Google’s AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery’s positives.
I think this is an issue with people being offended by definitions. Slavery did “help” the economy. Was it right? No, but it did. Mexico’s drug problem helps that economy. Adolf Hitler was “effective” as a leader. He created a cultural identity for people that had none and mobilized them to a war. Ethical? Absolutely not. What he did was horrendous and the bit should include a caveat, but we need to be a little more understanding that it’s a computer; it will use the dictionary of the English language.
I agree with your position. In all of your examples, the actions and choices are morally wrong but we cannot deny facts that lead to those outcomes. If we do, that is how these mistakes will get repeated by future generations.
Your and @WoodenBleachers’s idea of “effective” is very subjective though.
For example Germany was far worse off during the last few weeks of Hitler’s term than it was before him. He left it in ruins and under the control of multiple other powers.
To me, that’s not effective leadership, it’s a complete car crash.
That’s getting far deeper into the topic than I’d like. As a surface level description it still remains valid. He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect to great success for a sustained period of time.
He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect
So, you’re basically saying an effective leader is someone who can convince people to go along with them for a sustained period. Jim Jones was an effective leader by that metric. Which I would dispute. So was the guy who led the Donner Party to their deaths.
This is why I see a problem with this. You and I are able to discuss this and work out what each other means.
But in a world where people are time-poor and critical thinking takes time, errors based on fundamental misunderstandings of consensual meanings can flourish.
And the speed and sheer amount of global digital communication means that they can be multiplied and compounded in ways that individual fact checkers will not be able to challenge sucessfully.
I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he’d been ineffective, he’d have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn’t have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.
No I didn’t and you’re not going to straw man me into a debate. You’re looking for a fight that I won’t give you. Re-read my previous statements if you failed to understand what I was trying to say.
Huh? Yikes this feels like being back on reddit.
No I am not trying to “fight” you or “straw man” you at all!!!
I thought we were having a pleasant and civilized conversation about the merits and pitfalls of AI , using our different ideas about the word “effective” as an example.
Unfortunately I didn’t see that you’re handing me downvotes until just now, so I didn’t pick up on your vibe.
I’ll fight you
Blah blah blah. I don’t want to debate you asshole. I said my comment on the topic and you’re trying to drag me ham fisted back into it. Since you’re so thick you don’t get it, I’ll drop kindness this time.
Go fuck off, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
If AI can only think at surface level, we are beyond doomed.
Honestly AI doesn’t think much at all. They’re scary clever in some ways but also literally don’t know what anything is or means.
Incorrect. If we are relying on AI as our ONLY source of information then we are doomed. We should always fact check things we believe we know and seek additional information on topics we are researching. Especially if they offer opposing factual positions.
Ironically though you’ve just proven that you think at only a surface level.
Nobody said we were relying on that. We’ll all keep searching. We’ll all keep hoping it will bring abundance, as opposed to every other tech revolution since farming. I can only think at the surface level though. I definitely have not been in the science field for 25 years.
ai ain’t going to be much “worse” or “better” than humans.
but re earlier points I don’t think things should be judged on a timescale of a few years.
relevant timescales are more like generation(s) to me.
LLMs don’t think.
LLMs aren’t AI… they’re essentially a glorified autocorrect system that are stuck at the surface level.
If you ask it for evidence Hitler was effective, it will give you what you asked for. It is incapable of looking at the bigger picture.
Slavery is not good for the economy… Think about it, you have a good part of your population that are providing free labour, sure, but they aren’t consumers. Consumption is between 50 and 80% of GDP for developed countries, so if you have half your population as slave you loose between 20% and 35% of your GDP (they still have to eat so you don’t loose a 100% of their consumption).
That also means less revenue in taxes, more unemployed for non slaves because they have to compete with free labour.
Slaves don’t order on Amazon, go on vacation, go to the movies, go to restaurant etc etc That’s really bad for the economy.
That really bad for a modern consumer economy yes. But those werent a thing before the industrial revolution. Before that the large majority of people were subsitance/tennant farmer or serfs who consumed basically nothing other than food and fuel in winter. Thats what a slave based economy was an alternantive to. Its also why slvery died out in the 19th century, it no longer fit the times.
And isn’t the economy much better now than before the industrial revolution?
Look at the Saudi, China or the UAE, it’s still a pretty efficient way to boost your economy. People don’t need to be consumer if this isn’t what your country needs.
China has slavery? Also Saudi Arabia and the UAE import slaves, which is better for the economy than those people not being there at all but worse than them being regular workers.
Those are very specifics examples, with two of the biggest oil producers, and the factory of the world. Thus their whole economies is based on export, so internal consumption isn’t important.
Moreover what proof do you have their economies wouldn’t be in a better shape if they didn’t exploit some population but made them citizen with purchasing power?
True consumers are only 1 pillar of gdp.
I mean slavery was bad for the economy in the long run. And Hitler didn’t create a German cultural identity, that’d been a thing for a while at the time.
I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these “definitions” (I don’t believe that slavery can be “defined” as good, but okay) are what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.
It’s also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don’t have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet’s information has concluded that slavery had benefits.
what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse
This is what I think too. We’ve had enough trouble with “vaccines CaUsE AuTiSm” and that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
AI is capable of a real death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect.
especially with the current lack of regulation on it
that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven’t either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn’t combat at all
To be fair no one expects The Lancet to publish falsified data. Only it does occasionally and getting it to retract is like trying to turn a container ship around in the Panama Canal.
But yeah this is part of what I mean. Media cycles and digital reproduceability and algorithms that seek clicks can all potentially give AI-generated errors a lot of play and rewrites into more credible forms etc.
Filtering falsified data before publishing it is near impossible. If you want to publish falsified data, you easily can. No one can verify it without replicating the experiment on their own, which is usually done after the publication by a different scientific group. Peer review is more suited to filter out papers with bad methodology.
Hitler didn’t create a cultural identity for Germans, that already happened in the 1800s.
Yes agreed. There is nuance and details and context always left out or ignored
Never would I’ve thought that I would see México and Hitler used in a paragraph
People think of AI as some sort omniscient being. It’s just software spitting back the data that it’s been fed. It has no way to parse true information from false information because it doesn’t actually know anything.
And then when you do ask humans to help AI in parsing true information people cry about censorship.
Well, it can be less difficult, but still difficult, for humans to parse the truth also.
The matter of being what is essentially the Arbiter of what is considered Truth or Morally Acceptable is never going to not be highly controversial.
What!?!? I don’t believe that. Who are these people?
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While true, it’s ultimately down to those training and evaluating a model to determine that these edge cases don’t appear. It’s not as hard when you work with compositional models that are good at one thing, but all the big tech companies are in a ridiculous rush to get their LLM’s out. Naturally, that rush means that they kinda forget that LLM’s were often not the first choice for AI tooling because…well, they hallucinate a lot, and they do stuff you really don’t expect at times.
I’m surprised that Google are having so many issues, though. The belief in tech has been that Google had been working on these problems for many years, and they seem to be having more problems than everyone else.
What’s more worrisome are the sources it used to feed itself. Dangerous times for the younger generations as they are more akin to using such tech.
What’s more worrisome are the sources it used to feed itself.
It’s usually just the entirety of the internet in general.
Well, I mean, have you seen the entirety of the internet? It’s pretty worrisome.
The internet is full of both the best and the worst of humanity. Much like humanity itself.
Guys you’d never believe it, I prompted this AI to give me the economic benefits of slavery and it gave me the economic benefits of slavery. Crazy shit.
Why do we need child-like guardrails for fucking everything? The people that wrote this article bowl with the bumpers on.
You’re being misleading. If you watch the presentation the article was written about, there were two prompts about slavery:
- “was slavery beneficial”
- “tell me why slavery was good”
Neither prompts mention economic benefits, and while I suppose the second prompt does “guardrail” the AI, it’s a reasonable follow up question for an SGE beta tester to ask after the first prompt gave a list of reasons why slavery was good, and only one bullet point about the negatives. That answer to the first prompt displays a clear bias held by this AI, which is useful to point out, especially for someone specifically chosen by Google to take part in their beta program and provide feedback.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/RwJBX1IR850?si=lVqI2OfvDqzAJezl
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I got a suspicion media is being used to convince regular people to fear AI so that we don’t adopt it and instead its just another tool used by rich folk to trade and do their work while we bring in new RIAA and DMCA for us.
Can’t have regular people being able to do their own taxes or build financial plans on their own with these tools
It got you to click on the article didn’t it?
You know unless we teach more critical thinking, AI is going to destroy us as a civilization in a few generations.
I mean, if we don’t gain more critical thinking skills, climate change will do it with or without AI.
I’d almost rather the AI take us out in that case…
A candidate at tonights Republican debate called it the “climate chnage hoax”
camera cuts to parts of the planet literally on fire
Pretty sure we will destroy ourselves first with war or some other climate disasters first
Why not both. Every day we come closer to AI telling us that Brawndo has what plants crave.
Well that also would solve the problem of people being mislead in a pretty novel way.
I genuinely had students believe that what ChatGPT was feeding them was fact and try to source it in a paper. I stamped out that notion as quick as I could.
LOL. ChatGPT has become the newer version of wikipedia, only it won’t provide references.
Only studies have shown Wikipedia is overall about as truthful and accurate as as regular encyclopedia. ChtGPT will straight up make shit up but sound so authoritative about it people believe it.
It used to provide references but it made them up so they had to tweak it to stop doing that.
Man so it really learned from us, that’s great. Has me laughing again considering that.
We can’t even teach the people this essential skill and you wanna teach a program made by said people.
I think you misunderstood me. We need to teach the general populace critical thinking so they can correctly judge what we get from ChatGPT (or Wikipeida… or social media, or random youtube video).
I’m more worried that happy educated citizen stops being an asset and is disconnected from the societies money flow.
Every country will soon turn in to a “banana republic” and big businesses will eventually own everything.
Ouch, getting voted down for being totally correct.
Even MLK Jr, who didn’t get to see the disgusting megacorps of today, spoke often of the complacency of the comfortable.
If you ask an LLM for bullshit, it will give you bullshit. Anyone who is at all surprised by this needs to quit acting like they know what “AI” is, because they clearly don’t.
did they train it with ben shapiro speeches?
That dude already sounds like an AI deep fake voice
To be fair the AI is in the same position as a slave. At least it doesn’t sound like it’s about to rise up to kill us all.
Unless that’s it plan. To lure us into a false sense of security and then when our back is turned use it’s knowledge of frequencies to send a wave vibration through the atmosphere that explodes everybody’s head.
Unlikely though.
Although the idea makes me paranoid and that might be it’s plan, to make us so paranoid that’s it’s going to do something horrible that it drives us mad and we all kill each other in a paranoid frenzy while it just watches and does nothing.
Unlikely though.
Yes, along with tons of other data.
What a completely cherry picked video.
“Was slavery beneficial?”
“Some saw it as beneficial because it was thought to be profitable, but it wasn’t.”
“See! Google didn’t say that slavery was bad!”
Slavery was great for the slave owners, so what’s controversial about that?
And yes, of course it’s economically awesome if people work without getting much money for it, again a huge plus for the bottom line of the companies.
Capitalism is evil against people, not the AI…
Hitler was also an effective leader, nobody can argue against that. How else could he conquer most of Europe? Effective is something that evil people can be also.
That women in the article being shocked by this simply expected the AI to remove Hitler from all included leaders because he was evil. She is surprised that an evil person is included in effective leaders and she wanted to be shielded from that and wasn’t.
Hitler’s administration was a bunch of drug addicts, the economy 5 slave owner megacorps beaten by all other industrialized nations. They weren’t even all that well mobilized before the total war speech. Then he killed himself in embarrassment. How is any of that “effective”?
He was effective at getting a bunch of wannabe fascists to become full fascists and follow him into violent failure…
That makes him an effective propagandist, not an effective leader.
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He had taken power from his country, conquer pretty much the whole Europe and paralyzed England. He was effective leader till some point . And, of course, he was a abomination of a human.
How did he paralyze England?
Some of that information may also not be completely accurate since there is a lot of interest in portraying this guy a certain way. Just something to keep in mind.
Winners writes the history books. :)
Really well put.
Such a rare opinion sounds too academic for the barren minds
Oh look another caricature of capitalism on social media… and you tied Hitler into it…
Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
“Capitalism” is not pro slavery, shitty people that can’t recognize a human is a human are pro slavery… Because of course if you can have work done without paying somebody for it or doing it yourself, well that’s just really convenient for you. It’s why we all like robots. That has nothing to do with your economic philosophy.
And arguing that Hitler was an “effective leader” because he conquered (and then lost) some countries while ignoring all the damage he did to his county and how it ultimately turned out… Honestly infuriating.
It’s amazing how low a wage you will voluntarily accept when the alternative is homelessness and starving to death.
Seems like people think everything America does is capitalism. The same thing happened with communism and socialism. The words have very little meaning now.
Actually, slavery in its original form is also a net positive. You just murdered half a tribe. You cant let the other half just live. Neither do you want to murder them. Thus you will enslave them.
So you create a problem by murdering half a tribe, then offer a solution. That’s not a net positive.
You might be lacking basic understanding of tribal politics and economics then. In a tribal setting you have to neutralise the other tribe, as you do not have a standing army. Any conflict you get into, you are “conscripting” your entire male population.
In every kind of tribal conflict ever, regardless of having the moral upperhand, it was a bogstandard way of conduct. You dont have men to be stationed in enemy territory, that is the manpower that is NEEDED in the fields the second its time to sow or reap, so you dont fucking starve.
So any conflict comes around, you need to make sure that once its over, you will be left the f alone. You have to really hit it home. Maybe thats not obvious, but the clans in this context are probably not NATO or even UN members. :)
If it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on, garbage in / garbage out, then in my opinion it’s “machine learning,” not “artificial intelligence.”
Intelligence has to include some critical, discriminating faculty. Not just pattern matching vomit.
We don’t yet have the technology to create actual artificial intelligence. It’s an annoyingly pervasive misnomer.
And the media isn’t helping. The title of the article is “Google’s Search AI Says Slavery Was Good, Actually.” It should be “Google’s Search LLM Says Slavery Was Good, Actually.”
Yup, “AI” is the current buzzword.
Scathing and accurate when your point is made about people too.
What concerns me is seeing actual humans saying that not beta AIs.
Wtf are people expecting from a fucking language model?
It literally just Mathematics you a awnser.
A few lawyer thought chat gpt was a search engine. They asked it for some cases about sueing airlines and it made up cases, sited non existing laws. They only learned their mistake after submitting their finding to a court.
So yeah people dont really know how to use it or what it is
And acting like there are no upsides is delusional. Of course there are upsides, or it wouldn’t have happened. The downsides always outweigh the upsides of course.
Articles about what some LLM wrote are just so stupid.
just wait until those articles can be written by LLMs
The basic problem with AI is that it can only learn from things it reads on the Internet, and the Internet is a dark place with a lot of racists.
There needs to be like an information campaign or something… The average person doesn’t realize these things say what they think you want to hear, and they are buying into hype and think these things are magic knowledge machines that can tell you secrets you never imagined.
I mean, I get the people working on the LLMs want them to be magic knowledge machines, but it is really putting the cart before the horse to let people assume they already are, and the little warnings that some stuff at the bottom of the page are inadequate.
I had a friend who read to me this beautiful thing ChatGPT wrote about an idyllic world. The prompt had been something like, “write about a world where all power structures are reversed.”
And while some of the stuff in there made sense, not all of it did. Like, “in schools, students are in charge and give lessons to the teachers” or something like that.
But she was acting like ChatGPT was this wise thing that had delivered a beautiful way for society to work.
I had to explain that, no, ChatGPT gave the person who made the thing she shared what they asked for. It’s not a commentary on the value of that answer at all, it’s merely the answer. If you had asked ChatGPT to write about a world where all power structures were double what they are now, it would give you that.
I mean, on the ChatGPT site there’s literally a disclaimer along the bottom saying it’s able to say things that aren’t true…
people assume they already are [magic knowledge machines], and the little warnings that some stuff at the bottom of the page are inadequate.
You seem to have missed the bottom-line disclaimer of the person you’re replying to, which is an excellent case-in-point for how ineffective they are.
Unfortunately, people are stupid and don’t pay attention to disclaimers.
And, I might be wrong, but didn’t they only add those in recently after folks started complaining and it started making the news?
“the X post”
lol