I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.

(she was right, BTW)

Now I’ve been using Microsoft’s Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It’s fairly robust and sure it has it’s quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it’s information from.

So I asked it a simple straightforward question:

“I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications”

And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the “founder of racial classifications.”

But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with this information at this time.

I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.

It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.

Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it’s infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.

  • @kromemEnglish
    1•7 months ago

    stripping out the source takes away important context that helps you decide wether the information you are getting is relevant and appropriate or not

    Many modern models using RAG can and do source with accurate citations. Whether the human checks the citation is another matter.

    The AI is trained to tell you something that you want to hear, not something you ought to hear.

    While it is true that RLHF introduces a degree of sycophancy due to the confirmation bias of the raters, more modern models don’t just agree with the user over providing accurate information. If that were the case, Grok wouldn’t have been telling Twitter users they were idiots for their racist and transphobic views.