AI psychosis seems to be on all sides of the debate. We've truly lost our moderate speech and the ability to discuss.
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i agree but it’s not due to or about AI but more about polarisation of society in general:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/psychologylse/2023/06/08/building-br...
At least AI polarization seems to cut across the tired old red/blue divide (in the US anyway). So it may produce some interesting coalitions.
Maybe it's not a full and clean correlation, but there still is one. In my experience, AI boosterism is often linked to conservatism, because the current US administration is all in on AI, the spoils of AI disproportionately reward the rich and increase inequality, and because leaving AI labs alone is fully consistent with most conservatives not wanting to bother private business and letting them do what they want.
The thing with AI is there are multiple axes of division that are in tension, and they don’t map conveniently to standard politics.
For example, Anthropic in one sense seems to occupy a caricature of the nanny state worldview, with their constant calls for safety regulation. But then when you examine the motives, it becomes pretty clear that giving them what they ask for will give them unprecedented consolidation of economic power. So if you are a liberal normally inclined toward regulation, you have to consider: is it worth living in a world with even more trillionaires controlling an even larger share of the world’s resources? Or would it be better for AI to become fully commoditized so that its benefits are more broadly dispersed?
Or suppose you are right wing, free market capitalist, deeply nationalist person. Are you for or against Chinese AI models? Your desire for America to “win” AI may be tempered by knowing that the biggest winners will be some power-mad EA people in the SF Bay.
Judging from social media interactions, this space seems to make for strange bedfellows at times.
My counterpoint to that first one is that forcing outcomes through laws doesn't have a political side, although the discourse in the US has definitely been extremely mangled by the untrue stereotype that conservatives are less keen on passing legislation. Strong government force can be used to either pass real regulation or to create and protect monopolies. Anthropic is asking for the latter. None of the AI labs would ever willingly ask for the lid to be put on their pot, it's just everyone else. Their demands are just requests for a government-protected monopoly that are PR-worded to appear as regulation. Left-leaning people are usually proponents of real regulation, the kind that businesses would never ask to be imposed on them. Right-leaning people may side with the AI labs more, seeing their proposals as compromise or reading between the lines and supporting the regulation to ensure that their side wins and that the biggest labs are handily rewarded for their work.
The Chinese model split is more interesting, but only as a theoretical point that examines what different political sides would support in theory if everyone's ideology was fully consistent with itself. If you look at the people, in reality most conservatives seem to side with laws that would protect their own and ban other models to 'win'. Left-leaning people are more likely to be okay with Chinese models or open-source AI, seeing them as opportunities to dislodge the power of American AI labs and prevent too much power from concentrating in few hands.
So I think the correlation is still valid. There are a few people on all sides who may take an unexpected worldview in light of these new problems, but I think that for most people, what I outlined is more or less the way they've split up.
There has never been a time when open source isn't full of flame wars of one flavor or the other. Are we going to diagnose people with syetemd psychosis or X11 psychosis next?
Already have
It is reasonable to stop some people from flooding projects wirh low quality PRs that take time on the other side, that might not work at all or be patches that are several times the size of what is needed and get a lot in the way of the maintenance.
I agree with a policy of "no AI contributions by default" just to be able to ban them quickly and lower the incentive.
Ido not have anything against AI itself though, as long as it is lanaged by humans and snippets are properly reviewed. But that is not what many ppl do.
They will just drop something there and say: you silly, review for me amd I take a lot of credit.
I would not spend a minute in that kind of contributions.
We really haven’t. It’s always been this bad.
For me I’m a late adopter. I’ve seen more things go than stay. I’ll wait until the industry has stabilised or evaporated before making a decision. It’ll save me time and money.
Luckily we have the enlightened centrists to descend from their clouds to say nothing at all
Because discourse around AI has devolved into eschatological thinking. The stakes are potentially high where the ceiling might be superintelligence and the floor total economic collapse, humans will just default to apocalyptic thinking. All discussion ceases to be technical and instead becomes religious.
Once people have convinced themselves that the stakes are existential, any nuance or moderate thinking feels like complicity.
So now because of that, a perfectly reasonable policy about copyright gets reframed as a battle for the future of humanity becausae we are no longer discussing tech, we are discussing what amounts to opposing religious beliefs.
I don't know, it feels like the GCC steering committee's AI policy is sorta the definition of moderate speech.
They aren't coming out swinging on LLMs shouting it down as slop and calling anyone using it lazy. They just created some, reasonable to me, guidelines that about when the use is and is not allowed in their project.
"h0w dArE yOu..." /s