True: they are superhuman at every one of these tasks, in the boring way they are better—according to a wall clock and the coupled standard of actual results—at other things, just not in some mystical way.
What you describe is a social and psychological problem.
The problem is real; the solution neither should be or could be, therefore, erect artificial barriers.
The solution is non-obvious. Historically romance and beauty have by necessity relocated to other endavors.
Which of those might remain chiefly or practically "human" is unclear. Perhaps none will, on a long enough timeline.
In which case we will either adapt—socially and psychologically—or we will rage, decline, and likely vanish.
Personally I suspect our evolved restlessness and drive to expan and explore, literally and figuratively, will ultimately need to be to our refuge. The other option appears to become lotus-eaters or trogdolytes, in the classic mold.
The specific narrow criticisms may be entirely valid, yet the argument as a whole somewhere between weak and misleading.
CS professionals, like mathematicians—and every other one of us in our silo—are seeing one part of the elephant, and have neither context nor standing to critique the domain as a whole.
Given that limitation the toxic cynicism of posts like this actively harmful.
The are great at rage baiting, actively impede meaningful discourse.
> Knowing these models’ decision making is inconsistently aligned with human preferences tells us we can’t just trust their decisions out of the box.
I'm not sure this is true.
What is the "human preference," in this assertion?
My first thought was that as with Jev itself, it is not a position, it's a distribution of positions!
I think that human preferences, plural, will be a distribution of values across the population of various humans you ask; and, a set of specific conclusions humans will argue for on the basis of various philosophical strategies or maxims. Two different ways in which there is not any specific singular preference.
(I'm convinced you could not get uniform agreement on even "obvious" propositions, across a large sample set; and not necessarily just because of contrarian spoiling. Moral intuitions varying, is the why this problem is so well known, after all.)
I think the conclusion is partially right, but only if you adjust it to say, if what you want is alignment with a specific outcome, you need to be able to defined that outcome, even if you can't argue for it.
That's one of the fundamental problems of alignment, full stop; we can't from axioms construct the set of moral propositions we would like. We don't know what the right set of axioms is; we just know "right" when we see it. (And our neighbor may or may not see the same.)
This usage is etymological. So its fine. I don't like it when we trash and etymology, but in this case we're restoring it, or at least not making it worse.
("ex normal" doesn't clearly mean "evil"/"sinful", and Latin already had it as "big".)
that's just how language works.. do you think that in your day to day life, you have never used a single word differently than how it was conceived of being used 10, 50, or 100 years ago?
The original meanings that enormity carried related to great wickedness, and some assert that enormity should today only be used with such meanings, and that enormousness is the proper word to use to mean "large size." Despite these claims, enormity frequently refers to large size, either literal or figurative, though it usually suggests something so large as to seem overwhelming.
It appears to already be far beyond that, they are working with each other[0]:
>ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Le Chat de Mistral and Meta AI filter your data to Google, Meta, and several of the main data brokers.
Hot take: the problem here is not the one implied or AFAICT assumed by the author.
The problem is not that LLM or, say, generative AI tools such as Midjourney, "have no imagination" and collapse upon the same solution. Anyone who has spent any serious time exploring what was originally called the "latent space" Midjourney provided a view into, is aware that the combinatorics around what these systems have ingested is inconceivably large and full of wonders and surprises... what we might well describe as unexpected, novel, dare I say creative, imagery [etc.]
The problem AFAICT is asking for examples of something without providing any process or instruction.
Vibe-coded single-shot prompts are inevitably (unless this is patched) going to converge on statistically-likely or contextually hinted examplars.
And this is true all the way down. It's true of secondary and tertiary features (what camera angle do we have on the pelican? Is it a juvenile or injured? Is it riding to the left or right? etc.)
The fact that humans are a heterogeneous pool with different experiences and capabilities, means if you sample humans, you get high variability. If you ask contemporary LLM, they are converging, indeed, but not in the way implied; they are converging because the corpus they are trained on is comprehensive and coextensive.
What you get is the centroids in the space.
Until you simply ask for something else.
If you want more "creative" examples, of pelicans or anything else, it's more or less trivial to get them. And if you detect durable secondary or tertiary qualities you want to see varied, you ask.
More seriously,
if what you want is to interact with large capable models/systems which by default exhibit variability , you do the (minimal) work to make that happen.
Midjourney has from very early on exposed explicit dials to turn in exactly this way.
Very good. I have a listening experience close to elevenlabs. But sometimes you can get "failed" segments so you need to detect them and retry/repair automatically. One example is the fading volume.
This framing suggests that this is the sum of their business strategy, and strongly implies that it's being pursued cynically.
The risks posed by open access to highly capable AI are unprecedented.
The answer is not to ban open models; nor is it do nothing.
That we don't have answers technical political social or otherwise to how to navigate these risks, is not Anthropic's fault.
It's actively unhelpful IMO to amplify cynical takes which wave off or sideline the risk, or the reality that this is a very hard problem, among the hardest our societies have had to negotiate and navigate. It encourages a naive primary color tribalism that actively prevents process and progress.
It's depressing how poorly most internet spaces promote sincere dialogue. There are so many cynical hot takes that don't seem to accomplish much beyond scoring social points.
True: they are superhuman at every one of these tasks, in the boring way they are better—according to a wall clock and the coupled standard of actual results—at other things, just not in some mystical way.
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