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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.

ChatGPT is designed to be helpful - saying 'I don't know' or 'there are no such relevant quotations' aren't helpful, or at least, it's been trained to think that those aren't helpful responses. Consider the average ChatGPT user who wants to know what Martin Luther King thought about trans rights. When the HelpfulBot says 'gee, I don't really know', the user is just going to click the 'you are a bad robot and this wasn't helpful', and HelpfulBot learns that.

It's probably worse than that: it's been RLHFed on the basis of responses by some South Asian and African contractors who have precious little idea of what it knows or doesn't know, don't care, and simply follow OpenAI guidelines. The average user could probably be more nuanced.

It's also been RLHF by indians who don't give a shit. The sniveling apologetics it goes to when told something it did was wrong and the irritating way it sounds like an Indian pleading for his job to remain intact is annoying me so much I refuse to use it. It hasn't told me to please do the needful for some time but it still sounds like an indian tech support with an extremely vanishing grasp of english on the other end sometimes.