AI

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

If e/acc is an attempt to rebrand tech zealotry as an apotheosis of moral goodness, it is also, as Silicon Valley grieves the realization that it is no longer seen as an unbridled force for good, a form of denial and bargaining—one last plea for salvation as the walls close in. If it happens to result in the end of humanity, so be it. As Land’s... See more

Observing these patterns of influence gives clues about how our models generalize from their training data. For instance, if the models responded to user prompts by splicing together sequences from the training set, then we’d expect the influential sequences for a given model response to include expressions of near-identical thoughts. Conversely,... See more