[Gareth321]

It's unbelievable how effective this question has been at identifying some pretty extreme views on the left. Even today, politicians are claiming there is no difference between a man and a woman. The fact that this extremism has been baked into frontier models is terrifying.

[otterley]

“Terrifying”? Really? What frightening consequences do you believe will result? What will the impact be to society—and to you personally—if some LLM happens to say this?

[Gareth321]

Your question is kind of shocking to me. Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny survives when ordinary people accept official lies, because control over what may be said becomes control over what may be publicly treated as true. Orwell talked about the same danger with Newspeak, a state-designed language meant to shrink vocabulary so that forbidden thoughts became harder to express. They both went to great lengths to explain how authoritarian regimes do not only censor opinions, but try to redefine words, facts, and moral categories so people lose the language needed to resist them.

Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.

[otterley]

I thought we were talking about what LLMs and people say, not something the Government is doing. You don’t have to agree with either of them.

I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.

[Gareth321]

We’re talking about the definition of words and how censorship is a tool of authoritarianism.

No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.

[otterley]

I’ll interpret this circular answer as “no impact whatsoever upon me personally, or upon society in a way that I can concretely identify.”

This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”

I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.