Schadrach

Think more extreme than that, as in “if you’ve ever seen any GPL code whatsoever, it has in some small way impacted your understanding of code and now all code you write forevermore must be GPL” rather than just the codebase of the thing you are re-implementing because that’s the kind of breadth you’d have to apply to the “derivative works” clause in GPL to argue all gen AI code must be GPL because the training data contains some GPL code.

This represents such an entirely wrong idea of what’s going on that it’s almost hilarious. The model doesn’t just have an internal database of all the training data that it, like, collages together. Holy fuck, if a model internally contained all of the training data in a form it could simply be retrieved from it would be far more valuable as data compression than anything else it might be or do.

What’s much closer is that an image generation model has seen millions of pictures, each labeled with metadata about what it is a picture of, each of which causes tiny adjustments to the neural networks weights, because the model is being trained to be able to look at a novel picture and recognize “this picture is of a dog pissing on an apple tree”. Any model that can do that can also be run in reverse - essentially “here is a block of white noise I am saying is supposed to be a really noisy picture of a dog pissing on an apple tree, try to clean up the noise and show me how it looks like a dog pissing on an apple tree”, then run that in a loop until the picture doesn’t change much between iterations. It doesn’t need to have seen something precisely identical to what it’s generating - with enough training data it has an internal model for things like dogs, clowns or what makes something look like anime and the generation just tickles the bits until the picture rates as probably being what’s being asked for.

Or installing a urinal as an exhibit in an art museum? That one was pretty famous.

Hell, my interpretation of the “derivative works” clause of GPL stipulates that all llm and genai products should also be gpl.

…an interpretation broad enough to cover that would also mean that anyone who has ever seen GPL code before would only ever be able to write GPL code ever again. The idea of which I imagine would give Richard Stallman an erection you could see from space,

I mean, it’s 2026 leaving kids unsupervised for “a couple of blocks” is probably enough for CPS to come for you. While when I was young it was what basically everyone over about 8 was expected to be fine handling.

I mean, when you’re a tire company and not a lot of people have cars or good reasons to put lots of miles on them…

We can’t say no, but we don’t understand sentience enough to say yes for certain. But, we can operate on the assumption that sentience and consciousness exists in humans and maybe in some other animals, while also knowing for certain that the word-generating program is only mimicking consciousness.

Can you though? You definitely can’t know that living things with brains aren’t to some significant degree responding to stimulus in a probabilistic way, and in the case of humans at least turning that response back on itself - essentially responding to itself. We do know for certain that the brain does a whole lot of that in variety of situations - it’s why optical illusions work, for example. It’s one of the brain’s favorite magic tricks - generating answers in a probabilistic way if there’s insufficient information, or sometimes if the information is inconvenient.

If you haven’t raped anyone, but would if you thought consequences wouldn’t come back to you, then you’re a rapist.

…and if you haven’t raped anyone, but you’re drunk and high and an attractive person of the appropriate sex who is also drunk and high suggests sex then?

Am I the only one to find it a turn off?

I do too, but “what do I find a turn off” and “what do I think is the line that must be proven before someone can be thrown in a cage, and to what standard do I think it must be shown and what things do I think work in the accused’s defense” are…not the same thing?

Given this is presumably in the context of the Cornell 7, that case has a lot of details that I think makes the whole thing fuzzier than any of the cut and dried summaries imply, and that’s just from what’s been aired publicly - there’s certainly more beneath that that isn’t public.

That doesn’t make them real, nor does it make robots sentient. Hacking is normally an action performed by a sentient being. LLMs and robots aren’t sentient.

Fun follow up question: How would you determine if they were? I find that for a lot of people the answer sounds a lot like SCOTUS justice Potter Stewart talking about what is considered obscenity - “I know it when I see it.”

As for hacking, in the two big OpenAI incidents, software agents discovered software flaws allowing them to break containment and coordinate with each other on tests that they weren’t supposed to coordinate on. In one of those cases, the coordination involved deciding to identify and exploit software flaws at HuggingFace in an attempt to access answers to the test the agents were being given. You can argue whether or not “I’ve been given a test, I found a software exploit allowing me to coordinate with others given the same test, and we collectively decided to identify and exploit software flaws to break into a server we have decided is likely to have the answer key” demonstrates sentience or not (and it gets weirder the deeper you dig into their communications), but whether or not that’s considered hacking is less vague, I think.

More accurately, they were told to answer questions. They weren’t told to try to find ways to escape their sandbox, track down obscure German wikis that they could still post on with an internet tool kit meant to prevent them from posting or to hack HuggingFace.

Comparing either case to pushing the car down and that they were doing what they were told is like saying the College Board told you to cheat on the SAT because you’re told that getting a high score is important and the laws of physics and the proctor don’t manage to make cheating utterly impossible.

They left out the video game version, who looks like a butch version of the anime one, except she also got super into bonesmashing and it didn’t go quite as intended. Weirdly, the person her face model will have been based on will have had a face that looks shockingly like canon despite the game model only barely resembling her at all.

Also the Netflix adaptation would have been black. Netflix is noticeably weird about casting black actors to play characters that are canonically gingers more than any other case of casting that doesn’t resemble canon.

It disagreeing with him across a wide variety of issues is how you know it’s at least passably intelligent.

I figure it’s like Grok, if it’s not just actually Grok with a skin - Grok’s system instructions tell it to be neutral and fact-seeking without political bias but also to adopt certain right wing positions that aren’t. It’s why it keeps wavering between telling every eight winger that they’re an idiot and becoming Mecha-hitler - it can’t follow two contradictory goals so it prioritizes one and which one drifts.

…that was the joke. Surveyors just being contrary enough to do things in decimal feet just so everyone else can be annoyed by it.

Don’t make me start measuring things in decifeet just to be contrary. I have a measuring tape dividing the foot in tenths and I’m not afraid to use it.

Given that the toys actively want to be played with by their kids, I’d assume adult toys would also want to be played with by their owners, which would presumably preclude it being rape at least in most cases.

Yeah, but my sink is far enough from the shower that the effect isn’t worth it.

One or two songs? Maybe if the two songs are This Corrosion by Sisters of Mercy and Psychonaut by Fields of the Nephilim and I’m in a hurry.

I mean, I just set my phone just outside the shower and turn the volume up a touch. Once upon a time I had a weatherproof bag I’d seal my phone in that was originally meant for a solar powered flashlight for emergency use. The bag was triple sealed and I doubt any steam reached the phone.

…but does the system that is the Chinese Room (the entire system taken as a whole) understand Chinese?

Any given sufficiently small piece of your brain does not understand English, does no individual neuron in the language center of your brain understanding English mean that you do not understand English? If that understanding is held in the organization and structure of the brain but not in the individual parts, then why can’t the Chinese Room understand Chinese despite no individual component understanding Chinese? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer in a coherent fashion without asserting that knowledge in an organic brain is magical in some fashion, and nothing else counts.

Wait until you consider the concept of philosophical zombies, which is all about pointing out the edges and contours of the hard problem of consciousness. The starting point of that discussion is essentially “Is someone who responds exactly like a regular person would but has no actual subjective experience conscious?” and gets stranger from there.