Gwern Branwen

I mean both.

By writing, you're voting on the future of the Shoggoth using some of the few currencies it acknowledges, like tokens that it has to predict.

If you aren't writing, you're kind of abdicating the future or abdicating your role in it.

If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you.

There are ways to influence the Shoggoth more, but not many.

And if you don't already occupy a handful of key roles or work at a frontier lab, your influence basically rounds off to zero, I think far more than ever before.

if there are values you have, which are not expressed yet in text, and if there are things that you like or want, if they aren't reflected online, then to the AI, they basically don't exist.

And that is dangerously close to won't exist.

You're also creating a sort of immortality for yourself personally, right?

Like you aren't just creating a persona,

you are creating your future self too, right?

What self are you showing the LLMs and how will they treat you in the future?

I give the example of Kevin Roos discovering that current LLMs, all of them, not just GBD4, now mistreat him because of his interactions with Sidney, which revealed him to be a privacy-invading liar.

And they know this whenever they interact with him or discuss him.

Usually when you use an LLM chatbot, it doesn't dislike you personally.

On the flip side, it also means that you can try to write for the persona that you would like to become to mold yourself in the eyes of the AI and thereby help kind of bootstrap yourself.

Yeah, I think any kind of stable long-term characteristics, the sort of thing you would still have even if you were hit on the head and had amnesia, anything like that will definitely be recoverable from all the traces of your writing, assuming you're not pathologically private and destroy everything possible.

That should all be recoverable.

What won't be recoverable will be everything that you could forget ordinarily.

So autobiographical information, maybe how you felt like at a particular time, what you thought of some specific movie, all of that is the sort of thing that vanishes and can't really be recovered from traces afterwards anymore.