Spyke
technology·TechnologybyFirstCircle

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

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.

Google's AI Bots Tout 'Benefits' of Genocide, Slavery, Fascism, Other Evilshttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-bots-tout-slavery-genocideOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
kbin.social

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.

86
kbin.social

Plenty of people still believe in the predictive power of fucking astrology, so something that spits out vaguely comprehensible words is a shoe in.

I predict an AI spouting astrology advice will be a massive hit.

16
mayoreply
lemmy.today

This is a baseless claim I don't know why it's getting support other than the fact the people seem to like hating on a tool.

-5
kbin.social

Not hating the tool. Hating the current level of hype around LLMs. It is dotcom/blockchain all over again.

2
lemmy.ml

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.

42

One of the worst rigid aspect of how the current LLM's are made is that they're also always "at your service", and will never say that you're in the wrong about a correction you make to them.

So either they're hard coded to avoid certain topics or they're susceptible, just tell them "uh, actually, Hitler was a great leader" and they'll go off listing why Hitler's so Great.

Bing is hard coded for dictators and will stop the conversation in the middle of a response. ChatGTP is also hard coded to never agree that suicidal thoughts are good, but resorts to ignoring the meaning of your response and just hallucinating some other question. The world would be simpler if they could outright say "That is misinformation". People deserve to be told off like that.

6
aussie.zone

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

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Gameyreply
feddit.rocks

Effective is doubtful if you ask me, everything he did was based on huge loans and a preparation for war that he solled differently (E.g. massive streets all over the country)

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XTornadoreply
lemmy.ml

Well we know he was bad at painting for sure 😅

4

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

That is not a factual claim. He was very effective at gaining power, but his actual reign was far from effective, most of it counterproductive to his own goals, and the actual system of decision making in Nazi Germany was a huge mess.

1
lemmy.one

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”.

24

It does feel like a lecture sometimes, even with stuff that is just difficult and not immoral.

4
lemmy.world

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

21
lemy.lol

Exactly! We were all worrying that with the advent of solid LLMs we would be flooded with propaganda machines...
And instead we just created an ulimited resource of empty content for writers to pull up when they run out of half decent ideas, they can use all their imagination to romanticize what would be a fart in the wind otherwise

5

LLMs are using writers to create click-baity news articles!

3
kbin.social

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.

20

Wow, the calculator analogy is excellent. I've done my fair share of getting an AI to answer with instructions on how to form a drug cartel. Now I realise it has the exact same feeling as writing BOOBS on a calculator

6

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

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lemmy.ml

You're in the running for a BoneAppleTea Prize, so that's something. There's also the Nobel Prize but that's overrated IMO. The real glory is with the Ig Nobel, you should consider submitting your work there.

4
sh.itjust.works

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.

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lemmy.ml

Rouge: noun, A red or pink cosmetic for coloring the cheeks or lips.

You want that stuff all over the net? And just who is going to clean it all up when you're done? The bot surely won't - it'll just claim that it hasn't been trained on cleaning.

10
lemmy.ml

What makes you think they haven't already? In the book Hyperion the AIs were sentient long before people thought they were, and in control of everything. They were smart enough to operate in the shadows and never revealed their true goals. By the time people realized they were sentient, they had already moved their servers out of human reach.

6

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.

12

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

There probably is some value in understanding why "evil" things were attractive to people at the time, because if you believe that evil always looks unambiguously evil, then you might fail to notice when it happens again.

8

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.

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programming.dev

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

9
lemmy.ml

I think the controversial bit was that when queried about various aspects of admittance to "heaven", the Google AI assumed that the question had to do with, specifically, the Christian idea of "heaven", going so far as to make reference to some "Jesus" entity. Christianity doesn't own the concept of heaven or an afterlife, but, apparently, the AI has been trained such that it responds to such questions from a seemingly Christian perspective. That was my take on it - the discussion is in the article, best have a look at it yourself.

6

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).

8

And genocide provides a more homogeneous clientele to market towards.

1

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

Really good at writng boring work emails though.

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literature.cafe

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

6

Well some of us have, but a huge swath (perhaps a majority?) of people haven't and will happily continue to use these things as their main entry point for information seeking on the internet.

1

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.

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programming.dev

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

3

Evil AI that wants to destroy humanity is just humans projecting there own shit on expert systems that are no more self aware than a TI-83.

7

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.

5

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)

2

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!

2

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

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linux.community

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.

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Kerfufflereply
sh.itjust.works

It’s not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity.

I'm with you so far.

It’s a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text.

What? That's certainly not the purpose of LLMs and a lot of work has been done to improve the accuracy of their answers.

Is it still not good enough to rely on? Maybe, but that doesn't mean it's just for producing random text.

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ExLisperreply
linux.community

Well, obviously not totally random. It has to match the prompt and make as much sense as possible but LLMs hallucinating information is one of the main issues and they should not be treated as 'fact generating machines'. I just don't see much sense in assigning some deeper meaning to the wrong data. Why did this bot say that Hitler was a great leader? Because it was confused by some text that was fed into the model. Does it mean it's somehow fascist or racist? Not really.

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Kerfufflereply
sh.itjust.works

It has to match the prompt and make as much sense as possible

So it's specifically designed to make as much sense as possible.

and they should not be treated as ‘fact generating machines’.

You can't really "generate" facts, only recognize them. :) I know what you mean though and I generally agree. I'm really interested in LLM stuff but I definitely don't really trust them (and no one should currently anyway).

Why did this bot say that Hitler was a great leader? Because it was confused by some text that was fed into the model.

Most people are (rightfully) very hesitant to say anything positive about Hitler but he did accomplish some fairly impressive stuff. As horrible as their means were, Nazi Germany also advanced since quite a bit also. I am not saying it was justified, justifiable or good, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of "great" he could qualify.

So I'd say it's not really that it got confused, it's that LLMs don't understand being cautious about statements like that. I'd also say I prefer the LLM to "look" at stuff objectively and try to answer rather than responding to anything remotely questionable with "Sorry, Dave I can't let you do that. There might be a sharp edge hidden somewhere and you could hurt yourself!" I hate being protected from myself without the ability to opt out.

I think part of the issue here is because the output from LLMs looks like a human might have wrote it people tend to anthropomorphize the LLM. They ask it for its best recipe using the ingredients bleach, water and kumquat jam and then are shocked when it gives them a recipe for bleach kumquat sauce.

1
ExLisperreply
linux.community

I think part of the issue here is because the output from LLMs looks like a human might have wrote it people tend to anthropomorphize the LLM. They ask it for its best recipe using the ingredients bleach, water and kumquat jam and then are shocked when it gives them a recipe for bleach kumquat sauce.

That's the point I was making. In the end it's just some statistics based text. I doesn't have opinions and it doesn't represent opinions of it's creators. People don't understand how it works so they think it 'believes' something or 'thinks'. In the end it just a bug or they are using it wrong.

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Kerfufflereply
sh.itjust.works

Seems like we're on the same page. The only thing I disagreed with before is saying the output was random.

1

Yeah, not the best term. What I meant is that it's not really predictable. Creators of the LLM can't tell how will it respond to each prompt. There's no fixed set of rules you can review. So yeah, you start poking at it you will find strange responses.

1
lemm.ee

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.

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pawb.social

I mean, are they even factual though? Africa may be less developed than the United States, in general, but most of it isn't really in the "running from wild predators like cavemen" stage either. Obviously the specific people who are descendants of slaves in America wouldn't even exist without their ancestors being kidnapped, due to having entirely different life circumstances, but it seems unlikely to me that the equivalent descendants of those people would live without civilization. Poverty, perhaps, but that isn't the same thing. And Hitler, for his part, was good at gaining public support as far as I'm aware, but I don't think a leader who almost gets his country destroyed by starting almost unwinnable wars against half the world while wasting resources on murder and in pitting bits of his government against eachother, all while amped up on drugs, can really be called effective, unless one's definition of an effective leader is just having the ability to aquire a leadership role in the first place.

10

Of course they are not factual.

seems unlikely to me that the equivalent descendants of those people would live without civilization.

Some of the people who were trafficked were a lot more literate and well-educated than their captors or eventual "owners".

I really wish the history of the African kingdoms was taught in schools. Or even basic modern politics and society since the person you're replying to seems to think modern people living in Lagos or wherever are "running from lions" somehow.

Poverty, perhaps

We're dealing with counterfactuals here but:

...in a world where the African kingdoms were able to freely exchange culture and inventions with the West instead of being attacked and exploited by them for hundreds of years, we have no reason at all to think those in the world's second largest continent, such a resource-rich place, would be living in poverty at all.

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Enigmareply
sh.itjust.works

I disagree that the American slave trade somehow prevented Africans from “running from lions”. Since colonialism and the world slave trade happened long before America was a thing. Despite what you may believe, Africa has had cities and kingdoms and crazy amounts of wealth millennia ago. They also invented some medical procedures like the c-section. Colonialism and the slave trade has harmed Africa.

Also, most of Africa don’t have lions lmao.

I suggest you read up on African history.

9

Oh I see, just another troll. Still, my comment is there for anyone who believes that nonsense but is willing to learn. Have a good day/night!

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livusreply
kbin.social

However, had we not brought them over here, it’s a good possibility they would still be running from lions.

Facepalm. World history needs to be taught much, much better.

I don't know which is more cringeworthy here, the ignorance or the part where you proudly claim your statements are "factual."

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ZeroCoolreply
lemm.ee

Thankfully, I don’t really care what you think. Downvote and move on, your time is wasted on someone who could care less about anyone else’s option. Cheers.

-6

Downvote and move on, your time is wasted

Lol no kid, downvoting only mattered on reddit.

Those of us on kbin can even see which accounts are doing the downvoting. It loses its power.

If you don't like seeing me school you, block me.

1

LLMs don't state facts, they are just fancy calculators for language. If you use them, as if they were a database of facts, you will make a fool out of yourself. Like stating that the guy who destroyed german science was an effective leader.

6
kbin.social

However, had we not brought them over here, it’s a good possibility they would still be running from lions.

This is not factual, this is willfully ignorant.

3

I don't think they're phobic anything. I think you're a straight up crypto fascist.

0
ZeroCoolreply
lemm.ee

I found another lemming… 🤦🏻‍♂️

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ZeroCoolreply
lemm.ee

So, instead of offering a possible rebuttal or give your opinion , you’d prefer to capitalize on a number that somehow made it into my comment. 🤦🏻‍♂️

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kbin.social

you’d prefer to capitalize on a number

Well, I reckon, I suppose they did.

2
ZeroCoolreply
lemm.ee

The only thing they succeeded in doing was making themselves look stupid, and I’m ok with that. LMAO

-6

You must be in quite the gravity well, because your frame of reference is wildly different from everybody else's

0