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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.