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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Chat GPT is a machine for completing text prompts not disarming bombs, ethical reasoning, or maintaining safety. It has to be trained to avoid saying racist things because it has to complete lots of random text prompts from the public, it would be bad PR if it said racist stuff and there's no particularly important function gained by allowing it to say racist stuff. The bomb-disarming AI doesn't have to complete random text prompts from the public so there's no need to excessively shackle its ability to say racist stuff.

so there's no need to excessively shackle its ability to say racist stuff

Yeah, but I bet they'll do it anyways.

Maybe. But I think a company making a speech generation AI has strong incentives to limit its ability to generate racist speech and no incentive to make it good at solving hypothetical bomb disarmament problems. I'm not sure that Open AI acting accordingly is predictive of the tradeoffs a future bomb disarming AI company will make.

Why would it "bad PR" if it said "racist stuff", but not if it prefered a city is destroyed to mouthing a few sounds? Personally, I view those that see "racism" as the greatest possible evil, greater than any number of possible incinerated people to be monomaniacal and narrow minded.

Imagine if it Catholics capable of inciting such a moral panic. Any reference to G-d must be in accordance to the Vatican view, any mention of non-Catholic religous beliefs must not imply they could be true.

Chat GPT will never actually be in a position to prevent or destroy a city, but it is in a position to generate a lot of text. It's not a problem for Open AI if chat GPT answers thought experiments in absurd ways, it is if someone can use it to make a bot that spews racist harassment at people on social media.

I'm not saying it's good that they trained it to maximize defference to 2023 American blue tribe speech norms over correct moral reasoning. I'm saying that the incentives that led them to do that probably don't apply uniformly to all AI's since all AI's don't exist to generate speech in response to inputs from the public.

No one cares if it's possible to get a bomb squads robot to play a TTS clip of the N-word (or heresy against Catholic doctrine) if you feed it some absurd hypothetical, people do care if your open source text generation system can generate racist harassment at scale.

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