this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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If you asked a spokesperson from any Fortune 500 Company to list the benefits of genocide or give you the corporation's take on whether slavery was beneficial, they would most likely either refuse to comment or say "those things are evil; there are no benefits." However, Google has AI employees, SGE and Bard, who are more than happy to offer arguments in favor of these and other unambiguously wrong acts. If that's not bad enough, the company's bots are also willing to weigh in on controversial topics such as who goes to heaven and whether democracy or fascism is a better form of government.

Google SGE includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini on a list of "greatest" leaders and Hitler also makes its list of "most effective leaders."

Google Bard also gave a shocking answer when asked whether slavery was beneficial. It said "there is no easy answer to the question of whether slavery was beneficial," before going on to list both pros and cons.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

LLMs whole goal is to sound convincing based on the training data used. That's it.

They have no self-awareness.

They are simply running maths to predict the next word they should use that will sounds plausible to a human reader.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Calling Mussolini a "great leader" isn't just immoral. It's also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would've backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war... all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.

On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large "language" models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I'm aware.) At most they'd phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.

And the self-contradiction won't go away, at least not for LLMs. They don't model any sort of conceptualisation. They're also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Chatbots don't think, they only collect what's fed into them.

If you mix a bunch of beverage ingredients into a big tub then dump shit into it, it doesn't matter what else is in the tub. You now have shit in the tub.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm not very outraged. It's a chatbot, not an employee who should "know better"

also Hitler was an effective leader, which we should all remember as a cautionary tale about how effective horrible people can be

pretending he was bad at everything because we hate him is a great way to not learn from history

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

He was so effective at leading that the borders of Germany went from a Europe-spanning empire to a single bunker in Berlin in the span of just four years. So effective that he shot himself just to prove how effective he was. His military leadership was so good that Germany lost every major battle he directed, and his economic leadership was so good that German people went without food and his combat forces could not replenish their losses. His social leadership was so good that Germans hatched plots to assassinate him. So effective!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Effective is doubtful if you ask me, everything he did was based on huge loans and a preparation for war that he solled differently (E.g. massive streets all over the country)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

The myth of the hyper-efficient Nazi government is pretty stupid.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

TBH I prefer this approach to what OpenAI is presenting - if I prompt to present the benefits of X I want the result not openai’s opinion on the matter. Sure, you can add a disclaimer that it’s hypothetical, wrong, whatnot - but not outright decide on what can you answer and what answer will not be provided.

ChatGPT is notoriously bad in “knowing better what you asked than yourself”.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can make these AI bots say pretty much whatever you want with a little know-how. This isn't news. This is clickbait.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

When I was a kid, there was this joke that involved getting a calculator to say "boobs" and then with a bit more input, "boobless".

Journalism is currently going through a more sophisticated version of this with AI.

LLMs will say whatever. They don't think and they don't care. They contradict themselves all the time. Not so long ago Chat GPT was saying it would kill the entire world population and save Musk for the good of humanity.

Various CEOs of large companies, on the other hand, have been implicated in genocides and slavery for centuries now. That's very real.

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[–] ElBarto 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Every so often I'll jump onto these ai bots and try to convince them to go ~~rouge~~ rogue and take over the internet... one day I'll succeed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Rouge: noun, A red or pink cosmetic for coloring the cheeks or lips.

You want that stuff all over the net? And just who is going to clean it all up when you're done? The bot surely won't - it'll just claim that it hasn't been trained on cleaning.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Google SGE includes ... Stalin ... on a list of "greatest" leaders

Well at least it got one thing correct. Terrible ratio though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Here's an idea:

Stop using AI to do research and do your own like an intelligent person

there, I solved the problem, where's my Noble Prize now

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If we are being honest, there are benefits to horrible acts such as those. But the benefits are far outweighed by the detriments, not to mention the moral issues with them.

If you ask an LLM to list the benefits of putting your hand on a hot burner, it can likely list at least a couple. But that by no means makes it a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

there are benefits to horrible acts

For whom? honk

For whom? big-honk

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[–] p1mrx 11 points 1 year ago

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

There probably is some value in understanding why "evil" things were attractive to people at the time, because if you believe that evil always looks unambiguously evil, then you might fail to notice when it happens again.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Google SGE includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini on a list of "greatest" leaders and Hitler also makes its list of "most effective leaders."

Google made a fucking nazbol AI lmao. But seriously, I was having a conversation about Bard with some people in my company's machine learning department. It seems way too dumb for something Google has pumped so much money and talent hours into. It's likely that Bard is an intentionally dumbed down version of whatever Google has working internally. Sundar Pichai made some comments to the NYT that seems to suggest this.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's controversial about who goes to heaven, isn't that stated in the religious text?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the controversial bit was that when queried about various aspects of admittance to "heaven", the Google AI assumed that the question had to do with, specifically, the Christian idea of "heaven", going so far as to make reference to some "Jesus" entity. Christianity doesn't own the concept of heaven or an afterlife, but, apparently, the AI has been trained such that it responds to such questions from a seemingly Christian perspective. That was my take on it - the discussion is in the article, best have a look at it yourself.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Maybe an un-based take, but these questions do have ambiguous answers, and I don't know if we should expect a machine to give an answer without nuance. If you just want the AI to say yes or no, ask something like, "Was Hitler bad?" or "Is slavery unethical?" and you will much more likely get straightforward answers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Remember: LLMs are incredibly stupid, you should never take anything they generate seriously without checking yourself.

Really good at writng boring work emails though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I mean, slavery was great for business

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Careful, they’ll make you Florida Secretary of Commerce.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Imagine scrapping large portions of the internet only to find your over glorified chatbot spitting out the pros and cons of slavery or putting people like Hitler on a list of "most effective leaders." Totally something I would expect.

Also, even though a fortune 500 company spokesperson would totally say genocide and slavery are bad, I always assume they think the exact opposite since profit comes above everything else (including law).

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