Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along.

Aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about, like race or IQ, AI's woke opinions, in quotes, aren't because companies trained it to be woke, they're because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.

Also, there was a brief brouhaha when ex-AI changed the prompt to tell Grok not to criticise Elon.

After some outrage, the offending statement was removed and blamed on, quote, an ex-OpenAI employee who, quote, hadn't fully absorbed the culture, end quote.

Awkward, but props to XAI for their unusual decision to have a non-secret prompt, which seems increasingly important for transparency and helped this incident end well.

38.

Bulldog has an analysis of how much it costs to offset meat-eating by donating to animal welfare charities.

He thinks about $23 a month.

39.

Police have finally arrested most of the Zizians, a murder cult with links to the rationalist social scene, though they broke connections and turned against us before the murders started.

Congrats to Evan Ratliff of Wired, whose article, paywalled but you can control A and control C and paste to notepad if you're fast, somehow gets the entire convoluted story entirely correct.

Hall of Shame goes to Vox, which mangles things in a way that tars innocent people.

In particular, they confuse the Zizians with the post-rationalists, a different group that started out part of the rationalist movement and later turned against us, but whose crimes are mostly limited to annoying Twitter posts.

40.

This month I learned about anti-massing regulations.

Here's a tweet.

It says, modern architecture gives fuck it, life has no meaning vibes.

And there's a picture of an apartment with what seems to be in a sort of an assortment of random shapes that make it up.

It's not completely modern looking, but it's also just not a square apartment with grid of windows.

It has a lot of sort of interesting angles and edges and things are not sort of quite lined up.