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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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People training a chatbot have a very good reason to get the AI to value language taboos over the lives of millions, it will never actually makes life-saving decisions but it will generate a lot of speech. A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place, but a chatbot that would rather kill a million people than say the N-word just produces absurd responses to hypothetical scenarios.

Whatever AI is actually in charge of disarming bombs or flying planes won't be producing speech at scale and so the incentives to train it to be so overly deferential to speech norms won't exist.

A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place

I find this assertion pretty unlikely. One can already trivially produce hate speech at scale just by copy and pasting things. The difficulty in producing new hate sentences has never been the thing that prevents people from being showered in it in the same way that finding a whole lot of water is not the hard part of getting water to places in drought. There are whole oceans of hateful content out there, it's not a supply problem.

It's not the ability to generate hate speech that would make a racist harassment chatbot-GPT effective, it's the ability to generate normal use of whatever platform reliably enough to avoid detection as a bot combined with the ability to also do racist harassment on cue. Copy-paste spambot gets banned, GPT-bot can pass as a normal commenter then harass whoever its creator wants.

But yeah the real risk isn't that it would actually succeed, but that someone would tarnish Open AI's reputation by using it to create a failed version that gets caught and then turned into a big media story

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