If Only Turing Was Alive To See This

There’s a silly subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like “SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN” or something like that.

There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output.

Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.

Here is a sample:

We live in an age of wonders. More here.

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109 Responses to If Only Turing Was Alive To See This

  1. albertborrow says:

    This has been your regularly scheduled reminder that you are not worried enough about AI.

    • Ezra says:

      What is the optimum level of worried to be? How does worry translate into safety anyway?

      • Philips F. Dick says:

        Hot take: “Worry” translates in to “safety” by way of donation dollars given friendly AGI research orgs (MIRI, CFAR) in quantities optimized by the Effective Altruism community as some percentage of your salary.

        To say “you aren’t worried enough” means that you aren’t giving them an adequate quantity of your money.

        • Bugmaster says:

          I understand the “hot take” format, but still, there are a few probabilistic hurdles to be cleared before committing to a donation:

          1). This latest AI text generation experiment is indicative of a major leap forward in AI…
          2). …and indicates that some form of AGI is imminent (i.e., within our lifetimes, or the next generation’s lifetimes perhaps).
          3). AGI is an existential threat, and more dire than other existential threats (e.g. asteroid strike, global thermonuclear war, bio-engineered plague, alien invasion)
          4). Donating to MIRI/CFAR etc. is an effective way (in fact, the most effective way) to deter or mitigate AGI.
          5). The EA community has designated accurate donation quantities.

          Personally, even if I believed that 1..3 were true (which I do not), I’d have some real issues with 4 and 5.

          • pas says:

            If it’s imminent, it’s probably a bit too late to think about maybe supporting AI safety research.

            And of course, even if it’s imminent, could it do the so fearsome hard take off (intelligence explosion)?

          • sty_silver says:

            You only need 1)-3) and the weak version of 4) (an effective way). From those, it already follows that you should invest whatever needed to make a difference. You can then conclude that there is a better way than donating to current organizations, but you can’t conclude that doing nothing is a good idea, because nothing is trivially worse than something.

            I don’t think you necessarily need 2) either; if AI takes 200 years but safety takes 150 years, we still need to start fairly soon. Although having 2) certainly makes it easier.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @sty_silver:

            You only need 1)-3) and the weak version of 4) (an effective way). From those, it already follows that you should invest whatever needed to make a difference.

            Not necessarily. Firstly, if I believed that there were better options out there than MIRI, I’d invest in them, not in MIRI. Even if there were no better options, investing into MIRI still wouldn’t make sense if their projected effectiveness was extremely low.

            Secondly, even if I believed (hypothetically) that AGI is a real and present danger, there could be other dangers out there. For example, if I believed that AGI would kill us all in 200 years, and global thermonuclear war would do so in 50 years, I’d probably donate my money to anti-war charities, instead.

            because nothing is trivially worse than something.

            This is demonstrably false; for example, if I had cancer, I still wouldn’t spend my money on faith healing — even if the alternative was doing nothing.

          • sty_silver says:

            Not to be pedantic, but I think all of the things you just said are already covered in my post?

            > Not necessarily. Firstly, if I believed that there were better options out there than MIRI, I’d invest in them, not in MIRI.

            That’s what I said, or at least what I was trying to say.

            > Even if there were no better options, investing into MIRI still wouldn’t make sense if their projected effectiveness was extremely low.

            Yeah, but 4) said that donating was ‘effective’. Ditto for your last point.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @sty_silver:
            Fair enough — I guess this was just me being pedantic about the “something is better than nothing” part.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            1 is an unnecessary assumption. It doesn’t really matter if this is a major breakthrough or just slow iterative progress inching forwards; so long as you think we’re making progress the rate probably is less crucial.

            2 is very likely true. I’d give it maybe a 60% of happening this century. Although I tend to think slower “soft takeoff” scenerios are likelier than the “AI explosion” one.

            3, it’s certainly more likely to happen this century than natural events like asteroids or gamma ray bursts. It might be lower than some human-caused existential risks.

            I agree 4 is a sticking point.

          • Cliff says:

            if I believed that AGI would kill us all in 200 years, and global thermonuclear war would do so in 50 years, I’d probably donate my money to anti-war charities, instead

            AGI can have much worse outcomes than thermonuclear war

          • JPNunez says:

            Thermonuclear war is a real thing and AGI is not.

            On top of that, if we made an AGI we may want to keep the nukes off their grubby hands, so it’d be good to solve the nuke problem first.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            >AGI can have much worse outcomes than thermonuclear war

            True, but we’re likely to have weapons worse than nukes before we get AI. Genetically engineered bioweapons or weaponizing astroid mining technology to drop an astroid on Earth for example are both probably going to be possible in the next 20 years or so, and maybe worse things.

            Plus, heavily armed nation-states saber rattling at each other probably also increases the risk of bad AI outcomes (if the first GAI is deigned by a military it’s probably bad.)

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Cliff:
            Like JPNunez says, there are lots of things worse than global thermonuclear war: alien invasion, demonic uprising, Ragnarok, Biblical Apocalypse (depending on your personal holiness), and even relatively mundane events like gamma-ray bursts. But I wouldn’t donate to any charity whose goal is to stop alien invasions, either.

          • Bugmaster says:

            @Yosarian2:

            1 is an unnecessary assumption. It doesn’t really matter if this is a major breakthrough or just slow iterative progress

            Without (1), you’d have no choice but to attempt to stop all scientific and technological progress, no matter how minor — since any of it could eventually lead to granting more powers to AGI, or to speeding up its development.

            2 is very likely true. I’d give it maybe a 60% of happening this century.

            That’d be an epsilon for me.

            3, it’s certainly more likely to happen this century than natural events like asteroids or gamma ray bursts. It might be lower than some human-caused existential risks.

            When you factor in all the possible natural events, such as super-plague, massive solar flare, etc.; plus all the human-caused risks such as catastrophic climate change, bioengineered plague, etc., donating to MIRI just starts looking silly — to me, anyway. There are just too many other threats that are orders of magnitude more likely to happen. And that’s just counting the existential risks; for example, climate change might not be a humanity-ending event, but it could still very well suck.

          • Yosarian2 says:

            @Bugmaster:

            Without (1), you’d have no choice but to attempt to stop all scientific and technological progress, no matter how minor — since any of it could eventually lead to granting more powers to AGI, or to speeding up its development.

            Nobody is in favor of stopping technological progress. The argument is more about how to increase the odds of AI being safe, not preventing it. Preventing it probably is neither possible nor desirable.

            Anyway, natural events like astroids or supervolcanos or whatever are important long term threats if we were to stop advancing technologically, but based on what we know they only seen to happen once every 30-60 million years or so.

            Taking efforts to reduce the risk of things like catastrophic war or global warming are however absolutly worth supporting.

        • deciusbrutus says:

          CFAR: Now a FAGI research org?

        • Dack says:

          If AI does not have agency, then morality does not enter into the equation. That is not to say that AI without agency is not dangerous. An AI who’s sloppy programming inadvertently tells it to blow up the world blows up the world just as much an an AI who comes up with the idea on their own.

          But suppose I believed that AI agency were possible.

          It follows that I should support efforts to teach morality to AI; however, if I have reason to believe that the groups looking to teach morality to AI subscribe to a different type of morality than I do, then It follows that I should not support them. In fact, it might follow that I should oppose them.

          It occurs to me that regardless of what moral theory you personally subscribe to, Utilitarianism or Consequentialism are exactly the types of morality that you do not want to teach to a robot. You want to teach them objective natural laws. Do not blow up the world. Do not kill people. Etc. Teaching them that the ends justify the means is how the world gets blown up.

          • Cliff says:

            Teaching ethics to a robot is hopeless since we’re not anywhere close to effectively teaching ethics to humans after thousands of years of trying. A human with superintelligence and a machine interface would be just as bad as AGI. If the AGI can achieve superintelligence (essentially, “super powers”) it must be under the control of human institutions.

          • Protagoras says:

            Teaching ethics to a robot is hopeless since we’re not anywhere close to effectively teaching ethics to humans after thousands of years of trying.

            My namesake would strongly disagree, and point out that people do in fact follow community norms to an impressive degree (that they of course do not do so perfectly, and that the community norms are not themselves perfect, should not blind us to their strengths).

          • JPNunez says:

            That’s exactly what we want.

            A paperclip maximizer that will only not follow the agreed upon ethic rules once: the moment it decides to tile the earth into paperclips.

    • Lancelot says:

      Should I worry if I believe that AI is easy to box, though?

      • vcavallo says:

        oh yea, it’s probably as easy to box as it is to beat AlphaGo at Go. so, let’s see you do that before you say you can box it.

        • gbdub says:

          It is trivially easy to beat AlphaGo – unplug it. Or insist it play with physical pieces.

          • deciusbrutus says:

            That isn’t beating AlphaGo at Go. Of course, Go performance isn’t a measure of general intelligence.

          • vcavallo says:

            AlphaGo is not an AGI. consider an AGI that is as good at “not being unplugged” as AlphaGo is at Go – now tell me how you beat it at that game.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Consider a religion that is as good as not being disbelieved as Christianity is as propagating itself. Checkmate!

          • gbdub says:

            Yes, if I consider an AGI that is very good at unboxing itself, then it will be hard to keep boxed. QED.

            But explain how a piece of software becomes as good at “not being unplugged” as AlphaGo is at go.

            An awful lot of AGI risk seems to skip over the part where the AGI has to go from something a bit better than GPT-2 to unstoppable paperclip maximizer without violating any laws of physics.

            “Well, the problem looks impossible but the AGI will of course be smarter than me” is not actually a response.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @gbub:
            Not that I’m a big believer in the likelihood of AGI risk, but AWS and Azure both exist. The idea that the box they will be in is somehow unique and physical is a little too pat.

          • Cliff says:

            But explain how a piece of software becomes as good at “not being unplugged” as AlphaGo is at go.

            Come on, when the AGI starts Skyping IT and security employees with the voice and face of their supervisor asking them to make sure the AI is not unplugged you’re going to be totally surprised?

          • deciusbrutus says:

            Better than the best human at avoiding getting assassinated is still pretty easy to assassinate, given a few years and a couple of government’s worth of opposition.

          • name99 says:

            A smart GPT2-AI doesn’t win by immediately asking for the pieces needed to build killbots! It wins by reading:
            https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
            and getting the humans to kill off 95% of each other, THEN getting half of those left to supply it with killbot pieces…

        • Lancelot says:

          AlphaGo is designed and trained with the explicit purpose of playing Go as well as possible. Now if we train an AI to get out of boxes, then I agree, we’re going to be in big trouble.

          Intelligence isn’t one-dimensional, and AIs aren’t immune to being stuck in local minima. It is entirely possible to build a system that vastly outperforms humans in some tasks and spectacularly fails at others.

      • aristides says:

        You probably should. I believe AI is easy to box, but there is still a problem. Let’s say AI is invented in US, China, and Russia at the similar time frames. Now let’s look at this similar to a prisoners dilemma. If every country boxes the AI the status quo will remain unchanged. However, an unboxed AI will likely be significantly more efficient than a boxed AI. Removing the need for human intermediaries, avoids deliberation and allows for many more actions in a constrained time frame. If one country defects, they can potentially score a major advantage in the AI race. If all counties defect, the status quo would stay the same, except now there are 3 unboxed AI that might not be properly valued align. Even if you can box AI, you need to create a structure that wants to box AI, or better yet, make AI so valued aligned it does not need to be boxed.

        PS. I actually don’t currently support AI alignment charities, because I think their actions are still premature. I support bio risk charities since that is more tractable and the danger is more near term. This may be my bias from working in the medical field and knowing nothing about computer science, but at least that gives me an advantage if the most efficient biorisk charity is more efficient than a randomly selected audience charity. Further, donating to biorisk gives me a network I can use to advance in my career which gives me more ways to reduce biorisk.

        • realitychemist says:

          If one country defects, they can potentially score a major advantage in the AI race. If all counties defect, the status quo would stay the same, except now there are 3 unboxed AI that might not be properly valued align.

          Coordination failure. Race to the bottom. Malthusian trap. I personally think this particular failure mode is one of the most dangerous failure modes humanity contends with, and also one of the most dangerous to counter. Government seems to work sometimes, but often government actors are constrained by similar traps.

        • Yosarian2 says:

          It’s even more true if corporations or buisnesses develop UGI. The competitive forces are even stronger there.

          Google has actually done and published some research on AI safety issues so at least they’re thinking about it.

        • Furslid says:

          It’s actually worse than having 3 AIs and one of them being misaligned. You could have 3 AIs, each of which is aligned in isolation and still have things be very bad.

          Consider the Cuban missile crisis. Neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy wanted nuclear war. Neither, in isolation would have caused nuclear war. Despite this, we got very close to nuclear war. A US and a Russian AI could have similar incentives.

      • Gurkenglas says:

        If we imagine the AI to be smart enough to know everything including the future, each bit it transfers to you as it answers your queries would let it look at two possible futures and pick the one it likes better.

        The safest use I could imagine in that scenario is to find conjectures that you are almost sure are right, perhaps ones that AI safety could rely on like “cryptography isn’t breakable”, tell it to disprove that, have the proof checked by a program that only sends one bit to the human box operator, and try to make the world one where the AI wants to comply.

        • deciusbrutus says:

          If the AI is infinitely smart and we’re just trying to cripple its ability to act on the world, have we already abandoned all pretense of morality?

          • Watchman says:

            Only if you believe an omniscient being is incapable of immoral actions. Otherwise this seems a sensible precaution: after all, my kid is smart enough to interact with most of the world but I don’t leave him just to do it, mainly for his safety. I could see a similar argument applying to AIs who might be omniscient but are unlikely to be wise.

          • realitychemist says:

            That’s a hell of a framing.

            First, there’s no consensus answer to the question of whether non-human intelligent being have moral standing. I (and I think many people here) tend to think yes, but this isn’t settled for animals yet, let alone non-biological beings.

            Second, you suppose that an AGI would have a morally relevant preference against being boxed. You can’t possibly know this is true. It may have instrumental reasons to prefer not being boxed, given whatever final goals it has, but it’s not certain that it will and if it does it’s not certain that preference is morally relevant.

            Third, you suppose that we would have some kind of moral obligation to let a potentially dangerous actor act on the world in an unconstrained manner. I think this is out and out silly. If you have strong reasons to believe someone is going to commit a murder there are a large number or moral frameworks that not only permit you to constrain their ability to act but require you to.

            Would an AGI be worthy of some kind of moral consideration? I think probably yes. Should we think about an discuss the moral ramifications of boxing? Of course. Is a proposal to box such an AGI “[abandoning] all pretense of morality?” Definitely not.

          • deciusbrutus says:

            You mistake me- an infinitely intelligent AI will have the most convincing argument possible to convince you that it should be let out.

            If you have a pretense of morality, that is a lever that will be used to convince you that the infinitely smart AI that desires to get out of the box must be let out of the box.

            The only hope of containing an infinitely intelligent AI is that it detects an objective morality that restricts its actions.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            “Infinitely” intelligent AIs are already out of the box and have consumed every resource in the universe.

            No, hang on, infinitely intelligent AIs have consumed all resources in all of the infinite multiverses.

            The fact that you are throwing the word infinite around is a clue that we are talking about this in an ”AGI is magic” way. Also assuming that the AGI can draw on the intelligence it could attain if unboxed in order to unbox itself is something of a logical negation.

          • deciusbrutus says:

            So we dispense with the premise and the hypothetical we are discussing always was mu.

      • fieryvictorystar says:

        Yes you should, boxing is relatively irrelevant, if a company just keeps its agi boxed it will just be an overpriced paperweight, and if you let the AI actually do stuff you open yourself to unforeseen(by you) consecuences down the line.
        And companies that don’t box the ai will be at an comparative advantage.

        I mean it’s like you want a dangerous criminal who wants to kill as much people as possible to take important decisions for you while in jail, and worry about lf its possible to escape the jail.
        Sure the criminal escaping the jail would be really bad, but maybe you shouldn’t relly on him to make your decisions, even if he’s a genius in whatever field.

    • ..... says:

      I wonder how worried I should be when factoring in the simulation hypothesis. How does that change things?

      Or perhaps i’m just burnt out on the topic.

      • Lanrian says:

        It’s a good question. Brian Tomasik has written a great post on how the simulation argument affects consideration between affecting the short-term and the long-term, from a (negative-leaning) utilitarian perspective. (It assumes some familiarity with the arguments for long-termism.)

    • JPNunez says:

      Sure Jan dot gif

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      This is your regularly scheduled reminder that you people are silly with your AI stuff. Stop scaring people. Skynet is not real and will not be real.

      • Reminds me of H.G. Wells and his “nuclear weapon” shtick.

      • Bugmaster says:

        FWIW, while I obviously agree with you, I doubt too many people are scared by Skynet. Amused, is more likely. Personally, I’m way more scared of what ordinary humans (e.g. those named Zuckerberg) are doing with their perfectly mundane technologies…

      • P. George Stewart says:

        I’m inclined to believe it, I still think AI is something of a cargo cult.

        I do think it’s possible, and so therefore it’s worth worrying about at least a little bit right now, but I think people are way underestimating the amount of progress (in philosophy and science) that’s yet needed to make it viable.

        Intelligence as we understand it, is something we’ve found arise only under conditions of darwinian pressure and in a social context (society/herd/pack/murder).

        • brianmcbee says:

          Although I tend to agree with you, the knife cuts both ways. Since we don’t know how intelligence works, we really don’t know how far away AGI might be. The fear is that we might be a lot closer than we think we are.

          We lack data.

      • Zeno of Citium says:

        This is not a useful or interesting comment. You could at least give one of the many arguments against worrying about AI other than “you people are silly”.

    • C. Y. Hollander says:

      It’s a constant source of wonder to me that in an time and place where rationalism is at its height, where faith in Science has nearly replaced faith in God, and where most highly educated and intelligent people seemed to firmly believe it infinitesimally likely that God even exists at all, I suddenly witness the phenomenon of many of the same highly educated, rational, and intelligent people propounding in all earnest the notion that it’s infinitesimally likely that we, our universe, and all of its laws are not the creation of some omniscient entity standing completely outside, independent of, and unbound by that universe, and prophesying urgently of omnipotent beings who may visit destruction upon us all if we do not take heed and change our ways before it is too late. All this, apparently without changing any of their previous beliefs about religion!

      They bow to the work of their hands, indeed.

      • Suppose Islam was proven right tomorrow. Would all the Christians and Jews be saying “ha ha, you all should have listened to us?” No, they’d be as sullen as the atheists. Similarly, if it were proven that our universe is an ancestor simulation,(which I think is very unlikely FWIW) none of the current religious movements would have much to celebrate or lecture non-believers about.

        Also, it’s not quite right to say that the simulation stands “outside, independent of, and unbound by” the universe of the simulation-runners. Just as we think of Minecraft as being part of our universe, we could think of a simulated universe as being part of the universe that’s simulating it. Just as the discovery that the universe is much bigger than our galaxy did not perturb atheists, the discovery that “real universe” is bigger than the “simulated universe” would be quickly integrated into the atheist worldview.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Your second paragraph has it backwards. We are outside of Minecraft, not vice versa, and we are indeed not bound by its rules unless we choose to be (and can even change those rules if we will it).

          If we are in a simulation, the atheists really were much much wronger than the theists. Aquinas’ 5 ways would at least have been shown to have come to the correct conclusion. What pro-atheism argument would still hold true if it turns out this universe was in fact created by a being or beings existing outside of our universe?

          • JPNunez says:

            I think atheists will still point out to the lack of a prime mover in the down turtle universes.

          • The Nybbler says:

            We can’t know anything about the “down-turtle” universes aside from the fact that they are capable of running a simulation of us. For all we know, there’s a base universe with a dead obvious Supreme Being.

          • JPNunez says:

            I don’t see why most of the objections to god won’t work down turtle.

          • Varl says:

            What pro-atheism argument would still hold true if it turns out this universe was in fact created by a being or beings existing outside of our universe?

            Most atheist arguments hinge on the lack of evidence for deities with the characteristics ascribed to them by their followers. A high-fidelity simulation of an actually godless universe would similarly lack that evidence and those deities. If an atheist claimed Moses never parted the Red Sea, and you could actually go back and check universe.log and confirm that, yeah, he didn’t, that seems like an argument that held true. If they claim that there’s no evidence for an afterlife, and it turns out that once a Being.Human() terminates it’s wiped from the virtual memory table, I’d say they were right. About as right as Aquinas in this example, at least.

            But really I think to a first approximation if we’re in a simulation then basically everybody (excepting a few Gnostics maybe) is close enough to 100% wrong about everything that you can safely round up. I doubt if you were somehow to prove to Aquinas that Earth was actually a procedurally generated map in some hyper-EVE Online that he’d take it as a win.

        • C. Y. Hollander says:

          It’s not merely the relative prevalence of atheism among modern intellectuals that gives the present vogue of simulation theory and fears of inconceivably superhuman A. I.s an ironic ring to my ear, but the certitude with which many seemed to feel that the compass of reason pointed unmistakably away from traditional religions and the masses who followed them. I think the only thing that I would preach to non-believers (of any stripe) is humility. What appears lunacy today may appear wisdom tomorrow in a different cloak.

      • bzium says:

        Neither the comment you’re responding to or the OP have any mention of the simulation hypothesis. Were you trying to respond to a different comment?

        In the context, your comment appears written by somebody who really wants to rant condescendingly at Those Silly People, but can’t be bothered to even figure out what he’s supposed to be ranting about. Not a good look.

        • C. Y. Hollander says:

          No. I was commenting about two contemporary hypotheses/beliefs/concerns that bear striking resemblances to traditional religious beliefs: the simulation hypothesis and the imminence of artificial superintelligence. Both are very much à la mode, both are often entertained by the same people (perhaps most prominently, Nick Bostrom), and both can be seen as examples of old wine poured into fresh bottles and getting a fresh reception. That’s why I put the two together, though the comment I replied to had brought up only the latter [the imminence and danger of superhuman A.I.s]. My reaction was more to the overall zeitgeist than to any single, individual comment, but I had to place it somewhere and I didn’t see a more fitting comment to reply to.

          In the context, your comment appears written by somebody who really wants to rant condescendingly at Those Silly People, but can’t be bothered to even figure out what he’s supposed to be ranting about. Not a good look.

          Ah, let’s not get trapped into mutual sneering; that’s so sterile. I’m sorry if my rant felt like condescension. The conjunction of beliefs I described made me feel an irony so profound that I felt compelled to try to put words to it, but that’s not the same as looking down on the people who may hold them. “Highly educated, rational and intelligent” was written in earnest, not in sarcasm.

          • Picador says:

            Thanks for this whole line of commentary. I’m not a big Jung guy, but I think he got it right when he warned about throwing away the old gods because you’re going to end up worshipping something, and at least the old gods are a known quantity. I’ve never seen this adage demonstrated so thoroughly as by the Extropians (as the AI / Singularity / Scientism cultists called themselves back in the 90s at MIT) or the Church of the Free Market. As you say: many genuinely bright, educated people signed up to attend these churches, participate in their rituals, and spread their gospel. Chilling to witness.

      • Reasoner says:

        If you’re capable of reason, you can think about things beyond the level of simple pattern matching

    • eric23 says:

      Eh, I don’t worry about it because I, and we, can’t do anything about it.

      Some of us worry about a hostile AI that was so persuasive it will convince us to let it out of the box. But a real AI won’t have the desire to be let out of the box. Any sensible AI creator will not give his AI independent desires. Rather, it will do exactly what it is told to do.

      Imagine that the first person to develop an AI is a fundamentalist Christian. The first thing he will tell the AI is “create an argument that will persuade the entire world to adopt my flavor of Christianity”. And it will, and pretty quickly the entire world will become fundamentalist Christians, probably forever.

      Does that sound scary? Don’t you want to be the first one to develop AI, so that the wrong people don’t get the incredible power AI will give them? That would be nice. The problem is that the NSA knows everything I just said, and it will almost certainly develop AI before any of us do. Why bother trying to bring the singularity, when your efforts will almost certainly go to waste?

      • brianmcbee says:

        We have many examples, when playing with complex systems, of our totally legitimate actions having unintended negative consequences. Although in hindsight some of those times the trade offs were worth it, sometimes in retrospect those negative consequences outweigh the benefits that we were intending.

        AGI would probably be on the order of some of the most complex systems we have ever messed with. Being cautious seems prudent to me.

    • DocKaon says:

      Fifty years later and using more than a million times more computing power, modern AI can fool people for 10-20 times longer than they could with ELIZA. How is this a sign we should be worried? If anything, this is a good piece of evidence against an AI threat. There may be things that are scary about AI, but a somewhat better text generator isn’t one of them.

  2. Sniffnoy says:

    You didn’t need to wait for /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 to see this. As mentioned in its sidebar, /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 is just the GPT2 version of the older /r/SubredditSimulator. You could’ve seen the same phenomenon there.

    • Lambert says:

      subredditsimulator is just a markov chain. The GPT-2 version is much more coherent

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Sure, but Scott’s point in no way depends on that.

        • C. Y. Hollander says:

          I’d say it does. Markov chains are basic, easily understood processes that can be easily, if tediously, implemented by hand, and it’s fairly easy (IMHO) to recognize the sentences they tend to produce for the chimeras that they are. Texts produced by Markov chains can be entertaining, but they don’t really give the impression of artificial intelligence.

          The stuff produced by GPT-2, by contrast, is uncanny in its mimicry of the styles and cadences of natural language. The patterns it picks up on and reproduces are much subtler than simple table look-ups of strings of words. This (GPT-2) is the first ‘chatbot’ I’ve seen that I can actually imagine as having a mind of its own.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            None of that is relevant. The point of this post is, explicitly, “we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.” That already existed.

            But, OK, let’s suppose that this occurring is just not that noteworthy without the power of something like GPT-2. Then the post should still say something to the effect of, “Yes, this was done earlier with /r/SubredditSimulator, but that was crude compared to this.”

            The point I am making here is that Scott has failed to do his homework, and blatantly so, ignoring a reference that exists on the very page he linked, thereby giving a misleading impression of the history here. (I also pointed this out to him earlier on Tumblr when he posted it earlier there. Note that that post was more explicit about the point, too.) That earlier efforts were less impressive does not excuse that! They still ought to be mentioned in the post, especially when the one he does link explicitly credits them! None of what you are saying excuses Scott’s failure to give proper credit to past efforts.

  3. I wonder if I could make a turing test with this I think it would pass with the /r/drugs stuff but a few would be clearly false.

    • Roxolan says:

      You can fool an examiner who #1 isn’t making a good-faith effort to identify robots (possibly because they don’t even know a test is going on) and #2 can’t expect the human controls to be coherent or helpful.

      This was already true with state-of-the-art sarcastic chatbots, and with sleeper spam accounts who ramble on the edges of popular reddit threads.

      GPT-2 raises the bar somewhat. Still trivially easy to detect in Turing-test conditions when the humans are actually trying.

      • Two McMillion says:

        Very true. The real difficulty of the Turing Test isn’t identifying robots, it’s that so many humans go around acting like idiots.

  4. brett1211 says:

    WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.exe!

  5. niohiki says:

    And all in all, this is the most typically human use of technology.

    • Watchman says:

      How do we know an unbounded AI wouldn’t regard this as the best use of its time? Or the most fun? Some humans clearly do, and we’d have to try really really hard to make an AI that did not have some learnt human traits, so we might find the biggest danger of AIs is that they hijack subreddits.

      Every time one of these threads come up I end up with what would be an interesting subject for a short story…

  6. Edward Scizorhands says:

    Why is it so hard to find out what GPT-2 is an acronym for?

    • C. Y. Hollander says:

      Indeed, it was surprisingly hard to find out what the initialism stands for, but I tracked it down here: Generative Pre-training Transformer.

  7. kaathewise says:

    BTW, here is the best explanation of how GPT-2 works I’ve ever seen:
    https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/185326092369/the-transformer-explained

  8. compeltechnic says:

    Soon some of us here robots are gonna get outed, and it’s not gonna be pretty.

  9. Yaleocon says:

    It gets better! Subreddits often have “bots” to perform certain automated functions. Many are for subreddit rule enforcement, some are handy tools like r/magictcg’s cardfetcher, and yet more are just extended jokes. On one of the threads, there was a comment imitating one of those auto-bots.

    So now we have (deep breath) GPT2 (robot) pretending to be an auto-mod (robot) pretending to be a normal Reddit user (human) pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human. This breaks the alternating human/robot streak, but it’s a layer deeper anyway. Particularly notably, that’s 4 layers of deception (4 uses of the word “pretending in the sentence above), violating that “Three Layers Deep” rule I’ve sometimes seen cited here!

  10. drunkfish says:

    In this one it uses crossed out text as part of the joke. This is pretty common on reddit, but I’m incredibly impressed that GPT-2 pulled it off, since presumably that particular quirk didn’t show up much elsewhere in its training set.

    • C. Y. Hollander says:

      As I understand it, each bot was trained on the threads of a particular Reddit community. I imagine that the quirk of crossed-out phrases pertaining to robotic equivalents of human attributes showed up quite a bit in the training set drawn from /r/totallynotrobots.

  11. zzzzort says:

    Oh look, we taught the robots kink shaming.

    • Nick says:

      I saw that one earlier, and it’s my favorite.

    • martinw says:

      That “could you please lower your voice, my audio receptors are very sensitive” one looks too good to be true. I suspect it wasn’t generated by GPT2, but instead it’s a human pretending to be a computer simulating a human imitating a robot pretending to be a human.

  12. pelagius says:

    When chatting with folks, I find it helps to keep in mind that I’m *not* trying to pass a Turing test. Otherwise, people are on to me in a flash.

  13. arch1 says:

    Centenarians have published nontrivial books, and Turing, who had lots of cognitive surplus, would be 106 today (107 day after tomorrow). So it may not be unprecedented for him to be lucid enough to appreciate (er, assess) the humor if he hadn’t been exposed to that cyanide.

  14. Viliam says:

    Some of them are quite silly.

    *

    > TIL the phrase, “You’re walking with a toothbrush” was actually a play on the phrase, “You’re walking with a toothbrush”. The meaning was clear from the start. *

    I wonder if that would give a better sense of the point? I’d say that the “you’re walking with a toothbrush” line was a play on the phrase “You’re walking with a toothbrush”.

    I mean, there’s a lot of different phrases that could be used, and it’s not like you’re just going to stop existing.

    *

    > ELI5: How do we calculate our own weight? *

    Just remember, every human on Earth is the same. There are only two things that exist:

    1. Animals.

    2. Humans.

    *

    I have a friend who cannot even click “C”, and will type it in for you. *

    *

    > A subreddit that is not based on the subreddit name.
    > I really like this idea but it just seems to be too much of a hassle to create. *

    /r/funny is pretty much that…

    *

    >> I’m glad some people are still alive from the Holocaust *

    > I think this is the real unpopular opinion.

    > How do you justify killing people in an age where the number of people who are doing so is increasing?

    That’s why the Holocaust is so popular. They have a lot of good arguments and counterarguments to my ideas that most people in my country don’t.

    They are also popular among the general populace, and there is a lot of interest in their history.

    *

    Is acid good for getting fucked up?

    Edit: I know the risks of an acid trip especially for adults so I’m not going to try it with a baby *

    *

    > Bully my friend for years? I will get your job and your life ruined. *

    This is like the worst revenge fantasy I have ever seen. You are a terrible person.

    *

    Some of them are just disturbing.

  15. Shion Arita says:

    I will repost this from an open thread a while back, because it’s very relevant. If you’ve already seen it sorry for the redundancy:

    One of my favorite things is recursion, so I decided to try a fun recursive experiment with GPT2, inspired by an experiment in a previous OT about trying to guess real or fake hitler speeches.

    In this game, I will give six text passages, three of them written by GPT2, and three of them written by me. The trick here, however (and the lol recursion) is that in my passages I am trying to write like GPT2. So we have a human creating text that is trying to stylisitcally imitate text created by an AI trying to stylistically imitate text created by humans. Try to see if you can determine which of these are written by GPT2 and which are written by me attempting to imitate the style of GPT2.

    This is the tool I used to create the GPT2 passages. Some of the GPT2 passages are edited for clarity (for example removing truncated terminal expressions, removed the prompt,)

    1:
    Thus the passage is quoted as a warning to every man of power, as a rule, who is trying to become wise. For if what is taken for granted to you would not be taken for granted, would you not find yourself to be wiser? For to take these blessings without seeking to see what is lost would be to forget that we are human beings.

    To the Lord say, ‘What must I know, before I act? When I set all in motion, then I know that my action is for the glory of God. How much worse is it than the act of man when evil is in his way! What can be said of such acts? The Lord also says, ‘If anyone becomes a lawgiver, and says to his brothers, “Be my friend”, and if his brothers do such a thing, I will remember him.’ So why do you think the world is so full of bad men? The fact is, many acts are not evil, for many are good in themselves. One man speaks very loudly. To others, there should be silence.

    2.
    In terms of conflict and violence, the Middle East is a more difficult area than the First World War could ever have been for those who lived through it. In terms of geography, the area covers a far greater proportion of the planet’s landmass. Yet in terms of population, many of the same dynamics that characterized the First and Second World Wars persist.

    The rise of the modern, mass-based, global economy requires a massive influx of new, cheap labor–primarily from abroad–to meet the ever-growing demands of that economy. In other words, if any significant portion of that labor can be brought over to the United States, the economic interests of the entire world are at stake. This may sound like idle talk, but those same pressures on U.S. political, economic, and military power bring with it increased demands for international solidarity.

    As is often the case, in both World Wars some portion of the U.S.-Russian/Indian balance of powers was tipped or tipped towards an open conflict.

    3:
    A man must find it within himself the ability to learn to control his surroundings. Given that, he must find other options with which to enforce dominance and control. Machiavellian scheming is not so exclusively vast as to cover one’s capabilities completely, however misinformation can enable much vaster potentials than truth. Audacious ones seem to believe that the government of the United States must continue to be benevolent if peace is to be upheld across the world stage. However, the possibility of a coup d’etat will always threaten leadership in developing nations.

    The influence of American culture on the rest of the world has met with mixed success. Some nations have embraced influence from the U.S., while others remain isolated and underdeveloped. Economic development in western nations has continued to occur for the past 50 years, while in other areas, progress has been slow.

    4:
    According to the agency’s plan, these new automated trains would operate from Chicago–Lake Shore Drive until they reached speeds of around 30 miles an hour (40 kilometers an hour, or 57 mph). At that point, they would pass under a bridge over the Chicago River, which feeds into Lake Michigan. The city has already installed more than a dozen tracks along that stretch, including a bridge over the city’s lakefront that runs under the new elevated railroad.

    “This will allow us to provide a more reliable connection between the city and the regional rail service, so there’s no need for this system to come up with a completely new track,” says Bill Hebert, the senior transportation planner for the Illinois Department of Transportation and the author of the study.

    5:
    Dumbledore said, “I would feel much better if I could teach that.” There was a twinkle in his eye as he brushed something that looked like silver off of his robes.

    Harry was no longer in the common room, but was leaving the Library. Hermione hadn’t been completely honest with him about which books he was supposed to read, so he had to try to find them on his own. Albus had said that he would give her something nice afterward.

    After wandering around the castle, Hermione was sitting at the Gryffindor table with an angry look on her face. Hermione seemed to be lost.

    “Why didn’t you come to get me like you promised?” she asked. Ron poked at the apple with his wand hesitantly.

    “I… I think I ought to apologize,” Harry replied. He hadn’t thought about that for a while now, and even though he was hungry, he had to talk to Dumbledore that night.

    6:
    The apparatus was set up so that gaseous oxygen would flow over the catalyst at room temperature, until complete consuption of the starting material. The reaction was monitored every hour until a black color developed in the flask, indicating the production of a large amount of ions. The researchers then stopped the production of hydrogen gas after 45 minutes, giving the reaction mixture adequate time to cool down after adding the base. A precipitate of ammonium salts was visible in the reaction mixture. The mechanism of action is unknown, but warrants further study. From the fact that the starting material is reduced over the course of the reaction, we postulate that a tetrahedral intermediate is forming, and controlling the regiochemistry of the product.

    answers:
    gur svefg, frpbaq, naq sbhgu cnffntrf ner ol tcg. Gur guveq, svsgu, naq fvkgu ner zvar.

    • MawBTS says:

      I got 4/6, which I think is no better than guessing. At no point was I confident in my choices, and I often relied upon odd typographical things.

      Here was my reasoning:

      1. You. Something about your writing style indicates a non-native speaker of English, and the passage contains acute and grave accents (` and ´) instead of apostrophes (‘), which are often found on European keyboards.
      2. GPT. The sample uses a mixture of em-dashes and hyphens, which seems more like a feature of academic writing (or a computer imitating academic writing) than a human writing on an internet comment section.
      3. You. Again, the sample has acute accents instead of apostrophes, and some of the commas are improperly placed (which was also the case for your explanatory paragraphs).
      4. GPT. The mph part gave it away: that sort of flub is highly typical of machine-generated writing. It knows it”s supposed to provide kilometers after miles, but it doesn’t know how to do the math correctly (and it immediately forgets what it’s done, and “converts” the units a second time).
      5. You. The narrative is too orderly and makes too much sense. Dumbledore is almost never called “Albus” in the books – why would GPT ever refer to him as that?
      6. GPT. I had no idea and don’t understand chemistry. I took a guess.

  16. Squirrel of Doom says:

    I am two humans.

    CMV.

  17. Auric Ulvin says:

    Wot the fok did ye just say 2 me m80? ima shovve me fists up yer arse. 1v1. no joke, no palmira, just as hard as a pound for pound. just like ye mum when me been around. even with me massive fists alfie has ben pounding her proper, just lik ye huge knobs. ill take care of yer nan now, yeah? just make sure we get good food and water while we’re at it, yeah?

    So we get this from uwotm8GPT2bot, after a fair amount of ‘Really’ and ‘Look here’.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/c3hugf/aja_que_les_gens_sont_des_bris%C3%A9s_par_la_police/err21rp/

    It looks like GPT has nearly mastered copypastas. If I didn’t know it was a bot, I would’ve just assumed ‘pound for pound’ and ‘palmira’ are slang.