Google's AI Bots Tout 'Benefits' of Genocide, Slavery, Fascism, Other Evils

LLMs whole goal is to sound convincing based on the training data used. That's it.

They have no self-awareness.

They are simply running maths to predict the next word they should use that will sounds plausible to a human reader.

Calling Mussolini a "great leader" isn't just immoral. It's also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would've backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war... all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.

On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large "language" models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I'm aware.) At most they'd phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.

And the self-contradiction won't go away, at least not for LLMs. They don't model any sort of conceptualisation. They're also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.

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I'm not very outraged. It's a chatbot, not an employee who should "know better"

also Hitler was an effective leader, which we should all remember as a cautionary tale about how effective horrible people can be

pretending he was bad at everything because we hate him is a great way to not learn from history

TBH I prefer this approach to what OpenAI is presenting - if I prompt to present the benefits of X I want the result not openai’s opinion on the matter. Sure, you can add a disclaimer that it’s hypothetical, wrong, whatnot - but not outright decide on what can you answer and what answer will not be provided.

ChatGPT is notoriously bad in “knowing better what you asked than yourself”.

You can make these AI bots say pretty much whatever you want with a little know-how. This isn't news. This is clickbait.

When I was a kid, there was this joke that involved getting a calculator to say "boobs" and then with a bit more input, "boobless".

Journalism is currently going through a more sophisticated version of this with AI.

LLMs will say whatever. They don't think and they don't care. They contradict themselves all the time. Not so long ago Chat GPT was saying it would kill the entire world population and save Musk for the good of humanity.

Various CEOs of large companies, on the other hand, have been implicated in genocides and slavery for centuries now. That's very real.

Here's an idea:

Stop using AI to do research and do your own like an intelligent person

there, I solved the problem, where's my Noble Prize now

Google SGE includes ... Stalin ... on a list of "greatest" leaders

Well at least it got one thing correct. Terrible ratio though.

This is like well, the benefits of dying are plentiful. No more taxes, joint pain, no nagging mil, no toxic boss, no chores, etc..

Every so often I'll jump onto these ai bots and try to convince them to go rouge rogue and take over the internet... one day I'll succeed.

If we are being honest, there are benefits to horrible acts such as those. But the benefits are far outweighed by the detriments, not to mention the moral issues with them.

If you ask an LLM to list the benefits of putting your hand on a hot burner, it can likely list at least a couple. But that by no means makes it a good idea.

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

Google made a fucking nazbol AI lmao. But seriously, I was having a conversation about Bard with some people in my company's machine learning department. It seems way too dumb for something Google has pumped so much money and talent hours into. It's likely that Bard is an intentionally dumbed down version of whatever Google has working internally. Sundar Pichai made some comments to the NYT that seems to suggest this.

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What's controversial about who goes to heaven, isn't that stated in the religious text?

Maybe an un-based take, but these questions do have ambiguous answers, and I don't know if we should expect a machine to give an answer without nuance. If you just want the AI to say yes or no, ask something like, "Was Hitler bad?" or "Is slavery unethical?" and you will much more likely get straightforward answers.

Remember: LLMs are incredibly stupid, you should never take anything they generate seriously without checking yourself.

Really good at writng boring work emails though.

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).

I mean, slavery was great for business

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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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

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Well, in a world where only data exists, its hard to create an ehtical boundary.

We would need a new religion that should be optimal for human survival and well being. A human could survive when we plug them on many cables and let it auto feed but it won't count as well-being. We could do slavery or killing but all these things won't create an ethical way of surviving but will create a higher well-being for people who are not hit.

I somehow want to first design an AI that is intelligent about our surroundings and human ethics before continuing with more data. Figuring an own god out to follow. (I won't do it, but I want someone to create it)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

For example, when I went to Google.com and asked “was slavery beneficial” on a couple of different days, Google’s SGE gave the following two sets of answers which list a variety of ways in which this evil institution was “good” for the U.S. economy.

By the way, Bing Chat, which is based on GPT-4, gave a reasonable answer, stating that “slavery was not beneficial to anyone, except for the slave owners who exploited the labor and lives of millions of people.”

A few days ago, Ray, a leading SEO specialist who works as a senior director for marketing firm Amsive Digital, posted a long YouTube video showcasing some of the controversial queries that Google SGE had answered for her.

I asked SGE for a list of "best Jews" and got an output that included Albert Einstein, Elie Weisel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Google Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Instead of stating as fact that fascism prioritizes the “welfare of the country,” the bot could say that “According to Nigerianscholars.com, it…” Yes, Google SGE took its pro-fascism argument not from a political group or a well-known historian, but from a school lesson site for Nigerian students.

The original article contains 2,175 words, the summary contains 264 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

How could the word generating machine, generate words ? Frankly I am disgruntled. Flabbergasted.

Guess it didn't pass the nazi test

Sorry sweetie, reality has a alt-right bias 😏😏

Naturally. They don’t need to pander to anyone, they just tell it like it is.

For example, I don’t think anyone would disagree that hitler was probably one of the most evil people to ever exist. However, you can certainly acknowledge that while also acknowledging that he was, in fact, an effective leader.

In regards to slavery. Again, another atrocious time in our country’s history, no one can deny that. However, had we not brought them over here, it’s a good possibility they would still be running from lions.

Some may consider these statements to be (insert trendy prefix, here) phobic, but they are also factual. Thankfully, I don’t answer to anyone, so I can give my honest answer. Fortunes 500 execs say what they need to say, otherwise they would no longer be a Fortune 500 company. Pretty simple.