I do think the thing you describe here is great. I think I hadn't actually tried really leveraging the current zeitgeist to actively get better at it, and it does seem like a skill you could improve at and that seems cool.

But I'd bet it's not what was happening for most people. I think the value-transfer is somewhat automatic, but most people won't actually be attuned to it enough. (might be neat to operationalize some kind of bet about this, if you disagree).

I do think it's plausible, if people put more deliberate effort it, to create a zeitgeist where the value transfer is more real for more people.

A thing that gave me creeping horror about the Ghiblification is that the I don't think the masses actually particularly understand Ghibli. And the result is an uneven simulacrum-mask that gives the impression of "rendered with love and care" without actually being so. 

The Ghibli aesthetic is historically pretty valuable to me, and in particular important as a counterbalanacing force against "the things I expect to happen by default with AI." 

Some things I like about Ghibli:

• The "cinematic lens" emphasizes a kind of "see everything with wonder and reverence" but not in a way that papers over ugly or bad things. Ugliness and even horror are somehow straightforwardly depicted, but in a way that somehow makes both seem very normal and down to earth, and also supernaturally majestic. (See On green, and The Expanding Moral Cinematic Universe).
• The main characters are generally "low-ish neuroticism." (This youtube analysis I like argues that the women in particular are 'non-neurotic', and the men tend to be "low compared to modern city-dwelling standards.")

There's a bit of awkwardness where Miyazaki is particularly anti-transhumanist, where I disagree with him. But I feel like I could argue with him about it on his terms – I have an easy time imagining how to depict spirits of technology and capitalism and bureaucracy as supernatural forces that have the kind of alien grandeur, not on humanity's side or the "natural world's side", but still ultimately part of the world.

For years, I have sometimes walked down the street and metaphorically put on "Miyazaki goggles", where I choose to lean into a feeling of tranquility, and I choose to see everything through that "normal but reverent" stance. I imagine the people that live in each house doing their day to day things to survive and make money and live life. And seeing the slightly broken down things (a deteriorating fence, a crumbling sidewalk) as part of a natural ebb and flow of the local ecosystem. And seeing occasional more "naturally epic" things as particularly majestic and important. 

So, the wave of "ghiblify everything" was something I appreciated, and renewed a felt-desire to live more often in a ghibli-ish world. But, also, when I imagine how this naturally plays out, I don't think it really gets us anything like a persistent reality transfer the way you describe. Mostly we get a cheap simulacra that may create some emotion / meaning at first, but will quickly fade into "oh, here's another cheap filter."

...

That all said, I do feel some intrigue at your concept here. I'm still generally wrapping my mind around what futures are plausible, and then desirable. I feel like I will have more to say about this after thinking more.

Seems at odds with longhairism.

Curated. I think this is a pretty important point. I appreciate Neel's willigness to use himself as an example. 

I do think this leaves us with the important followup questions of "okay, but, how actually DO we evaluate strategic takes?". A lot of people who are in a position to have demonstrated some kind of strategic awareness are people who are also some kind of "player" on the gameboard with an agenda, which means you can't necessarily take their statements at face value as an epistemic claim. 

I think I agree with a lot of stuff here but don't find this post itself particularly compelling for the point.

I also don't think "be virtuous" is really sufficient to know "what to actually do." It matters a lot which virtues. Like I think environmentalism's problems wasn't "insufficiently virtue-ethics oriented", it's problem was that it didn't have some particular virtues that were important.

Or: when the current policy stops making sense, we can figure out a new policy. 

In particular, when the current policy stops making sense, AI moderation tools may also be more powerful and can enable a wider range of policies. 

I mean, the sanctions are ‘if we think your content looks LLM generated, we’ll reject it and/or give a warning and/or eventually delete or ban.’ We do this for several users a day. 

That may get harder someday but it’s certainly not unenforceable now. 

I agree it'll get harder to validate, but I think having something like this policy is, like, a prerequisite (or at least helpful grounding) for the mindset change.

Curated. I think figuring out whether and how we can apply AI to AI safety is one of the most important questions, and I like this post for exploring this through many more different angles than we'd historically seen.

A thing I both like and dislike about this post is that it's more focused on laying out the questions than giving answers. This makes it easier for me the post to "help me think it through myself" (rather than just telling me a "we should do X" style answer). 

But it lays out a dizzying enough array of different concerns that I found it sort of hard to translate this into "okay what actually should I actually think about next?". I'd have found it helpful if the post ended with some kind of recap of "here's the areas that seem most important to be tracking, for me."

(note: This is Raemon's random take rather than considered Team Consensus)

Part of the question here is "what sort of engine is overall maintainable, from a moderation perspective?".

LLMs make it easy for tons of people to be submitting content to LessWrong without really checking whether it's true and relevant. It's not enough for a given piece to be true. It needs to be reliably true, with low cost to moderator attention.

Right now, basically LLMs don't produce anywhere near good enough content. So, presently, letting people submit AI generated content without adding significant additional value is a recipe for LW admins to spend a bunch of extra time each day deciding whether to moderate a bunch of content that we're realistically going to say "no" to.

(Some of the content is ~on par with the bottom 25% of LW content, but the bottom 25% of LW content is honestly below the quality bar we prefer the site to be at, and the reason we let those comments/posts in at all is because it's too expensive to really check if it's reasonable, and when we're unsure, we sometimes to default to "let it in, and let the automatic rate limits handle it". But, the automated rate limits would not be sufficient to handle an influx of LLM slop)

But, even when we imagine content that should theoretically be "just over the bar", there are secondorder effects of LW being a site with a potentially large amount of AI content that nobody is really sure if it's accurate or whether anyone endorses it and whether we are entering into some slow rolling epistemic disaster.

So, my guess for the bar for "how good quality do we need to be talking about for AI content to be net-positive" is more at least top-50% and maybe top-25% of baseline LW users. And when we get to that point probably the world looks pretty different.