unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov

Great article, thanks for sharing it OP.

For example, the Anthropic researchers who located the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge within Claude didn’t just identify the regions of the model that lit up when the bridge was on Claude’s mind. They took a profound next step: They tweaked the model so that the weights in those regions were 10 times stronger than they’d been before. This form of “clamping” the model weights meant that even if the Golden Gate Bridge was not mentioned in a given prompt, or was not somehow a natural answer to a user’s question on the basis of its regular training and tuning, the activations of those regions would always be high.

The result? Clamping those weights enough made Claude obsess about the Golden Gate Bridge. As Anthropic described it:

If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day. If you ask it what it imagines it looks like, it will likely tell you that it imagines it looks like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Okay, now imagine you're Elon Musk and you really want to change hearts and minds on the topic of, for example, white supremacy. AI chatbots have the potential to fundamentally change how a wide swath of people perceive reality.

If we think the reality distortion bubble is bad now (MAGAsphere, etc), how bad will things get when people implicitly trust the output from these models and the underlying process by which the model decides how to present information is weighted towards particular ideologies? Considering the rest of the article, which explores the way in which chatbots attempt to create a profile for the user and serve different content based on that profile, now it will be even easier to identify those most susceptible to mis/disinformation and deliver it with a cheery tone.

How might we, as a society, create a process for conducting oversight for these "tools"? We need a cohesive approach that can be explained to policymakers in a way that will call them to action on this issue.

"Surely the leopards won't eat MY face!" -Kentucky

on device

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I know I'll be downvoted into oblivion as I can hardly believe I've formed this opinion myself, but tbh this is a good application for some of this AI tech.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine grew up well-off; from an immigrant family but their parents were educated and in a lucrative profession so he always went to private schools etc. Fast forward to about 10 years after all the kids moved out; the parents had divorced amicably and his mom had a sizeable retirement along with the payout she had from the divorce. In the 7 figures - she never had to worry about money.

Anywho, mom ran into some medical issues so the kids had to get involved with her finances again, as she couldn't do it herself. Turns out that over the course of months or years, mom had been getting scammed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where she had actually taken out a mortgage on the home she previously owned outright. They're still sorting things out but the number he has tossed out in the past is ~$1.4M that got wired overseas and is just... gone now.

So yes, I probably won't turn this feature on myself, but for the tens of millions of uneducated and inept people out there, this could genuinely make a difference in avoiding some catastrophic outcomes. It certainly isn't a perfect solution, but I suspect my friend would rate it as much better than nothing, and I would argue that this falls short of being "strictly evil".

Nah man that was the Biden admin when we had high employment and got inflation under control.

Yes, the continued consolidation of the economy into everything "Big" is the problem. Survival of the fittest only works as a core component of the economic philosophy if we allow firms to be out-competed and for market shifts to occur.

Ever-increasing profit is not a problem if a consummate increase in service or product quality comes along for the ride. This is how an economy expands. We all want this, even if it creates turbulence at the individual or community level.

Consolidating into entities that are too big to fail is a problem. Give me Zuck Prime. This is literally why we are all on Lemmy, is it not?

Only if they receive the message that the left offers solutions, and not just more chaos.

They do have a medical program. They're also far from the only state that hasn't legalized recreational cannabis, though I agree they are an anomaly in New England.

I was in a similar boat and have found modern Linux to be somewhere between Windows XP and Windows 10 in terms of convenience and having it "just work". However, I reckon I've spent less time troubleshooting than I would spend raging at the bullshit Microsoft keeps trying to shove down your throat in Windows. On balance I'm counting it as a win, and I suspect you will too.

I think I more or less fully agree with everything you're saying here. We're seeing the same trends and outcomes. Getting money out of politics should be one of the foundational steps we take to rebuild, agreed.

I'm bored with you so best of luck in our shared future hellscape. I definitely LOL'd when I saw you weren't American.

My comment wasn't based on a body of research other than high school us history and some political science classes in college. Agree completely that modern day boomers are not progressives, I was thinking more specifically about the social progress of the mid-late 20th century and how many more people we've agreed to include in the conversation than ever before. Hell, women couldn't vote 106+ years ago. Now we have gay and trans people in Congress, we've had a black president, women mostly have rights to their own bodies, etc etc etc. The boomers were, broadly, part of those social changes, though clearly they didn't all agree, just as they don't now.

A lot of those wins are getting erased now, by DOGE and others, and there are way more old people at protests than I would expect to see. I'm simply suggesting that the older generations remember the feeling of making progress in a way that younger generations haven't. It's probably hyperbolic but it feels like we've been slowly regressing, on balance, since Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida and fixed the 2000 election results for his brother George Dubya.

Tl:Dr you don't know the value of what you have now until it is gone, unless you've gone without before.

Stalin, I hate engaging with commies, but I can't resist a good pun.

The left doesn't have a cohesive platform, nor any political power. Your indignation is not righteous, and your sentiment does not inspire. US politicians are generally idiots, yes, but I disagree that calling for a more moderate path in the face of a populist criminal was a bad take. We are seeing it play out in real time, and we're all in the same boat so I hope you're enjoying the ride.