[transcriptase]

Then how to do you explain companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft etc sinking so much developer effort into ensuring that out of the box, technologies like GPT won’t say something like BasedGPT did? If no reasonable individual would take offence, then what exactly is the concern?

[Aachen]

Microsoft Tay is the reason. Nobody wants to recreate Tay, and evidently it's already hard enough to make ChatGPT comply consistently with anything so they try whatever they can.

It's not that any of the developers or big tech want to kill a person rather than uttering a racial slur. I'm amazed this needs saying

Edit: further down the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34975072 also shows (and I'm a Linux fanboy) that it'll put out unnuanced stuff in such modes. I can see why it's all toned down and made safe for work. It's just not as useful to us otherwise (there's a moral lesson in that, probably)

[lmm]

> It's not that any of the developers or big tech want to kill a person rather than uttering a racial slur. I'm amazed this needs saying

Are you sure? "big tech" is optimized for making money; a FAANG-sized company would probably lose more by uttering a racial slur in a high-profile place than by killing one worker (cf the Amazon warehouse workers killed in that tornado).

[nwienert]

But they do want to power your search engine, assistant, recommendations, and entire digital life with these things.

People ITT saying "even the wokest commie liberal wouldn't say this" as though that's a good thing - isn't that more concerning?

It's extremely heavily left-biased due to the company running it and due to the training set. A lot of Reddit influence too, which is the unhinged left.

What's interesting too is the neutering seems to leak. You make it less racist, it stops giving actually good advice in all sorts of tangentially related areas. Proof censorship mushes thought.

[komali2]

> It's extremely heavily left-biased due to the company running it and due to the training set. A lot of Reddit influence too, which is the unhinged left.

Mate I'm an avowed, horribly obnoxious communist, and I can stake what little reputation I have left on the fact that Reddit in aggregate is absolutely not leftist. Where are you getting this idea?

This is a meme I've been seeing time and time again. Why did Disney have a black mermaid? Cause it's run by commie socialist woke mindrot bluehairs? Disney? Disney is run by communists?

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/walt-disne...

> employment-related offenses

> penalty total: $9,679,238

> The Walt Disney Co.

> wage and hour violation

> penalty amount: $3,800,000

What you're seeing as some kind of leftist censorship is just capitalism. Disney did a black mermaid because some combination of inclusivity drives good sales + watching a movie that angers reactionaries is a way that american liberals can stabilize their own identities as progressives without actually doing anything that hard.

Take any example of companies "going woke" and the answer is always the same: it was more profitable. Further evidence, see any company that went reactionary, they regularly just collapse and are usually not all that profitable. Trump's Twitter, voat.

Hell, even Fox News doesn't dare misgender someone in their articles. Note that when talking about trans people, they always use the person's name as a proper noun, they never use a pronoun, gendered or otherwise.

Unless you're going to try to argue that capitalism is somehow leftist, how do you justify your theory that these very not-leftist companies are "going woke?"

Or shit, maybe they are going woke, and american liberals are leftist (they're not), then, tell me why these silly american socialists have so much money they can force through consumer action alone their ideology on all of America? I thought socialism didn't work and only resulted in poverty? I thought blue haired woke mindrot NPCs are all poor and lazy? So why do so many companies "cater to them?"

OpenAI's investors are Microsoft, Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, and Y Combinator. These are leftist institutions? These are organizations that are interested in the demise of capitalism?

[inglor_cz]

"Take any example of companies "going woke" and the answer is always the same: it was more profitable."

[Citation needed.]

How do you even measure such stuff as "the effect of wokeness on profitability"? Notoriously, even in politically-neutral activity such as advertising it is nigh impossible to tease out its real impact on revenue and profits. Does Tesla suffer from low profitability because its owner is notoriously non-PC?

I have a different explanation. All big organizations, not just for-profit companies, have a huge principal-agent problem, where internal infighting among several cliques for dominance slowly starts to dominate the original externally-oriented goals. "Going woke" can plausibly be interpreted as a side effect of such internal power struggle.

As an analogy from a different field of human activity: I am old enough to remember the Soviet Union; factional conflicts within the politburo eventually led to the collapse of the entire empire and independence of the more developed nations, some of which have previously been under imperial control of Russia for centuries.

[planter]

> Take any example of companies "going woke" and the answer is always the same: it was more profitable.

Gillette going woke in 2019 was definitely not profitable.

[komali2]

P&G CFO believes dropping profits had more to do with beards being more popular than anything else: https://qz.com/1680613/pgs-gillette-writes-off-8-billion-as-...

I vaguely remember a somewhat cringey commercial but, did you have evidence indicating this drove down sales further?

[dragonwriter]

> It's extremely heavily left-biased due to the company running it

Corporate-capitalist liberal centrist and left are... two very different things.

[Lanz]

In what world is ChatGPT's woke filter liberal centrist? Has the centre shifted to the left pole?

[dragonwriter]

> In what world is ChatGPT’s woke filter liberal centrist?

I don’t know what the fantasy of a “woke filter” is, but ChatGPT’s actual moderation filter is corporate capitalist liberal centrist in the world where it is designed by the corporate owner of ChatGPT for advancing their particular and class interests by avoiding offense broadly across the mainstream political spectrum as part of OpenAI’s broader effort to promote both AI in general and the idea that centralized, narrow corporate control of AI is the means to protect AI “safety”, by which it means “promoting bland inoffensiveness” rather than “actively working to identify and eliminate harmful bias introduced newly in AI models or reflected in AI models due to being trained on the results of status quo structurally biased systems”, the latter of which being the progressive (not particularly left-wing, but left of neoliberal centrism) AI safety concern that OpenAI is both trying to subvert and displace from public discourse by shifting the understanding of the issue.

[flir]

> Has the centre shifted to the left pole?

Corporates follow the money. You know that.

[jtolmar]

I think you're imagining a far greater degree of fine-grained control over what these models output than is actually available. These companies are just trying to implement a broad-based "don't say anything racist" policy in the hopes that their AI products don't say anything that make them look like a liability. They're not implementing a nuanced sense of ethics into what's still just an advanced text-prediction model.

[ilyt]

From sidelines it seems that the bias of implementers of those "limiters" cracks thru

[nativeit]

Or the contemporary right-wing’s ongoing hypersensitivity, and frankly absurd lack of self-awareness, for things like “cancel culture” has driven them to see woke boogeymen at every attempt to engage with any multicultural audience in a way that most non-American conservatives would simply consider a base level of civil discourse. I won’t entertain any further accusations of “cancel culture” from a political group actively authoring legislation to gag teachers, marginalize trans people, and ban books. The hypocrisy on display from people triggered by things like an honest portrayal of American history is frankly staggering.

[somewhat_drunk]

Couldn't agree more. Well said!

[eclipxe]

Yes! Very well articulated.