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by prohobo 1287 days ago
Not exactly. It's possible to identify anti-social comments. You just have to define what's considered anti-social, either from a human nature perspective or a cultural one.

For example, if we go the human nature route, then any comment - no matter how inflammatory - is fair game as long as the goal of the comment is to "help the tribe" in some sense. That's kind of like political speech. So, you could faithfully argue ideas like "nazis are good, and we should be like them", as long as you aren't using toxic language and attacks on other people while doing it.

EDIT: Actually fascist/communist ideas contain beliefs that are anti-social, so wouldn't be considered pro-social according to human nature, and that's where the conversation would stop. It still stands that heterodox ideas that don't work, or people don't like, can be technically pro-social.

If we go the cultural route, then identify the mainstream beliefs and rules of discussion and enforce them. This is like the "no swearing" rule, or "no nazis" rule.

You could just codify a set of rules for content that the AI adheres to.

2 comments

> You just have to define what's considered anti-social

Who exactly should have the authority to decide such things?

In terms of human nature and tribal dynamics: scientists. Otherwise, the platform creators.
Of course, I forgot to explicitly ask "why".

Why should scientists/platform creators be authority?

Not that I necessarily disagree, but questions like these should have answers with a lot of rational arguments behind them.

I don't know really, I'm just trying to come up with the least bad solution. There's a lot of corruption even in the scientific community, and major disagreements even on supposedly "settled" science.

Maybe some kind of international organization with (elected) representatives who manage rule sets and audit AIs with the help of scientists. Maybe an open source authority of some kind.

Can you give an example of an anti-social comment? Something specific would be helpful.
By human nature, anti-social would be anything that's meant to be destructive to, or an attack on "the tribe" or a member of the tribe. So, some examples:

- "Orange people are useless."

- "Fuck you, you piece of shit."

- "<insert political party> voters are idiots."

- "We should take away the rights of <insert demographic>."

The more sophisticated the comment the more difficult it is to tell whether it's overall anti-social or not, but we can at least identify parts of a comment that are anti-social and flag them as such.

The main issue would be people trying to get around the AI's ability to recognize it by obfuscation.

Historical classic in modern form:

- "On this issue, there is no middle ground. Either you're <aligned with a direction I advocate> or you're a <something>-ist."