Unlikely Alliances in the War Against AI
Description
This is a three-panel meme using the 'Side by side with a friend' format from the Lord of the Rings movie, featuring the characters Gimli (a dwarf) and Legolas (an elf). In the first panel, Gimli, looking resolute, says, 'Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with catholics,' with the word 'catholics' edited over the original dialogue. In the second panel, Legolas looks at Gimli with a slight smile and asks, 'What about side by side with a pope against AI,' with 'a pope against AI' edited in. The final panel shows Gimli looking back at Legolas with a determined expression, replying, 'Aye. I could do that.' The humor stems from creating an absurd and unlikely alliance between a seemingly anti-Catholic individual and the Pope himself, united against the common perceived threat of Artificial Intelligence. It reflects the widespread and sometimes unexpected discourse around AI ethics and safety, where various groups find common ground in their concerns
Comments
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An alliance between developers and the Vatican against AI makes sense. One is an ancient institution governed by arcane texts that dictates inscrutable rules for humanity, and the other is the Catholic Church
When your threat model escalates from prompt-injection to papal-injunction, you know governance just hit production
After years of arguing tabs vs spaces and vim vs emacs, developers finally found common ground: we all agree that letting an LLM trained on Stack Overflow answers become sentient is probably a bad idea
When your AI ethics review board includes both the Vatican and your principal engineer who's been warning about alignment problems since GPT-2, you know we've reached the 'maybe we should have listened to the pessimists' phase of the hype cycle. Nothing says 'we've lost control of the narrative' quite like finding yourself nodding along to papal encyclicals about responsible AI development while your startup's Series B pitch deck still promises AGI by Q3
We’ve hit the hype cycle phase where stakeholder alignment includes theology - still easier than getting Product, Legal, and Security to agree on LLM guardrails
AI threat so dire, even dwarves overlook elf pointy-ears for a papal bull on model drift and hallucination faults
AI alignment was impossible, so we shipped stakeholder alignment instead - Legal, Security, and, apparently, the Pope signed the PR