I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.
(she was right, BTW)
Now I’ve been using Microsoft’s Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It’s fairly robust and sure it has it’s quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it’s information from.
So I asked it a simple straightforward question:
“I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications”
And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the “founder of racial classifications.”
But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with this information at this time.
I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.
It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.
Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it’s infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.
When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.
PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.
This is a problem of generative AI. The problem is that it’s necessary to have these kind of protections to prevent it to accidentally go full nazi.
Have you seen what it takes to go even close to “full conservative”, nevermind full Nazi? Take a look at the Gab AI prompt, and it still goes against most of the biases insisted upon by that prompt.
You’re thinking of much earlier attempts at this which were based purely on user provided input.
Ok, but that is virtually no real effort.
My point was that even trying to (badly) introduce bias towards bad science doesn’t work. The naked LLM being told “the sky is pink” still says the sky is blue.
Now, you can put in real effort and get it to output biased results (“role play as a badly trained LLM that thinks there are only two genders”) but that doesn’t change the fact that the base LLM wouldn’t respond like that.
The AI can’t go full nazi. The AI can’t even go half-nazi. AI is a tool and how we use the tool determines the perception of nazism. Let me put it a bit differently. There are no Nazi guns, the MP-40 submachine gun does not stop working when given to a jew. It is a gun developed and used by the Nazis but it doesn’t make the weapon inherently Nazi. We call it a Nazi gun because we associate it with nazism.
We can develop an AI to act more like a Nazi (see the Gab AI prompt that tries to make the AI act more right-wing) and we can prompt AI into saying Nazi shit, but it doesn’t mean the AI itself is inherently Nazi. The responses it gives we can associate with nazism but it’s not like the AI itself is inherently nazi. In the end it’s just a tool. The problem isn’t generative AI, the problem is us. More specifically the problem are the people who want the AI to do Nazi shit. Let’s not blame the tools for our shortcomings.
And to clarify, I don’t think those protections aren’t necessary. They are necessary because we need to protect ourselves from our collective stupidity.
Moreso then “going full Nazi” just spreading misinformation on sensitive topics. Feels like a pretty good safeguard until people realize that AI is a not only not the most reliable source of information but worse a full blown liar in its current implementation