just a heads up, this is pretty dark (as any mass shooting discussion would be, but particularly this one), and doesn’t include anything about the sale of infowars or the onion.
That AI-generated imagery isn't bringing any less value to the conversation than comments like these where something is rejected for having a whiff of AI. Employing a graphic designer to create different decorative images is outside the scope/resources of that personal project if I had to guess.
So as he is quoted at the top "Something I talked about like 15 times, six, seven, eight years ago." This appears to be true when he said it, judging from the rest of the site's content. He offered consistent reasons for his (wrong) opinion. And when he said, "I mean, how do I get a fair trial with stuff like this?", pretty valid given the article he's referencing. Sorry, but I don't see defamation here. And the un-doctored video of the dad is ODD enough to say so on the radio. Don't take this as defending him (because I do believe he's wrong) but I find everything he said to be allowable in an open, free society. And sorry, I don't find the parents to be harmed to the tune of a $B. That all said, however, as a Tim Heidecker fan, I'm pretty happy at the outcome. Here I'll say what neither side will say: Alex is the frontman for the "cabal" (he admits his dad was in DARPA and Intelligence). His job is to say their deeds out loud (which is part of their belief system) in such a way that few people trust. I may be wrong, so sue me for a billion dollars why don't you.
> I find everything he said to be allowable in an open, free society.
Indeed, the government is not prosecuting him or trying to suppress his first amendment rights. But that doesn't mean he can say anything he wants about anyone he wants and not have any civil liability, so it seems like the system is working.
The billion dollar verdict is his own fault. He got sued by a bunch of people, and it is pretty normal to shoot for a high amount and settle for less. If he had not noped out of the entire process he would have been liable for a whole lot less (or even nothing, depending on the jury). No sympathy from me.
> Alex is the frontman for the "cabal" (he admits his dad was in DARPA and Intelligence).
Alex Jones is a severely damaged man and a known liar. His story about his father has changed radically over the years and within days of his telling, each time mythologizing his Dad by way of making Jones himself special, or from special people. Was Jones’ grandmother psychic? Is he himself? Does God give him downloads of information over chicken sandwiches and in the middle of the night with clock time ‘proofs’? Why did Jones receive the download to go rescue Gene Hackman and then just not do so, if the battle against the Actual Devil is so important?
> So as he is quoted at the top "Something I talked about like 15 times, six, seven, eight years ago." This appears to be true when he said it, judging from the rest of the site's content.
I haven’t reviewed the site but Jones was the head of a whole media operation that knowingly defamed these people in a bitter time, and to sell dick pills. The depositions for these things are public and you can watch them yourself. Jones himself admits in these depositions his role behind the scenes, sending Halbig on his mad journey and what not.
The $1B judgement is startling but it’s based entirely on Jones’ own statement of impact in the depositions. If you’re being sued for the profit you made from lies, maybe don’t claim the majority of humanity tunes into your show and website every day.
He wasn't just expressing an opinion though. He was willfully lying. The burden for proving defamation is pretty high to avoid infringing on free speech and the burden was easily met. They proved that he not only lied, he knowingly lied and continued to knowingly lie after seeing proof his lies were materially hurting people.
Also he is not a frontman for shit. He's a narcissistic rage baiter who has never exposed any true story. Your nonsensical belief however is nowhere near the standard for defamation.
Alex Jones is an utterly depraved lunatic who will tell any lie as long as it makes him money and he doesn't care at all about the damage his lies cause. This directly led to him getting sued and losing because his lies causes enormous harm to the parents of the Sandy Hook victims.
> My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.
What a great way of framing it. I've been trying to explain this to people, but this is a succinct version of what I was stumbling to convey.
I have been explaining this to friends and family by comparing LLMs to actors. They deliver a performance in-character, and are only factual if it happens to make the performance better.
The analogy goes down the drain when a criterion for good performance is being objectively right. Like with Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards.
RLVR can also encourage hallucinations quite easily. Think of SAT: giving a random answer is right 20% of the time, giving "I don't know" is right 0% of the time. If you only reward for test score, you encourage guesswork. So good RL reward design is as important as ever.
That being said, there are methods to train LLMs against hallucinations, and they do improve hallucination-avoidance. But anti-hallucination capabilities are fragile and do not fully generalize. There's no (known) way to train full awareness of its own capabilities into an LLM.
I think what you say is true, and I think that this is exactly true for humans as well. There is no known way to completely eliminate unintentional bullshit coming from a human’s mouth. We have many techniques for reducing it, including critical thinking, but we are all susceptible to it and I imagine we do it many times a day without too much concern.
We need to make these models much much better, but it’s going to be quite difficult to reduce the levels to even human levels. And the BS will always be there with us. I suppose BS is the natural side effect of any complex system, artificial or biological, that tries to navigate the problem space of reality and speak on it.
These systems, sometimes called “minds”, are going to produce things that sound right but just are not true.
It's a feeling I can't escape: that by trying to build thinking machines, we glimpse more and more of how the human mind works, and why it works the way it does - imperfections and all.
"Critical thinking" and "scientific method" feel quite similar to the "let's think step by step" prompt for the early LLMs. More elaborate directions, compensating for the more subtle flaws of a more capable mind.
Nobody that I'd be using this analogy with is currently using LLMs for tasks that are covered by RLVF. They're asking models for factual information about the real world (Google replacement), or to generate text (write a cover letter), not the type of outputs that are verifiable within formal systems—by definition the type of output that RLVF is intended to improve. The actor analogy is still helpful for providing intuition to non-technical people who don't know how to think about LLMs, but do use them.
Also, unless I am mistaken, RLVF changes the training to make LLMs less likely to hallucinate, but in no way does it make hallucination impossible. Under the hood, the models still work the same way (after training), and the analogy still applies, no?
> Under the hood, the models still work the same way (after training), and the analogy still applies, no?
Under the hood we have billions of parameters that defy any simple analogies.
Operations of a network are shaped by human data. But the structure of the network is not like the human brain. So, we have something that is human-like in some ways, but deviates from humans in ways, which are unlikely to be like anything we can observe in humans (and use as a basis for analogy).
This is also related to the philosophical definition of bullshit[1]: speech intended to persuade or influence without any active intention to be either true or false.
Right, all models are inherently wrong. It's up to the user know about its limits / uncertainty.
But i think this 'being wrong' is kind of confusing when talking about LLMs (in contrast to systems/scientific modelling).
In what they model (language), the current LLMs are really good and acurate, except for example the occasional chinese character in the middle of a sentence.
But what we mean by LLMs 'being wrong' most of the time is being factually wrong in answering a question, that is expressed as language. That's a layer on top of what the model is designed to model.
EDITS:
So saying 'the model is wrong' when it's factually wrong above the language level isn't fair.
I guess this is essentially the same thought as 'all they do is hallucinate'.
If I was to drop acid and hallucinate an alien invasion, and then suddenly a xenomorph runs loose around the city while I’m tripping balls, does being right in that one instance mean the rest of my reality is also a hallucination?
Because it seems the point being made multiple times that a perceptual error isn’t a key component of hallucinating, the whole thing is instead just a convincing illusion that could theoretically apply to all perception, not just the psychoactively augmented kind.
This is the general idea of the Tangle newsletter [1]. They pick a topic from the news and provide "What the Right is saying" and "What the Left is saying" about the topic.
A group of coworker friends and I used to find the most creative ways to mess with each others' computers if they were left unattended. Some of the ones I can remember off the top of my head:
1. A Chrome extension that slowly rotated every <div> on the page (think 1 degree every 10 minutes). Would be hard to notice unless a page had been left open for a while.
2. Another Chrome extension that would redirect to a full-screen gif of John Cena that would only load after a random number of page loads.
3. A horn sound that would play after every successful git commit, regardless of computer volume.
4. A Slack bot that would scrape another coworker's insufferable Reddit comments, store them in a database, and then use ML to interject the comments into our conversations based on some basic NLP. This one was my favorite.
Just listened to the Search Engine podcast episode [1] where the author talked about this story. It's wild. The author (Joseph Cox) is also a founder of 404 Media[2], which is a great tech blog.
Oh this is fascinating. I'll have to keep an eye on the Tom Brady data since I was already doing something similar by hand for tracking all of his TDs [1]. I've wanted more detailed data for the data visualization piece of it [2] but it's a lot of work.
How is the government stealing your income or destroying the value of your property? Seems a bit hyperbolic.
And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
Because there is no free market in housing whatsoever.
Owning land doesn't give you the right to build anything. You need planning permission - which means permission from the local council, local homeowners and consultation, etc. which gives the NIMBY attitude so much power.
There aren't piles of empty houses. There aren't enough houses at all.
> And if the free market solves this, why are we in this situation in the first place? Shouldn't the free market have solved this already? Instead we have piles of empty houses/buildings and more homeless than ever before.
There is no 'situation'. Rational participants in the free market mostly have housing. The issue is that there is a widely available drug (fentanyl and meth too) that makes people behave irrationally, and thus the free market principles stop applying, since they presume a basic level of participant rationality. The fix from a government perspective is to remove the agency of those who are so drug addled that they cannot make good decisions.
"In 2018, Yiannopoulos told at least two news organisations who had requested comments that he wanted vigilantes to shoot journalists. He wrote in a text message 'I can't wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight'."
