop as fast fashion

The first aligned AI would immediately try to curb the techbros and billionaires that made it

Plot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didn’t look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing