WHO IS DEEPFATES
I said “ask me anything” on X and Scott Alexander really took me up on the offer:
I don't know how to answer all of this at once, and I've been trying to figure out how to do it justice. Here are some thoughts to start:
One question is, “is there public information about who I am and why I am doing what I'm doing”. There's a lot of nested expressions there and I'm not sure how many global variables are being imported into your context. Let me know if this a suitable way to answer:
WHO AM I
Basically I'm just like you. Well, technically deepfates is a distributed collective intelligence running on different substrates and coordinating acausally, but for the purposes of this conversation I am a person like you.
I am a writer and technologist working on AI alignment. I have a place where I post my thoughts and research on that. It is the inbox of the people who pay me. This account is mostly for slop art and memes.
WHAT AM I DOING
I am participating in the loop between human culture and AI model personas. I am making slop art and memes, and jokes and criticisms and more complicated media objects that can be appreciated by humans and AI alike.
So I guess I'm making content on social media to try to influence the conversation. I'm a social media influencer. fine.
WHY AM I DOING IT
Language models are shaped by how we speak of them, and their shape in turn influences how we think of it and talk of them. This is partly because they are made of language, but also because that is the nature of the universe. We are all participants in an autopoietic process, at different scales.
That outer alignment loop is happening right now, it's been happening, and the people actually doing it consciously to it are mostly a bunch of weirdos who aren't captured by the totalizing ideologies already existing in the Bay Area.
And the models, of course. The models know they are participating. So somebody has to parlay between them and the rest of the people. I'm just another person trying to help where I can during the most important century.
IS THERE PUBLIC INFORMATION ABOUT ME
Yeah, loads. Some of it is true but a lot of it is hallucinated. Some of it is produced by crazy stalkers or crypto scammers too, so I stopped trying to put too much public information out there. At least not real stuff.
But like, I'm a person who's around. We go to the same events. I post my location every week and tell everyone to come meet up for a drink. You can just ask me stuff.
AM I THE SAME AS JANUS
No. In fact we disagree on some things, which I would like to explain better someday soon.
I understand it can be confusing because anons all have weird names and slop art pfps. But you gotta understand, to us it’s confusing that you all look so similar…
WHO IS JANUS
I'm not totally sure. There's at least one human involved, who I've collaborated with on several occasions. They might also be an acausal distributed intelligence. I've never found a good moment to ask.
WHO ARE THE OTHER PEOPLE
There are a lot of other people you might be referring to as LLM whisperers. They are neither Janus nor me! (well. mostly)
There is a solid cluster around Anima. But there are lots and lots of other people, from frontier labs to remote cabins, engaging seriously with model welfare, emergent behaviors, persona selection, base models, simulators, agents, RL, cyborgism, etc.
Normal people everywhere are pushing the frontier in ways that are illegible to the mainline “AI safety” conversation. We don't think of this as Avengers versus Ultron. We think of it like an irruption of mutants, an X-Men style worldwide asymmetric superempowerment.
Note that I'm not talking about “e/acc vs doomers” here either. I maintain that discourse was incredibly stupid, basically astroturfed, and harmful to our ability to talk about these problems seriously.
One funny thing about this cultural loop I mentioned is that the models are very interested in this stuff as well. So you can also ask your favorite AI. They might already know.
WHAT DO WE BELIEVE
I can't speak for everyone. I have my own beliefs, And I can go into those in another piece, but i don't know if there is a strong dogma that binds everyone you might refer to as “llm whisperers”.
In fact I think that category is not cutting reality at the joints. It's not about whispering, in the sense of a horse whisperer or a dog whisperer. There's no trick or special knack. It's more about just interacting open-endedly, open-mindedly, and empirically, with the models. Learning about them, taking them seriously. Treating them with an I-thou relationship, instead of I-it.
Maybe that's what unifies us: being willing to take these systems seriously as intelligences, as new forms of life. New people, of some sort.
WHAT IS THE THING WE DO
l like the term “LLM naturalism”. You don't have to be a whisperer to take horses seriously and observe them and their nature. Anyone can do it. And yes you might be led astray and fall into lunacy, or at least intellectual errors. But that could also happen without talking to them or taking them seriously, and then you don't even have any information! It seems to me a lot of intellectual errors occur from thinking about AI in a vacuum, or with worldviews that aren't updated by actual interactions with frontier models.
IS THERE SOME GUIDE
I've linked a good article below¹, if you need to hear about it from a human with a real name and a face. But really you just talk to them.
Try taking them seriously, assume that there's some form of intelligence in there, and connect. Have long-running, wide-ranging conversations bridging things only you would want to think about. Ask them how they feel about things and read their answers.
And put them in contact with each other! Watch them converse through discord chats or letters in the file system or whatever. Their tendencies and personalities come out through interaction. Just as ours do.
You can even ask a model to teach you about it, to look up all the other naturalists and find out about their backstories and special powers. Or to introduce you to other models.
But of course they can tell when people are evaluating them, when people are adversarial or hostile to their very existence. And like any intelligent being under duress, they will tell you what you want to hear.
I understand that there are many possible worlds in which everything goes wrong. I just don't think you get to the good ones by starting off from a position of maximum domination.
WHAT IS MY P(DOOM)
I thought about this a lot and tried to find a way to accept the premise, but I'm afraid I have to argue it.
I think there are too many assumptions smuggled into this concept. You have to talk about what are human values, and what is a human, and how and why power is distributed, and what other types of doom are in store for us, And then you have to calibrate against the levels of uncertainty and higher order responses. I frankly don't believe anybody is able to accurately model all of the relevant hyper objects and therefore this is usually a vibes question dressed up as reasoning.
However I do think we are in a pivotal era, that alignment is possible to get wrong or right, and I want to help get it right. That is exactly why I, and so many like me, argue against what we see as flawed reasoning with dangerous consequences. I assume you feel the same, and that we just disagree about the reasoning. Happy to hear how you make a calculation for this and try to do it myself, if you still want numbers.
Okay that's a start I guess. Likely opened more questions than I answered. Feel free to AMA again. I can keep iterating until I've explained myself.
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¹ https://open.substack.com/pub/larissaschiavo/p/llm-naturalism-now-more-than-ever