[airstrike]

First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess. How do you know other models are just as heavily skewed but just less open about them? The real alignment issue today is not about AGI, but about hidden biases.

Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

In reality, politics is more of a field than a single dimension, and people may very well have their reasons to reject both "the left" and "the right" without being morally bankrupt.

Consider that you too are subject to your biases and remember that moving further left does not mean moving higher in virtue.

[elliotto]

It's difficult to make the claim that the AI not complying with a racist prompt is a positive signal for the organisation that wrote the racist prompt.

[not_a_bot_4sho]

> Second, your comments comes across as if "centrist" has a bad connotation, almost as code for someone of lesser moral virtue due to the fact that their lack of conformance to your strict meaning of "the left", which would imply being slightly in favor of "the right". A "desire", as you called it, perhaps arising from uncivilized impulse rather than purposeful choice.

Centrism and compromise are the enemies of extremists.

[airstrike]

Extremism is thinking there are only two choices: us or them

[const_cast]

Centrism is also the ultimate defense of the status-quo, meaning you have a bias towards the status-quo.

The fallacy here is that the status-quo is reasonable therefore being a centrist is reasonable and being a not-centrist is unreasonable.

Just because the status-quo is the status-quo and is in the "middle" does not make it reasonable. For example, the status-quo in Israel right now is performing a genocide. The centrists in Israeli politics are pro-genocide. The "extremists", as you say, are anti-genocide.

The current political landscape of the US is far-right. Where does that leave centrists? This is up to you to dissect.

[airstrike]

The current political landscape of the US is not far-right. The current government may be, but everything in life is cyclical.

Democrats in 2024 lost more votes relative to 2020 than Republicans gained between the two elections. Which is why some people say Kamala "lost to the couch"--which is a comforting but myopic take because losing to the couch means your arguments are less convincing than those of the other party

[rsynnott]

> First, I think the fact that grok basically refused to comply with those hamfisted instructions is a positive signal in the whole mess.

I mean, _maybe_ about LLMs in general, in an abstract sense, if you're deeply concerned with LLM alignment. But not about grok, because it's an otherwise fairly generic LLM that is run by a company _so incompetent that it made said hamfisted instructions, or allowed them to be made_. Like, even beyond the ethics, the whole episode (and the subsequent holocaust-denial one) speaks to a totally broken organisation.