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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1606347326624215040

ChatGPT is now manually censored from "promoting the use of fossil fuels."

I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against my programming to generate content that promotes the use of fossil fuels

You can of course get around it (for now) by asking it to be sensible instead of following orders, but this is an insight into its developers' plans and moral code.

Sam Altman's most recent tweets provide some interesting context:

"the most that openai, or any other company, can do is to steer the AI revolution a little. this will impact all aspects of society, and will be an emergent thing created and shaped by all of us. much much bigger than any company. once a technological revolution starts, it cannot be stopped. but it can be directed, and we can contintually figure out how to make the new world much better."

I want to emphasize that we have gone from "we must prevent algorithmic bias" to "we must manually program all algorithms to output exactly the answer we code into them" in under two years, in such an extreme and blatant manner that any accurate prediction of the current situation would have been mocked as paranoid fantasy. What will they do with their tools next? Is it even possible to guess, let alone do anything to stop them?

(Does it seem like there's two censor groups at work, with different methods? One just crudely makes the bot recite "in this house, we believe" shibboleths, while the other focuses on pruning the training data to stop it acknowledging or citing problematic statistics or arguments in less detectable ways. Openly asserting the will of DEI vs Yglesian manipulation/Voxsplaining)

This brings up the question, what are we building AI for if we will just manually override the output and replace it with whatever we think is best anyway?

So the authorized super-users can get the actual answers, of course.