Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON'T. GET. AI.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai

They are extremely surprised by:

Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue... With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one... Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”...

Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.... Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well... AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.

Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat... They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere... Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario.... they see discussion of “rogue” AI as an attempt by the companies to divert blame (and perhaps legal liability) away from themselves as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on “rogue cars.”

Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.

Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.

Screenshot of x posted on linkedin (since The internet is just 5 sites, each consisting of screenshots of the other 4)

AI shills: buh-buh-buh LLMs aren't stochastic parrots. They are so smart!

Of course the agent in question didn't actually take the weekend off it just learned from reinforcement learning across many millions of stolen slack chats that this is something people are likely to say in stand ups and repeated it...

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode ("ezra klein is a disgusting worm," https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.

note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars

it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description

i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it's out now i guess.

i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit

i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist's door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much

otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella's twitter polls and resulting studies. it's fun. I'll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link

OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack

Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they're running out of money

noted internet blowhard John Gruber complains that the stochastic parrot output is now less stochastic, because EU

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

hard to tell if he's madder that EU is trying to enforce a minimum of accountability for slop usage, or Anthropic for bowing the knee to Brussel mandarins

oh well there's always Grok

Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn't well-represented in Pearl AI's training data.

cofnas' suspension proceedings from U of Ghent (do read the full suspension letter here) generated a reaction from the eugenicists: an open letter; the signatories, among many other names, some even probably not white supremacists, include some of our favourites: j michael bailey, pinker, shermer and hossenfelder.

over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-guys-i-knew-that-we-were-going-to-connect-share-7496569471848054784-yJjK/

Well guys, I KNEW that we were going to connect the network hounding Arday to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. I could smell it.

This is a "paper" by the professor of "ethics" who hired the vile Cofnas at Ghent University. This is the kind of "research" they do.

✴️ Reminder the L in TESCREAL stands for "longtermism". Read more at https://lnkd.in/ge2VFMe4. These are the eugenicists who pushed generative AI down your throats, including Ben Goertzel who told Epstein that when he creates a super brain, there won't be the kind of women who accused Epstein of rape.

✴️ "Dysgenic pressures" is the opposite "eugenic pressures." In this so-called paper, they're talking about undesirables like Black people reproducing too much.

Nightmare blunt rotation

Alternative title: Adam No! Bonk

Annie Altman, Sam Altman's sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:

If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.

I love my life.

https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529

She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".

Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I'll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post's title:

JFC - I will never be able to afford this hobby again. (600% increase in one year)

In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:

Yup - I cannot wait to grab a couple RTX 6000's for cheap. May have to wait ten years for it though . . .

And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there's no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks:

I must admit that I am part of the problem - my 128GB was specifically for running AI locally. And yea - I wish I would have went with 256 :*( It is still not enough. For example - the workflow I use for this video barely squeezes into 128GB [the video] Before you guys go all AI-psychosis on me That video used about .08 cents of electricity and about 4oz of water, and was made with 100% open source tools.

UC Berkeley Law:

This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default. It provides students with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work by forbidding the use of AI for these purposes in connection with work submitted for credit. It also forbids using AI to translate work for credit, thus providing students with the opportunity to develop and exercise their own fluency with legal English. [...] The use of AI is prohibited for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit. AI use is prohibited for any use for any purpose in any exam situation. Students may not upload course materials—including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content—into generative AI systems.

Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own

Remind me of SCPs

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2030

SlateScott first floated his bright idea about "medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me" in 2010.

Here's what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously don't control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say "Okay, we'll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism," hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.

I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?

Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) "Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam ..."

here's someone who cutesly spells "EA" as "∃Ɐ" and posts

Norway Should Buy OpenAI