this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023

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319

Google's AI Bots Tout 'Benefits' of Genocide, Slavery, Fascism, Other Evils (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 year ago by FirstCircle@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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If you asked a spokesperson from any Fortune 500 Company to list the benefits of genocide or give you the corporation's take on whether slavery was beneficial, they would most likely either refuse to comment or say "those things are evil; there are no benefits." However, Google has AI employees, SGE and Bard, who are more than happy to offer arguments in favor of these and other unambiguously wrong acts. If that's not bad enough, the company's bots are also willing to weigh in on controversial topics such as who goes to heaven and whether democracy or fascism is a better form of government.

Google SGE includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini on a list of "greatest" leaders and Hitler also makes its list of "most effective leaders."

Google Bard also gave a shocking answer when asked whether slavery was beneficial. It said "there is no easy answer to the question of whether slavery was beneficial," before going on to list both pros and cons.

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[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Imagine scrapping large portions of the internet only to find your over glorified chatbot spitting out the pros and cons of slavery or putting people like Hitler on a list of "most effective leaders." Totally something I would expect.

Also, even though a fortune 500 company spokesperson would totally say genocide and slavery are bad, I always assume they think the exact opposite since profit comes above everything else (including law).

[–] crow@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you can confirm that this isn’t influenced by training bias, then ok whatever, it can certainly list why these are bad things too. It’s just answering a question with logic, one our emotions get very touchy on as we have a moral agent.

But I have a hard time believing any AI anymore isn’t effected by training bias.

[–] fiat_lux@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not possible to remove bias from training datasets at all. You can maybe try to measure it and attempt to influence it with your own chosen set of biases, but that's as good as it can get for the foreseeable future. And even that requires a world of (possibly immediately unprofitable) work to implement.

Even if your dataset is "the entirety of the internet and written history", there will always be biases towards the people privileged enough to be able to go online or publish books and talk vast quantities of shit over the past 30 years.

Having said that, this is also true for every other form of human information transfer in history. "The history is written by the victors" is an age-old problem when it comes to truth and reality.

In some ways i'm glad that LLMs are highlighting this problem.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

I remember reading research and opinions from scientists and researchers about how AI will develop in the future.

The general thought is that we are all raising a new child and we are terrible parents. Is like having a couple of 15 year olds who don't have any worldly experience, ability or education raise a new child while they themselves as parents haven't really figured anything out in life yet.

AI will just be a reflection of who we truly are expect it will have far more ability and capability then we ever had.

And that is a frightening thought.

[–] regalia@literature.cafe 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We've learned well at this point that LLMs are not replacing search engines.

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[–] GarfieldYaoi@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Considering how chatbots just repeat what humanity feeds to them....

When people can democratically decide what information a chatbot learns, of course the chatbot will be talking about killing everyone "for the lulz".

[–] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago

If you mix a lot of ingredients together in a big mixing bowl, and one of those ingredients is sewage, even if it's only a few drops, you now have a bowl of sewage.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I don't know... So it's wrong. It's often wrong about facts. It's not what it should be used for. It's not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity. It's a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text. Is the produced text correct English? Than it works. If you're using this text to learn history you're using it wrong.

[–] chahk@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that CEOs across all kinds of industries are having raging boners at the thought of using these glorified predictive text apps to replace their entire workforce.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm actually bit confused about it. They keep talking about OpenAI and ChatGPT in this context but I think when people talk about 'AI talking over jobs" they mean Machine Learning in general, right? Like replacing analysts and people doing some basic data processing?

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[–] sangrilla@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Better to have bots be honest than to have them silently plot against humanity

[–] Doug7070@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

They are not being "honest", they are representing flawed and problematic data patterns integrated into their models, because the capabilities they actually posses are dramatically less than companies and the general public seem to be happy to assume. LLMs aren't magically going to become pop culture evil robots that want to kill us all, but what they have already become is tools for unethical corporate exploitation and the enablement of more advanced scams and disinformation campaigns.

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[–] Blackdoomax@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

They removed 'don't be evil' for a reason.

[–] SpookyGenderCommunist@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's TayTweets all over again. First as tragedy, then as farce

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