alt Hacker Newscalling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.
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it feels unhinged and makes me think we should just put every engineer working at these labs in jail to pause this shit until we can figure out what the fuck they are doing over there
The most charitable way I can describe it is just extremely low quality sci-fi fan fiction. I think that's too charitable, because I believe it's far more cynical than that. They're deliberately playing into these sort of techno-religious beliefs that have taken root in the wake of Kurzweil, et al., fanned by LLM psychosis, influencer marketing, and a deluge of this kind of sci-fi marketing copy. It's just chatbots, guys. Relax.
Alien mind is in my view the best mental model - LLMs are not merely stochastic parrots, are not like humans, are not like animals.
They're maybe nearest to Cthulhu, but that's fictional. In terms of existing mental models "alien minds" feels the best can do.
I agree that "teach how to love" is off and perhaps excessively anthropomorphic. But we don't have good words or concepts for what we really need to do - hence why we should pause.