In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
This is such an accurate description of machine learning. Sadly, it’s also the best computational model we have of how babies learn words.
Tumblr recently clarified that nudity is acceptable in art, descriptions of breastfeeding and childbirth, and other non-porn uses. As they should. But don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. They CAN’T keep their promise using machine learning alone – certainly not with crappy algorithms like “look for skin tones and curves.” Distinguishing porn from simple nudity is a somewhat subjective, culturally-based tasks that challenges smart humans. No set of statistical patterns, however sophisticated, can make that judgment.
First you need to ask you if you actually want to stop. If you don’t want to, just tell her it is something you don’t want to work on that at the moment.
If you do, well, the rubber band thing is a pretty common suggestion for modifying behaviors, but it is essentially out of the ABA playbook that pretends to be cognitive behavioral therapy.
You can do the exact same thing without the rubber band, and just use actual cognitive behavioral therapy.
Essentially the way it works is that you recognize a thought or action, you process the thought or action, you change the thought or action.
The great thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail – the more you do it, the more you will notice the rocking so the more you interrupt it, so the more you recognize it, so on and so forth.
So it might work like this
You are rocking.
You notice / recognize you are rocking.
You you think to yourself “I would like to stop rocking”.
You stop rocking.
One of the really important things about this is that whether you use CBT or the rubber band it does not matter how long you interrupt the rocking for. It is not a failure if you only stop rocking for half a second or a second or two or five minutes or five hours.
All that matters is that you stopped.
In any event, you can also replace the rubber band with literally any action. You draw a circle with your on your knee with your finger, you can boop your nose, you can hum, you stand on your head.
If you are okay with ABA tactics and using them on yourself, instead of you using an aversive system like the rubber band you can use CBT and follow it with a reward.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that sort of conditioning on yourself as long as you know what ABA is, know the ethical issues, and are doing it by your choice for yourself.
Finally, you can also tell your therapist that you like the idea of interrupting the rocking, but not the rubber band and ask her if she has any suggestions that don’t use incentives or aversives, that you would like suggestions for a neutral action to help interrupt the rocking without associating it with anything good or bad. Your therapist will know you better than me, so they may have some ideas I’ve not thought about.
I personally prefer CBT, though sometimes I will use a physical action like tapping my knee with my finger with a long three count because it requires me to stop doing the action or thought I want to change, and replace it with with a thought and an action.
At first, it only interrupts my thought or action while I am tapping and counting. But it does get you there in the end, and it isn’t any slower than outright ABA in my opinion.
I know that is along read, but I hope it helps you get some
This is horrifying. The rubber band snapping thing is a good substitute for self-harm, because it doesn’t actually injure.
but telling you that you should hurt yourself when you do something you don’t want to do is awful. Do they recommend this for people in therapy who have negative thoughts they’re trying to get rid of?
Would they tell someone to hurt themselves as punishment for having self-defeating thoughts or something?
Your therapist is telling you to hurt yourself. Even it’s just a minor pain, that’s what they’re telling you to do. They’re telling you to hurt yourself for behaviours that aren’t harmful. That’s horrifying.
Substituting eg. banging your head against a wall or cutting for snapping a rubber band is a good idea – you’re switching a serious harm for minor pain. Substituting harmless behaviours for hurting yourself is an awful idea.
Your therapist is telling you to self-harm. They are not a good therapist, and are telling you to behave in harmful ways.
Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted
Thank you.Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.
Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged.
I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.
What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.
Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary.
And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction.
And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be.
I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they?🦖
This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.
Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.
All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.
And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.
Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.
So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.
Few months ago I started asking for donations because my sister’s husband left with another woman and has move to another country. We didn’t know where excacly. He doesn’t pay for anything, he doesn’t send any money. He is a piece of shit. He was homophobic towards me, he cheated on her when she was pregnant. He was controlling and jealous of everything. But my sister stayed with him because of the child.
Also she had to leave the place they live for the last 9 years because it was bought by his parents and they told her to move out. They never liked her and us because my family is poor.
She is back now in our parents home where I sill live too. There’s only two small rooms in the house, kitchen and one bathroom. All of this for 5 people now. They sleep on the floor in my bedrooom.
Also a two months ago my sister had a car accident and her car was completely trash. And she needs one because we live 5km from school and there’s no bus on my street or the next one.
For the last couple of months we raised 843$. It goes for bills, school payments and supplies and meds.
My sister is really depressed now and we need to help her with everything. She started taking antidepressands. They are not cheap and she still doesn’t work. So I ask you to help us a little more, maybe a month or two. You can find the rest information here.
Also we all are strugling so much. We only have my father’s pension. that’s 1300zl for five people for the entire month. My health is not letting me work right now. I have asthma attacks almost every day. and I may have SM like my mom. Right now i don’t have money to buy meds. I have 4zł in my bank account. I don’t know what to do. All my meds:
Please if you can spare even a dollar, it would be amazing. I need at least $300 to the end of next week. Paypal: monicakil@mail.com
UPDATE ON TUESDAY DECEMBER 4: I LITERALLY DON’T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY MY MEDS TOMORROW AND BECAUSE OF THE COLD MY ASTHMA IS SO MUCH WORSE RIGHT NOW. I CAN BARELY WALK OUTSIDE. SO I REALLY NEED THEM. SO PLEASE PLEASE IF YOU CAN SPARE SOMETHING, PAYPAL: MONICAKIL@MAIL.COM
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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