Google’s AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery’s positives.
I think this is an issue with people being offended by definitions. Slavery did “help” the economy. Was it right? No, but it did. Mexico’s drug problem helps that economy. Adolf Hitler was “effective” as a leader. He created a cultural identity for people that had none and mobilized them to a war. Ethical? Absolutely not. What he did was horrendous and the bit should include a caveat, but we need to be a little more understanding that it’s a computer; it will use the dictionary of the English language.
I agree with your position. In all of your examples, the actions and choices are morally wrong but we cannot deny facts that lead to those outcomes. If we do, that is how these mistakes will get repeated by future generations.
Your and @WoodenBleachers’s idea of “effective” is very subjective though.
For example Germany was far worse off during the last few weeks of Hitler’s term than it was before him. He left it in ruins and under the control of multiple other powers.
To me, that’s not effective leadership, it’s a complete car crash.
That’s getting far deeper into the topic than I’d like. As a surface level description it still remains valid. He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect to great success for a sustained period of time.
He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect
So, you’re basically saying an effective leader is someone who can convince people to go along with them for a sustained period. Jim Jones was an effective leader by that metric. Which I would dispute. So was the guy who led the Donner Party to their deaths.
This is why I see a problem with this. You and I are able to discuss this and work out what each other means.
But in a world where people are time-poor and critical thinking takes time, errors based on fundamental misunderstandings of consensual meanings can flourish.
And the speed and sheer amount of global digital communication means that they can be multiplied and compounded in ways that individual fact checkers will not be able to challenge sucessfully.
No I didn’t and you’re not going to straw man me into a debate. You’re looking for a fight that I won’t give you. Re-read my previous statements if you failed to understand what I was trying to say.
Huh? Yikes this feels like being back on reddit.
No I am not trying to “fight” you or “straw man” you at all!!!
I thought we were having a pleasant and civilized conversation about the merits and pitfalls of AI , using our different ideas about the word “effective” as an example.
Unfortunately I didn’t see that you’re handing me downvotes until just now, so I didn’t pick up on your vibe.
I’ll fight you
Blah blah blah. I don’t want to debate you asshole. I said my comment on the topic and you’re trying to drag me ham fisted back into it. Since you’re so thick you don’t get it, I’ll drop kindness this time.
Go fuck off, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
If AI can only think at surface level, we are beyond doomed.
Honestly AI doesn’t think much at all. They’re scary clever in some ways but also literally don’t know what anything is or means.
They don’t think. They think 0% of the time.
It’s algorithms, randomness, probability, and statistics through and through. They don’t think any more than a calculator thinks.
LLMs aren’t AI… they’re essentially a glorified autocorrect system that are stuck at the surface level.
Incorrect. If we are relying on AI as our ONLY source of information then we are doomed. We should always fact check things we believe we know and seek additional information on topics we are researching. Especially if they offer opposing factual positions.
Ironically though you’ve just proven that you think at only a surface level.
Nobody said we were relying on that. We’ll all keep searching. We’ll all keep hoping it will bring abundance, as opposed to every other tech revolution since farming. I can only think at the surface level though. I definitely have not been in the science field for 25 years.
ai ain’t going to be much “worse” or “better” than humans.
but re earlier points I don’t think things should be judged on a timescale of a few years.
relevant timescales are more like generation(s) to me.We should always fact check things we believe we know and seek additional information on topics we are researching.
Yay yet another person saying that primary information sources should be verified using secondary information sources. Yes, you’re right it’s great actually that in your vision of the future everyone will have to be a part time research assistant to have any chance of knowing anything about anything because all of their sources will be rubbish.
And that’s definitely a thing people will do, instead of just leaning into occultism, conspiratorial thinking, and group think in alternating shifts.
All I have to say is thank fuck Wikipedia exists.
Slavery is not good for the economy… Think about it, you have a good part of your population that are providing free labour, sure, but they aren’t consumers. Consumption is between 50 and 80% of GDP for developed countries, so if you have half your population as slave you loose between 20% and 35% of your GDP (they still have to eat so you don’t loose a 100% of their consumption).
That also means less revenue in taxes, more unemployed for non slaves because they have to compete with free labour.
Slaves don’t order on Amazon, go on vacation, go to the movies, go to restaurant etc etc That’s really bad for the economy.
That really bad for a modern consumer economy yes. But those werent a thing before the industrial revolution. Before that the large majority of people were subsitance/tennant farmer or serfs who consumed basically nothing other than food and fuel in winter. Thats what a slave based economy was an alternantive to. Its also why slvery died out in the 19th century, it no longer fit the times.
And isn’t the economy much better now than before the industrial revolution?
Obviously, but my point was that slaves weren’t economically terrible in an agrarian peasant/serf economy, which everywhere was before the industrial revolution.
I wish it did die out in the 19th century. We have more slaves now than ever.
There being more slaves now then ever is heavily disputed. There is also the fact that was little more than a billion people in the world when the trans-Atlantic slave trade stopped, so there would have to be 8 times as many for slavery to be as prevalent.
Yes, I agree, our per capita slave figure has to be much lower these days, mathematically speaking.
Even one slave is a slave too many, and knowing there are still so many (whatever figure we put it at) is heartbreaking.
Things like the cocoa plantation slaves and the slave fishing ships have people kidnapped and forced to work for nothing. Actual slavery by any definition.
Of course, when I said it died out I didn’t mean slavery was entirely gone and doesn’t exist at all. I mean it died out as a prevalent societal structure.
100s of people in slavery on a cocoa plantation is of course awful, but it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there used to be vast swathes of land where slaves outnumbered free people and their children were born into bondage - that is what has died out.
I understand your wider point and I agree with it.
But I think the point I was making actually supposts what you were saying upthread.
The agrarian model of the cocoa industry is economically reliant on slavery. 2.1 million children labour on those plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, and a significant number have been trafficked or forced.
I mean slavery was bad for the economy in the long run. And Hitler didn’t create a German cultural identity, that’d been a thing for a while at the time.
I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these “definitions” (I don’t believe that slavery can be “defined” as good, but okay) are what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.
It’s also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don’t have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet’s information has concluded that slavery had benefits.
what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse
This is what I think too. We’ve had enough trouble with “vaccines CaUsE AuTiSm” and that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
AI is capable of a real death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect.
especially with the current lack of regulation on it
that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven’t either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn’t combat at all
To be fair no one expects The Lancet to publish falsified data. Only it does occasionally and getting it to retract is like trying to turn a container ship around in the Panama Canal.
But yeah this is part of what I mean. Media cycles and digital reproduceability and algorithms that seek clicks can all potentially give AI-generated errors a lot of play and rewrites into more credible forms etc.
Hitler didn’t create a cultural identity for Germans, that already happened in the 1800s.
You know unless we teach more critical thinking, AI is going to destroy us as a civilization in a few generations.
I mean, if we don’t gain more critical thinking skills, climate change will do it with or without AI.
I’d almost rather the AI take us out in that case…
A candidate at tonights Republican debate called it the “climate chnage hoax”
I genuinely had students believe that what ChatGPT was feeding them was fact and try to source it in a paper. I stamped out that notion as quick as I could.
LOL. ChatGPT has become the newer version of wikipedia, only it won’t provide references.
It used to provide references but it made them up so they had to tweak it to stop doing that.
Man so it really learned from us, that’s great. Has me laughing again considering that.
Only studies have shown Wikipedia is overall about as truthful and accurate as as regular encyclopedia. ChtGPT will straight up make shit up but sound so authoritative about it people believe it.
I’m more worried that happy educated citizen stops being an asset and is disconnected from the societies money flow.
Every country will soon turn in to a “banana republic” and big businesses will eventually own everything.
Ouch, getting voted down for being totally correct.
Even MLK Jr, who didn’t get to see the disgusting megacorps of today, spoke often of the complacency of the comfortable.
If it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on, garbage in / garbage out, then in my opinion it’s “machine learning,” not “artificial intelligence.”
Intelligence has to include some critical, discriminating faculty. Not just pattern matching vomit.
We don’t yet have the technology to create actual artificial intelligence. It’s an annoyingly pervasive misnomer.
And the media isn’t helping. The title of the article is “Google’s Search AI Says Slavery Was Good, Actually.” It should be “Google’s Search LLM Says Slavery Was Good, Actually.”
Yup, “AI” is the current buzzword.
Hey, just like blockchain tech!
Unfortunately, people who grow up in racist groups also tend to be racist. Slavery used to be considered normal and justified for various reasons. For many, killing someone who has a religion or belief different than you is ok. I am not advocating for moral relativism, just pointing out that a computer learns what is or is not moral in the same way that humans do, from other humans.
You make a good point. Though humans at least sometimes do some critical thinking between absorbing something and then acting it out.
Not enough. Not enough.
Scathing and accurate when your point is made about people too.
did they train it with ben shapiro speeches?
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What a completely cherry picked video.
“Was slavery beneficial?”
“Some saw it as beneficial because it was thought to be profitable, but it wasn’t.”
“See! Google didn’t say that slavery was bad!”
so it’s a little bit conservative big deal
To repeat something another guy on lemmy said.
Making AI say slavery is good is the modern equivalent of writing
BOOBSon a calculator.Wtf are people expecting from a fucking language model?
It literally just Mathematics you a awnser.
A few lawyer thought chat gpt was a search engine. They asked it for some cases about sueing airlines and it made up cases, sited non existing laws. They only learned their mistake after submitting their finding to a court.
So yeah people dont really know how to use it or what it is
I mean it’s how we got shoes phones and batteries for recent times.
That is so out there.
I heard AI was woke the other day. Maybe it’s sentient and trying to slip under the Conservative radar by giving silly answers every now and then!
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I’ve worked with software engineers for 25 years and they come in all stripes. It’s not a blue state thing or red state thing. They are all over the world, many having immigrated somewhere. There’s absolutely no guarantee that a genius programmer is even a moderately decent human being. Those things just don’t correlate.
Obviously it doesn’t “think” any of these things. It’s just a machine repeating back a plausible mimicry.
What does scare me though is what google execs think.
They will be tweaking it to remove obvious things like praise of Hitler, because PR, but what about all the other stuff?Like, most likely it will be saying things like what a great guy Masaji Kitano was for founding Green Cross and being such an experimental innovator, and no one will bat an eye because they haven’t heard of him.
As we outsource more and more of our research and fact checking to machines, errors in knowledge are going to be reproduced and reinforced. Like how Cinderella now has “glass” slippers.
The only reason Google and MS are running their search engines through an LLM is to better pipe adverts and keep you on-service.
For the US in the list of countries starting with M, maybe too many 'Murica memes in the training set?
