OscarD🔸
Posts 28
Comments339
How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?
Currently, I think AI writing isn't good enough to be better than good human users of the Forum, but I think this will quickly change, and I want to prioritise ideas and impact over who wrote the final words. I expect it will be longer before AIs are at the frontier of doing EA research and cuase-prioritization, so I think posts with only AI ideas will be bad for a longer time to come. But posts with human ideas written up well by an AI I could well imagine being better quality than most Forum writer's posts within a year or two.
I feel differently if someone is writing something to me personally, if someone writes me a poem or a birthday card or something that has sentimental value, then AI writing reduces that. But the Forum I see as primarily content-value rather than sentimental value.
Nice post! Overall, I am quite sympathetic to this case. One skepticism I have is that the sorts of agents that are scope-sensitive in their ethics (and therefore linear in consensium) are probably also the ones who are fairly altruistic and therefore don't over-weight their own interests extremely, so would fund consensium (or rather hedonium, or their preferred impartial good) regardless of what others do. It feels like you either get that welfare in distant galaxies is a huge deal, or you don't.
Interesting! (And troubling - well above the lizardman constant.) It would be interesting to do some qualitative follow-up on this, maybe with having these consistently retributivist people chat with an LLM instructed to do qualitative data collection and gently nudge them towards more suffering-averse views to see how deeply held or changeable those beliefs are.
Yep, that all makes sense, and I think this work can still tell us something, just it doesn't update me too much given the lack of compelling theories or much consensus in the scientific/philosophical community. This is harsher than what I actually think, but directionally, it has the feel of 'cargo cult science' where it has a fancy Bayesian model and lots of numbers and so forth, but if it all built on top of philosophical stances I don't trust then it doesn't move me much. But that said it is still interesting e.g. how wide the range for chickens is.
Nice! It strikes me that in figure 1, information is propagating upward, from indicator to feature to stance to overall probability, and so the arrows should also be pointing upward.
I think the view (stance?) I am most sympathetic to is that all our current theories of consciousness aren't much good, so we shouldn't update very far away from our prior, but that picking a prior is quite subjective, and so it is hard to make collective progress on this when different people might just have quite different priors for P(current AI consciousness).
Perhaps the main downside is people may overuse the feature and it encourages people to spend time making small comments, whereas the current system nudges people towards leaving fewer more substantive comments and less nit-picky ones? Not sure if this has been an issue on LW, I don't read it as much.
Good point re communal values of the forum, seems right.
Ah, maybe I interpreted the original question differently to what you intended. SInce you said it is not about 'post quality' I was trying to put that aside and imagine AI-written posts that are better than human-written posts, and I think in that case I would be happy to read them. But I agree that currently I am turned off by AI writing and far prefer people write themselves in most cases. I suppose I was answering the question more in principle, i.e. if an AI-written post was amazing I would be comfortable with it, but currently they are not. So for me it is more a quality issue than fundamentally and AI-written issue (except for the communal/sentimental aspects, which I agree have value).