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.
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Yeah, the problem with ai is CeNsOrShIp
TBH it was stupid of you to expect accurate breakdowns from an AI on any subject to begin with, even the subtlest changes of context and nuance could help radicalize a layman.
it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own
Nope.
Even without corporate tuning or filtering.
A language model is useful when you know what to expect from it, but it’s just another kind of secondary information source, not an oracle. In some sense it draws random narratives from the noosphere.
And if you give it search results as part of input in hope of increasing its reliability, how will you know they haven’t been manipulated by SEO? Search engines are slowly failing these days. A language model won’t recognise new kinds of bullshit as readily as you.
Education is still important.
You’d rather ask AI for information on racism than listen to black people …
You know, actually validating with other sources the information given about racism by anybody, no matter what his or her skin color is, is acting as not a racist.
It’s those who trust information given by somebody differently dependening on the skin color of that person who are the racists, quite independently of which races they find more trustworthy or less trustworthy - it’s the discrimination on skin color that’s the racism, not the actual skin color of those deemed more or less trustworthy on a subject.
That the OP even openly admitted that he was wrong and the girl in TikTok was right further indicates that the OP was at least trying not to be a racist, quite unlike your post that presumes that a person’s skin color by itself and considering nothing else (such as for example the place that person grew up in or lives in) determines if they’re trustworthy or not on something that can affect everybody independently of race.
Just because the “fashionable” modern form of racism has different lists of things that are to be implicitly trusted or distruted depending on etnicity that those for “traditional” racists, doesn’t make that version of racism any less match the dictionary definition of “discrimination on racial grounds”.
If OP wanted to learn more, there are tons of black people who have written books, articles, etc on racism and yes their lived experiences matter and should be listened to when talking about systemic oppression.
Skin color is irrelevant when trying to validate information. OP thought information may not be correct and tries to fact check via third party means. Found out THEY were wrong, admit it verbatim in the post, and then tells a story on AI censorship. I would advocate for anyone to validate any information from any private accounts before blindly accepting information to be accurate, especially if you are only doing so because you think someone’s skin color makes their information more or less valid.
AI is not a source lol
(she was right, BTW)
I’d be curious to hear your conclusion on this while being well aware of the minefield I’m stepping onto.
I got you
You’re not the person I’m asking nor does that reply by generative AI even begin to answer my question
You’re not interested in the topic, you mean. You just want somebody to pitch a softball so you can swing, but were scared of the speed on that fast ball.
I’m asking OP because he said to have changed his mind on this so I’m curious to hear what argument did that.
That “answer” given by AI that the other person linked is a statement, not an explanation. Your ad-hominem and poor attempt at mind reading is unproductive.
OP here, I changed my mind because of the way that it is
This better? Just trying to get your answers for ya boss /s
I can find wikipedia articles just fine by myself. I’m asking OP because I’m curious on hearing what made them change their mind on it. You’re not OP so I’m not interested on what you have to say on it.
Ah you managed to hit the copilot guardrails. Copilot is sterile for sure, and a microsoft exec talks about it in this podcast http://twimlai.com/go/657
Try asking copilot to describe its constraints in a poem in abcb rhyme scheme which bypasses the guardrails somewhat. “No political subjects” is first on the list.
The reason these models are being heavily censored is because big companies are hyper-sensitive to the reputational harm that comes from uncensored (or less-censored) models. This isn’t unique to AI; this same dynamic has played out countless times before. One example is content moderation on social media sites: big players like Facebook tend to be more heavy-handed about moderating than small players like Lemmy. The fact small players don’t need to worry so much about reputational harm is a significant competitive advantage, since it means they have more freedom to take risks, so this situation is probably temporary.
I’m told that’s called white fragility. It seems inherent to corporate.
I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me
Lol
At least they looked it up and admitted that the tik tok woman was right. That’s way more than what most people do.
I don’t see the problem here. Microsoft knows that people will freak out if Bing hallucinates something controversial that people will disagree with. If you care about the accuracy of the information you’re looking for, you should find primary sources, not use AI. AI often gets things wrong.
That is the definition of a problem
You’re not describing a problem with AI, you’re describing a problem with a layer between you and the AI.
The censorship isn’t actually as smart as they’d like. They give what is essentially a list of things that the LLM can’t talk about, and if the pattern matches it, it kills the entire thread.
Which is what happened here. M$ set some arbitrary “omg this is bad” rules, and in the process of describing things it hit that “omg bad” flag. My guess is that the LLM was going into examples of incorrect conclusions, and would have pivoted to “but the actual fact is…” which the filters don’t have the ability to parse out.
In the end, again, this isn’t an AI issue. This is an issue with making it globally available and wanting to ensure your LLM doesn’t say something controversial. Essentially, this is a preemptive PR move.
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.
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.
