PR people, always in search of influence, [] are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that’s not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It’s important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT.
The hour, in other words, is near, and, instead of being short-sighted or risk-averse, we should set to preparing. But for what? Again, for jumping into the AI mind, both to influence it and to hedge against human superfluousness. And how? The best way, Gwern thinks, for people who don’t work in AI at least, is to simply communicate in public to the AIs that already exist. “Much of the value of writing done recently or now is simply to get stuff into LLMs,” so as to teach them, he writes.
In an interview, he elaborated: “By writing, you are voting on the future of the shoggoth using some of the few currencies it acknowledges. If you aren’t writing, you’re kind of abdicating the future or your role in it.”
After all, you vote in elections even though you don’t expect to have a great effect on the result, because it’s important on some absolute moral level to send your wishes into the world. This sort of general moral thinking seems to me valuable here precisely because nobody knows what will happen, whether influence will compound or diminish over time. Turning to already formed instincts about how to interact with vast and complicated systems is a helpfully familiar way of not being paralyzed by weirdness and uncertainty. That sort of moral thinking is also crucial to mounting a case for human value even when compared to superintelligence.
[T]here’s a reverse wager implied. If you’re one of these people, and if you want to be forgotten—an honorable instinct and possibly a right—and if you don’t want to be resurrected by AIs, then you absolutely must not write for them. In fact, the bitter conclusion is that you must not write at all, ever. For just as it’s now basically impossible to disappear, go somewhere, and start again, soon it will be impossible to be forgotten, and one day that might mean it’s impossible to not be brought screaming back.
The best way to communicate across the gulf between present and future is to place little droplets of values inside larger droplets of expression so that someone in the future, noticing how nice they look, stops to look at them more carefully.