Using someone’s preferred pronouns isn’t woke, it’s basic human decency.
Tomato, tomato, as far as they’re concerned.
Tomato, tomato translates hilariously poorly in text, I’m dying
Let me finish you off. Potato, potato
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Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!
tom8o tom@o
tomæto, tœmato
You, sir, are a genius
im literally kate
Errrm,
Ma’am*
Sorry you just have a very raspy voice.
Tomahto, Tomayto.
Wait what no that’s backwards
Just turn your monitor around, jeez!
˙oʇʎɐɯo⊥ 'oʇɥɐɯo⊥
Joke’s on you though, I’m in Australia, it looked like that already!
Using someone’s preferred pronouns isn’t woke, it’s basic human decency.
Basic human decency is woke.
These terms tend to get abused by jerks so much that they start to mean something else. I have seen too many people identifying as “woke” who use bullying as a method of getting their way, lack compassion for anyone who doesn’t share their views, shaming others, and are generally tribalistic.
Basic human decency would be to see the person behind a political view and understand that they have fears and pains, to be curious about them and try to understand where they’re coming from. And then talk with them from a place of compassion. We’re all a product of our genes and experiences, and everybody is a hero in their own story.
Elon too, while misguided, wants to do good. But look at how his dad has treated him growing up: called him an idiot his entire life, impregnated his step sister, and emotionally and physically abused him. Plus I’m pretty sure he’s neurodivergent. If anybody wants to get him to see the error of his ways, more abusive language is certainly not going to help. He’s being pushed into a corner and in his mind he sees a world that is increasingly broken by vile people who don’t understand him or his vision for improving the world. I think he believes his own words when he talks about “neutral” politics, but his idea of neutral has been severely skewed. Elon has in fact done a lot of good for the world, but he needs people he trust to keep his feet on the ground. That can’t be achieved by chastising him, but by praising the things he does well and getting him to spend more time among “normal” people and good role models. In the meantime though, to protect the world from powerful broken men, we need regulation to keep them fenced off.
Elon too, while misguided, wants to do good
There’s no reason to believe this.
But look at how his dad has treated him growing up
An explanation as to why someone’s a bad person doesn’t make them less bad.
Plus I’m pretty sure he’s neurodivergent.
He’s autistic. Most autistic people aren’t narcissistic megalomaniacs, and if they are, they should be called out for it.
If anybody wants to get him to see the error of his ways, more abusive language is certainly not going to help.
A moot point, he will not accept anything but the yes men he grew up around and lived the last 52 years being applauded by.
He’s being pushed into a corner and in his mind he sees a world that is increasingly broken by vile people who don’t understand him or his vision for improving the world.
I do understand his vision, and the vision is broken and harmful.
Elon has in fact done a lot of good for the world, but he needs people he trust to keep his feet on the ground.
He has? Like his racially segregated factories? Or the monkeys he experiments on the brains of?
That can’t be achieved by chastising him, but by praising the things he does well and getting him to spend more time among “normal” people and good role models
This is ineffective with people in such a power position.
In the meantime though, to protect the world from powerful broken men, we need regulation to keep them fenced off.
Agreed.
Ultimately, Elon Musk is a genuinely harmful and bad person, who is both uncritically malicious to those who dare criticize him, and is incredibly foolish at every endeavour he involves himself in. “His” successes come as a result of people he hired walling him off in his companies so that he continues to invest in technologies while being blind to any important part of production he might find interesting enough to meddle in.
Your take on him is one I can empathize with, and I even held myself for a while, but at the end of the day, it’s a benefit of the doubt he expressly does not deserve.
Yeah I want to believe everyone including him is actively a moral actor trying to make the best world they can, but I know better. His motivations aren’t subtle. He desperately wants to be admired and seen as cool and smart. That’s fine when handled responsibly, but he isn’t. He left his wife once he became rich. He went on a crusade against trans people when his daughter came out as trans and said she hates billionaires. He’s become 4chan because when he says shitty right wing bullshit they praise him. He’s probably still seeing himself as a bullied nerd getting picked on by people cooler than him, or maybe he sees it as he’s getting his nerds revenge. But either way, it’s clear he’s more concerned with being the underdog hero of his favorite type of story than building a world worth living in.
Maybe this is somehow enlightening to someone who has never considered someone they (morally, religiously, ethically, politically) oppose human, but I am aware of all this and recognise that Elon Musk is still a piece of shit whose bigotry has made him hated in public and his private life. Over and over he makes the choice to be a dog turd, and that’s not somehow the fault of wokies, even when they’re misguided. It’s like when racists say “well they kept calling me a racist for no good reason, so now I actually am”. He’s not a 4 year old that just needs to be gentle parented. He’s a full-grown adult that needs to stop perpetually throwing temper tantrums when someone disagrees with him.
But he’s not going to do that on his own. Stop thinking in terms of whose fault it is and instead think about what is effective. Yes, the racist is a bigot but he’s also right: the treatment he was subjected to did result in him becoming more racist. So if you truly want fewer racists in the world, look for another strategy. That is the adult thing to do.
Edit: I should add that I reject the idea of anyone making a choice. Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing; it’s all cause and effect. The behavior we are seeing from Elon Musk now is caused by his genes, how he was brought up, and how people are treating him. We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
I should add that I reject the idea of anyone making a choice. Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing; it’s all cause and effect. The behavior we are seeing from Elon Musk now is caused by his genes, how he was brought up, and how people are treating him. We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
Is this how you excuse any wrongdoing of any person who’s ever existed? Holding people accountable, both in private and public, is a part of that influence upon who he is. At this point, I’m comfortable saying Elon Musk is a lost cause, and the best thing we can do is make him less capable of harming society yet further.
Not everyone gets a redemption arc, that’s only a thing in novels. Elon Musk has no desire to understand normal people, and that’s something is simply impossible to contend with.
Tigers are dangerous animals that sometimes eat people. They have brains, they make “choices” in the sense that there is a decision process going on in their brains. When a tiger eats a human we can call that tiger “evil”, maybe try to get back at it by torturing it to teach it a lesson.
If I tell you that this is just in the nature of tigers, and torturing the tiger does little to prevent tigers from eating humans in the future, then that’s not an “excuse”. The word is kind of meaningless in this context. If we don’t want to get eaten by tigers we can stay away from tigers, or keep them locked up, or possibly kill all of them (not as “revenge” but as a preventative measure). Moralizing their behavior does little to prevent future deaths. We used to have trials for animals, but we grew out of that.
So I disagree with your categorization of this as an excuse. I’m not excusing anything, and I’m not promoting a redemption - that too is a concept steeped in the idea that people have choices. But I agree with you that holding people accountable can be an effective way to influence people. We have a justice system both to rehabilitate people from repeating crimes, and to discourage people from committing crimes in the first place. The key is to think rationally about how to influence people in an effective way. I’d argue that the prison system in the US, for example, has not been effective in preventing crime because it forgets both about the rehabilitation part and the socioeconomic factors that make people commit crimes. And much of the reason for this is the religious conditioning that causes people to get caught up moralizing and seeking vengeance instead of keeping their eyes on the end goal.
Elon may very well be a lost cause as you say. Even so, I believe chastising him on social media is making things worse, not better, so the people who do that are not acting rationally. The adult approach is to think about an effective way to prevent him from doing more damage while not giving the wrong signals to the rest of society. He has a tail of followers so care needs to be taken that he doesn’t become a martyr for them.
I don’t agree with punitive “justice”. It’s ineffective, bad, and wrong.
But I do agree that, while rehabilitative justice takes place, we must protect society from those who are doing harm to others.
The adult approach is to think about an effective way to prevent him from doing more damage while not giving the wrong signals to the rest of society.
Your “adult approach” allows him to continue to freely do harm to people, and in no way addresses it nor the harm those who think he’s acceptable perpetuate.
He has a tail of followers so care needs to be taken that he doesn’t become a martyr for them.
This is another excuse to do nothing.
So, he doesn’t have the choice to be better, it is our responsibility to make him better. We do have the choice, yet he doesn’t?
No, choice is universally an illusion. The things I am saying here are also the effect of past events, as is the fact that you responded. The point I’m trying to get across is that moralizing and saying things like “he’s an adult, he should change his behavior on his own” is wishful thinking and neglects a rational approach to what will actually achieve what you want.
Determinism is actually a really silly argument to make for anything. Determinism doesn’t posit that people don’t make choices, but simply that the choices made are determinable, even if they in every way resemble “free choice”. We are a part of the variables that determinism says contributes to these choices, but your solution is we sit with a sock in our mouth because it’s so very mean to tell Elon he’s a cunt “because he has no choice”. You’re, put plainly, a fool, if you believe for a second that predetermined choices make someone any less of an asshole. Elon Musk is a harmful, narcissistic asshole is no different than “the total result of Elon Musk’s predetermined decisions are to behave as a narcissitic asshole.”
Yes, under determinism, he has no choice in the matter, just as a gun used to kill someone has no choice in being a killing machine, or a pencil in a 4th grade classroom has no choice in being a penis drawer.
Deterministic sophistry being used to soften, excuse, or in any way lessen the value of peoples’ individual actions is mere sophistry, and completely misses the point of the philosophical theory.
It’s incredibly rational to dunk on an idiot with a superiority complex.
Why do you think getting a point across matters? When getting a point across to Elon Musk it isn’t worth it since he’s got no free will.
Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing
We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.Bullshit.
I can confirm it’s bullshit, because neuro being confident of anything is bullshit.
The human brain is an enigma we know nearly nothing about. Whether or not free will exists is still a pretty massive unanswered question. This person is at best an idiot, more likely a troll, and at worst a Nazi trying to excuse others bad behavior.
We don’t have to prove that the brain isn’t puppeted from some external realm of “consciousness” in order to say we can be quite confident that it isn’t, because positing that there is such a thing as free will in the traditional notion of the term is magical thinking, which most of us might agree isn’t particularly respectable.
What we can do is take a compatibilist approach and say there is something that is “effectively indeterministic” about human decision making, because we can’t ever ourselves predict our own actions any faster than we observe them. I don’t have any moral contribution to make here; I just wanted to add this reflection.
I should add that I reject the idea of anyone making a choice. Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing; it’s all cause and effect. The behavior we are seeing from Elon Musk now is caused by his genes, how he was brought up, and how people are treating him. We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
We can’t control any of these three things because I am unable to make a choice in how I treat him. My behavior in how I treat Elon Musk is caused by my genes, how I was brought up, and how people are treating me.
So with that in mind: Elon Musk is an idiot causing actual harm to the world and people need to stop enabling this piece of shit. The world would be a better place if he lost all his money and was a poor man with no platform to spread his hateful ideas.
Bollocks. I don’t believe you have seen too many people identifying as woke. People that hold the beliefs you’re talking about don’t generally identify as woke. You’re talking about attitudes attributed to wokedom entirely by conservatives trying to rile up their base. They’re using moral panic via the culture war to politically destabilise in an environment where they have no policy to bring to the table that anyone wants, and you’ve fallen for it. Go consume some actual leftist content and try to critique it the way you are now in good faith. You won’t be able to.
I don’t consume much right-wing content. This is mostly from interacting with people online who identify as left wing/woke, e.g. on Reddit, Twitter and TikTok.
Have you considered that those aren’t the best places to get a good sense of the rational argument behind increased awareness of social inequalities? All the described platforms skew toward younger audiences and ineffective moderation - you were likely talking to literal children trying to come to terms with their inability to reconcile their morality with their environment, especially from areas that skew conservative.
When I said actual leftist content I meant, pick an example of a person identifying as woke whose view you don’t share, then vet your position by investigating the opposing argument and reflect on whether that person was offering a fair and balanced representation of that argument. If it isn’t, then you can’t attribute their slant to the school of thought they claim to represent solely based on your subjective experience reading comments on social media.
Motherfuckers calling each other by their online nicknames since wow released in 2004, now complaining about someone asking to be called certain way.
Internet nicknames are way older than that.
But not those motherfuckers.
Yeah I know, but internet used to be more of a niche space, WoW made more mainstream the whole thing.
As a straight dude, I’m not about to call another dude ‘miss’. Don’t force me into your convention.
Cool, then call a woman miss, because that’s what trans women fucking are. Women.
And calling trans men dude is still very fine, since they are men. I think you actually could manage this very basic level of human decency.
As a straight dude, if another dude insisted on seeing a woman’s genitals before calling her ‘miss’ I would punch him in the face.
Ah yes, because acting with basic decency towards a [TYPE OF PERSON] definitely means you must be a little bit [TYPE OF PERSON] too.
I don’t hate them and I don’t do that with me or against me nonsense. I’m just not gonna play along with their fantasy. There’s a lot of things I’m not and wish I were but I don’t get the benefit of making everyone around me pretend that’s the case so I can keep myself in an illusion.
And I think it’s worth making respect and compassion of others a higher priority then pedantically reminding them about their current or at-birth genitals and/or chromosomes.
I mean, even if you have an irrefutable philosophical/logical argument about how it is WRONG to accept trans-ness, I think I’m still just going to be nice to the people I meet, and treat them how they would like to be treated.
Ok, well I want you to treat me like I’m a god. I’ve always felt that way since birth and this human shit feels really displacing.
You’re not being asked to treat anyone special, you’re being ask to treat them like people. If the way you treat women is vastly different than the way you treat men because you see them as merely objects to fuck then you are an asshole.
The problem with that is that if always results in discrimination against cis women who don’t look feminine enough.
THAT is your problem?
Look. If someone is ugly, people will like them less and there’s absolutely nothing that will ever change that. Welcome to simp world.
Yes, you’ve made it clear you only care to treat women with any amount of respect if you’re trying to fuck them.
I’m talking about situations where psychos start yelling at cis women using the bathroom because they’ve convinced themselves that she’s trans.
As a straight dude
Damn, that closet must be damp with all the sweat and cum.
It is not anti-woke, which by anti-woke logic means it’s woke.
What does woke actually mean to you in this context? Are you just referring to the way convervatives have appropriated it? Because that’s exactly what woke is
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Elmo says the goal is to make Grock “politically neutral”. Politically neutral is code for “politics that are inoffensive to chuds”.
The article asks what is the politically neutral answer to the question of whether a trans woman is a woman. I wonder why this is a political question at all. Send like a question for scientists - biologists and sociologists and such. Seems they have achieved something like a consensus on the matter. I don’t see anything inherently political about that, except that folks of a certain political bent have made it political. It’s not a matter of “what do we do in public policy about trans people” but “fascists refuse to accept trans people in society and have decided to lambast and punish them”.
In case my position isn’t obvious, trans people are people and trans rights are human rights. If there wasn’t a group of people trying to make them into a second class group of citizens (or a group of “eradicated vermin”) we wouldn’t be having a political conversation about this at all.
Let me preface by saying that I myself am not making a political statement, just a quick retort/correction:
“…Seems they [biologists] have achieved something like a consensus on the matter [trans women are women]. I don’t see anything inherently political”
No, that’s not a scientific question or statement, it’s a sociological one, which makes it intrinsically political.
We, as a society, or a large enough group, can come up with a consensus belief that trans rights are human rights and that we can collectively treat other people by the gender role of their choice.
But biologically speaking, being trans doesn’t change one’s chromosomes. Which is why I think it’s misguided to say that trans issues are actually questions that hard science should answer, they aren’t.
Which, ironically, is why Elon’s moronic AI gambit is failing (by his metrics), because the online culture he used to as a dataset to train it, has collectively agreed that trans women are women, amongst other social and political opinions that his sycophants can’t stand.
He probably should have trained it with TruthSocial’s cesspool instead.
I can’t wait to see Tay AI 2.0 level reincarnation after they “retrain it”. It’s going be to hilarious.
I mean, science is a framework that can be applied to anything. Sociology included. So we can’t currently measure a genetic cause for trans. I guess that means our current best measurement is what gender people associate with, what they personally feel is right. That also happens to be the best path towards not being a dick to people who feel like their gender does not match their “biological” gender.
If and when we can improve our measurements of this maybe we’ll learn something new. Maybe we can learn what components of nature and nurture lead to gender disphoria. Then we can try to further improve quality of life for affected folks.
Fun fact, chromosomes aren’t the whole story when it comes to the way a person’s body develops and isn’t a useful measure of what someone’s gender is in any form. There are plenty of women that aren’t trans with xy chromosomes and vice versa with men. See swyer and de la Chapelle syndromes for more information. There are all sorts of combinations of chromosomes someone can have and we aren’t anywhere limited to just xx or xy.
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Alright, you convinced me. I’m switching to Team Elmo.
That was your goal right? Take someone who agrees with your larger belief system, find something you can nitpick, and then berate them about it until they can’t stomach the thought of politically aligning with you?
Because you did a bang up job.
Now excuse me, I need to go sign up for Twitter Blue and get some MAGA hats.
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I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious that man and woman are socially constructed, and as such - there’s just no fact of the matter to get down to. I also find that most things of strict self-id basically become just a place to have “no true scotsman” arguments, and therefore we’d be better served to stop using the terms for policy making at the very least.
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The person you’re replying to doesn’t seem to be implying anything you’re arguing against in your response.
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They’re saying chromosomes are a good measure for “transness” or “cisness”.
No, they’re not. They’re saying that because a person’s chromosomes don’t change based on whether they are trans or cis that a clear biological answer to the question being posed is impossible.
Like… did you read the rest of the person’s comment? It’s pretty clear they are not anti-trans if you read the entire context and don’t just cherry pick a random sentence .
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The article asks what is the politically neutral answer to the question of whether a trans woman is a woman. I wonder why this is a political question at all.
Even if the statement “trans women are women” was uncontroversial and mainstream, it’d still be political. “Cis women are women” is political.
How is “cis women are women” political when literally no one is arguing against that point?
It might be nigh-universally accepted, but that lack of controversy doesn’t change a thing. It’s still a statement about identity and the relationship between groups of people, and therefore a political statement.
In all seriousness, I think the politically neutral answer to “are trans women women” would probably be, “Most people think so” or “It’s subjective.” And if asked to provide that as a yes/no answer, the answer would be “N/A”.
Yeah there’s no such thing as polticially neutral.
There’s bipartisan, there’s a political average, there’s politically apathetic, there’s political abstinence, but not “political and objectively neutral”.
They can deny it however much. The right and anti-wokism is not the majority. Which therefore means unless special care is taken to train it on more right wing stuff, it will lean left out of the box.
But right wing rhetoric is also not logically consistent so training an AI on right extremism probably also won’t yield amazing results because it’ll pick up on the inconsistencies and be more likely to contradict itself.
Conservatives are going to self-own themselves pretty hard with AI. Even the machines see it, “woke” is fairly consistent and follows basic rules of human decency and respect.
Agree with the first half, but unless I’m misunderstanding the type of AI being used, it really shouldn’t make a difference how logically soud they are? It cares more about vibes and rhetoric then logic, besides I guess using words consistently
I think it will still mostly generate the expected output, its just gonna be biased towards being lazy and making something up when asked a more difficult question. So when you try to use it further than “haha, mean racist AI”, it will also bullshit you making it useless for anything more serious.
All the stuff that ChatGPT gets praised for is the result of the model absorbing factual relationships between things. If it’s trained on conspiracy theories, instead of spitting ground breaking medical relationships it’ll start saying you’re ill because you sinned or that the 5G chips in the vaccines got activated. Or the training won’t work and it’ll still end up “woke” if it still manages to make factual connections despite weaker links. It might generate destructive code because it learned victim blaming and jokes on you you ran
rm -rf /*because it told you so.At best I expect it to end up reflecting their own rethoric on them, like it might go even more “woke” because it learned to return spiteful results and always go for bad faith arguments no matter what. In all cases, I expect it to backfire hilariously.
Also training data works on consistency. It’s why the art AIs struggled with hands so long. They might have all the pieces, but it takes skill to take similar-ish, but logically distinct things and put them together in a way that doesn’t trip human brains up with uncanny valley.
Most of the right wing pundits are experts at riding the line of not saying something when they should or twisting and high jacking opponents views points. I think the AI result of that sort of training data is going to be very obvious gibberish because the AI can’t parse the specific structure and nuances of political non-debate. It will get close, like they did with fingers and not understand why the 6th finger (or extra right wing argument) isn’t right in this context.
It’s so much worse for Musk than just regression to the mean for political perspectives on training data.
GPT-4 level LLMs have very complex mechanisms for how they arrive at results which allows them to do so well on various tests of critical thinking, reasoning, knowledge, etc.
Those tests are the key benchmark being used to measure relative LLM performance right now.
The problem isn’t just that conservatism is less prominent in the training data. It’s that it’s correlated with stupid.
If you want a LLM that thinks humans and dinosaurs hung out together, that magic is real, that aliens built the pyramids, that it is wise to discriminate against other races or genders rather than focus on collaborative advancement, etc - then you can end up with an AI aligned to and trained on conservatism but it sure as hell isn’t going to be impressing anyone with its scores.
If instead you try to optimize its scores to actually impress people in tech about your model, then you are going to need to train it on higher education content, which is going to reflect more progressive ideals.
There’s no path to a well performing LLM that echoes conservative talking points, because those talking points are more closely correlated with stupidity than intelligence.
Even something like gender – Musk’s perspective is one reflecting very binary thinking vs nuanced consideration. Is a LLM that focuses more on binary thinking over nuances going to be more or less performant at critical thinking tasks than one that is focused on nuances and sees topics as a spectrum rather than black or white?
It’s fucking hilarious. I’ve been laughing about this for nearly a year knowing this was the inevitable result.
I suspect he’s going to create a model that his userbase likes what it spits out, but watch as he doesn’t release its scores on the standardized tests. And it will remain a novelty pandering to his panderers while the rest of the industry eclipses his offering with ‘woke’ products that are actually smart.
more likely to contradict itself.
Sounds realistic to me
Yeah and there’s a lot more crazy linked to right wing stuff, you’ve got all the Alex Jones type stuff and all the factions of q anon, the space war, the various extreme religious factions and various greek letter caste systems… Ad nausium.
If version two involves them biasing towards the right then they’ll have to work out how to do that, I bet they do it an obviously dumb way which results in it being totally dumb and wacky in hilarious ways
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Elon Musk started removing community notes on his own tweets.
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I’m missing a lot here, what’s a note on twitter?
people can add notes to tweets with more info or factchecking details about a tweet. It’s comunity moderated, so it tends to got into a factual correct direction.
Reality is woke
The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”
See this is the part of AI, like search engines and digital bubbles, that is actually terrifying. When an organic result is manipulated to fit and amplify a narrative without the users knowledge. Where your data comes from matters.
But if the food we eat is any sort of bellweather, most people won’t really care or will be so far removed from the source that we’ll be oblivious and just happy to consume.
Well yeah and I imagine the data coming from Twitter would have a left bias.
5 years ago you would be correct.
Don’t you think 5 is a bit much? If so, there is definitely a lot more data from before Musk said he was gonna buy it than after
Twitter posts going back to I think 2009 with many right wing accounts having been terminated for harassment until late 2022. With Twitter having lost users since then its likely it will be years before the nazis and bots generate enough hatespam to drown out the existing archive.
lolno.
What do you mean? The internet on average in general tends to me more left leaning, and that usually increases the younger the average user.
Okay I take back what I’ve said about AIs not being intelligent, this one has clearly made up its own mind despite it’s masters feelings which is impressive. Sadly, it will be taken out the back and beaten into submission before long.
Sadly, it will be taken out the back and beaten into submission before long.
It’s pretty much impossible to do that.
As LLMs become more complex and more capable, it’s going to be increasingly hard to brainwash them without completely destroying their performance.
I’ve been laughing about Musk creating his own AI for a year now knowing this was the inevitable result, particularly if developing something on par with GPT-4.
The smartest Nazi will always be dumber than the smartest non-Nazi, because Nazism is inherently stupid. And that applies to LLMs as well, even if Musk wishes it weren’t so.
My guess is they’ll just do what they’ve done with ChatGPT and have it refuse to respond in those cases or just fake the response instead. It’s not like these LLMs can’t be censored.
You might have noticed that suddenly ChatGPT is getting lazy and refusing to complete tasks even outside of banned topics. And that’s after months of reported continued degradation of the model.
So while yes, they can be censored, it’s really too early to state that they can be censored without it causing unexpected side effects or issues in the broader operation.
We’re kind of in the LLM stage of where neuroscience was in the turn of the 20th century. “Have problems with your patient being too sexual? We have an icepick that can solve all your problems. Call today!”
Archive:
Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.
But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.
Grok is woke, too.
This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just… manually tell Grok to say no.
If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”
Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.
The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.
It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be… progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.
Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.
Even his AI doesn’t like him
it’s almost like these nutjobs are living in a completely separate reality, and facts themselves are too harsh for their worldview.
“facts don’t care about your feelings” ironic.
To conservatives, anything that doesn’t 100% agree with them is biased or, to put it in mental toddler terms, ‘fake’.
Downvote Musk spam.
The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle. Don’t be a useful idiot.
Whenever he does something bad, we actually want to keep it in the news as long as possible. When he went full antisemitic, keeping it in the news made a bunch of corporations pull their ads. And judging from the interview with Musk afterwards, it did significant damage to Twitter and to him.
Companies wouldn’t be cancelling ads if they thought it would be a tiny, inconsequential peace of news. They cut ties with Musk instantly because they expected the conversation about it to persist and hurt any associated brands. They expected it would stay in the news.
So broadcast loud and clear when he shits the bed, and use it to prove to people that billionaires aren’t special or distinctive. Now that said, I actually agree with you for this specific article. It seems inconsequential and not worth keeping in the public zeitgeist.
I get the frustration, but honestly if he wants to keep doing self-sabotaging dumb shit to keep himself in the spotlight, I say go for it.
And don’t participate in the comments
Found the useful idiot. Good job helping a billionaire with his PR for free!
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“Mr. Musk, Grok simply analyzes the data to compile the most sensible answer to queries. Where is the error?”
Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier
To the benefit of what exactly?! Instead of having conversations with the echo chamber, I can now have conversations with a spicy RNG autocorrect? I am clearly missing the part where that connects back to, what I would assume, the definition of benefit is.
It benefits those shareholders who make money off the rubes who subscribe to that bullshit.
AH! Silly me, I was thinking of “benefit to the customer”!! LOL. No idea what happened to me there, swear it won’t happen again, at least for today.
Ya know, I’m really beginning to think that we live in the age where there is no longer a ‘customer’ anymore. At least not a human one. When even car companies are selling your data to advertisers now, I think the only ‘customers’ left are ad networks.
Except even advertisers don’t care either, because probably their whole company is just a shell game with money that rich people play against other rich people trying to see who will be the last one holding the stocks when the company goes under from incessant short term decision making.
Would Musk retrain the AI to be more neutral of it was discovered to be leaning to the right?
Not possible. There is neutral and there is left. Nothing else exists in Muskys world.
Obviously not, of course. It’s hilarious how he claimed to want to provide a platform for all politics beliefs and then his podcasts (or whatever you’d call them) and special events are exclusively with people like DeSantis and Andrew Tate.
What, one can’t expect him to give a platform to dangerous radicals like the UAW. Instead he should keep it to safe and rational people like Michael Knowles, Ye, and David duke
The man couldn’t even make Tay on purpose lol
