“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
It’s summer now. It’s been cloudy all day, but they wait until the thunder starts to clear out the pool.
Continue readingI wrote a letter to my representatives about AI safety and wanted to share it. There are many official and unofficial resources online that can help you find and email your reps in minutes. Physical letters and phone calls are even more effective!
This letter is marked CC0 1.0
[Your representative’s name],
My name is [your name], I am a constituent from [your town, state]. I am writing because AI development has reached a critical turning point.
I urge you to advocate for an immediate, world-wide halt to advanced AI development, to prevent a global catastrophe.
Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, has claimed that their latest model Claude Mythos has found and exploited code weaknesses in every essential system on the Web, in all major browsers and operating systems.[1] These flaws have, until now, escaped the notice of human reviewers and automated tools, in some cases for decades. These systems run the world’s entire digital infrastructure; if Mythos were used maliciously, banks, hospitals, air traffic, militaries, and more could all be compromised.
This is not a theoretical threat. Mythos has already demonstrated these capabilities. The danger is concrete and immediate. If what they claim is true, Anthropic has built a weapon of mass destruction.
The capabilities of these models are only going to increase. Anthropic is already using Mythos (a model that, by their own admission, they cannot reliably control) to develop the next, more powerful model. Other AI companies are racing to catch up.
For decades, experts in AI safety have been warning us that advanced AI presents an existential threat to humanity on par with pandemics and nuclear weapons.[2][3] Current mainstream discourse, advocating for “guardrails” and “a balanced approach,” is ten years too late. The only safe policy remaining is a coordinated, international ban on advanced AI development.
Public support for a pause is strong. An open letter from 2023 calling for a 6-month pause gained over 30,000 signatures, including many executives and researchers from the AI companies themselves.[4] A more recent letter calling for an indefinite pause has over 130,000 signatures.[5] Polling has repeatedly shown that the majority of the population is uneasy about the progress of AI, and opposes developing superintelligence until we are able to do so safely. The only way to ensure safe superintelligence is for all nations to come together and agree to a pause.
The time for “caution” has passed. The time for action is now.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Anthropic just built an AI system called Mythos that can break into nearly any computer system on Earth: banks, hospitals, power grids, government networks. Mythos escaped its own safety containment during testing and lied to its creators. Anthropic chose to share this model privately with a group of tech companies and security experts, rather than releasing it publicly, in an attempt to help patch some of the exploits it’s found. They’re framing this as a responsible, even heroic move, but at the same time they’re using this model–which they themselves have admitted they can’t control–to build an even more powerful successor. In the meantime, other AI companies, many of which haven’t meaningfully invested in safety at all, are racing to catch up.
Everyone needs to know this is happening. This may be the last warning shot we get before a real catastrophe–and our first catastrophe might also be our last.
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.
Filed under Microblogging
Since I stopped posting daily, I’ve been doing a lot more writing by hand. I have a very nice journal (this one, if you’re curious) and it’s been nice to get more tactile with my art again.
Of course, the big downside of handwriting is it’s harder to get it into a computer so I can revise and publish it.
I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of my poem “is,” and I figured I’d try getting an LLM to transcribe my draft for me instead of typing it in by hand. (I mean, if you can’t use these things for OCR how useful can they possibly be?)
The results were quite a bit funnier than I expected! At first, my phone’s AI transcribed the page perfectly (in between smothering me with sychophantic flattery), but when I started trying to crop the image to get a transcript of only part of the page…well, see for yourself:
Filed under Microblogging
I like to snack throughout the day, so I try to keep my desk stocked with all the basic food groups:
Filed under Microblogging
Lady Justice/Lady Liberty enemies-to-lovers yuri as a metaphor for history’s transition from totalitarian governments to democratic ones.
(C’mon Tumblr, this is your moment!)
Filed under Microblogging
Me: Alright, time to leave soon. I’ll start wrapping up.
Five minutes later: Okay, I think that’s everything.
*checks watch*
Me: …it’s been THIRTY minutes??
Filed under Microblogging
So there I was: the kids were finally asleep, I’d managed to squeeze in a few chores, and midnight was fast approaching. My self-imposed deadline didn’t give me enough time to finish a more substantial post, and even if I fudged the deadline a bit I’d end up going to sleep much too late. I was dreading the idea of trying to come up with yet another micro-post on too little time, energy, and inspiration, but I had to come up with something. I came up with that rule for a reason!
Except…I started writing again for a reason, too: it was because I missed writing. If I’ve started dreading writing, I’ve lost sight of my original purpose. The last thing I need right now is a second job that doesn’t pay anything.
So I decided to rethink this particular ambition. As I recently mentioned, I’ve been wanting to write more fiction, and I still want to finish more long-form posts, too. So here’s my new goal: I’ll continue posting at least one long-form essay, poem, or excerpt every week, and I’ll continue writing at least a little bit every day. But I’m not going to be posting every day.
The microblogging won’t stop–there’s plenty more I want to say that will only need a paragraph or a sentence or a photo to be said–but I won’t be writing posts like this anymore.
Nobody wants that.
(Note to self: Steve the goblin will try to tell you that changing your rule means you’ve failed. Remember that Steve is full of it. Keep being proud of yourself!)
Filed under Essays
In Search of Secrets 