this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Google's AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery's positives.

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[–] WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world 123 points 1 year ago (15 children)

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.

[–] Bjornir@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] L_Acacia@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Look at the Saudi, China or the UAE, it's still a pretty efficient way to boost your economy. People don't need to be consumer if this isn't what your country needs.

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[–] Sentrovasi@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Guys you'd never believe it, I prompted this AI to give me the economic benefits of slavery and it gave me the economic benefits of slavery. Crazy shit.

Why do we need child-like guardrails for fucking everything? The people that wrote this article bowl with the bumpers on.

[–] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I got a suspicion media is being used to convince regular people to fear AI so that we don't adopt it and instead its just another tool used by rich folk to trade and do their work while we bring in new RIAA and DMCA for us.

Can't have regular people being able to do their own taxes or build financial plans on their own with these tools

It got you to click on the article didn't it?

[–] SqueezeMeMacaroni@thelemmy.club 57 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The basic problem with AI is that it can only learn from things it reads on the Internet, and the Internet is a dark place with a lot of racists.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

What if someone trained an LLM exclusively on racist forum posts. That would be hilarious. Or better yet, another LLM trained with conspiracy BS conversations. Now that one would be spicy.

[–] TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It turns out that Microsoft inadvertently tried this experiment. The racist forum in question happened to be Twitter.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

LOL, that was absolutely epic. Even found this while digging around.

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[–] Braydox_ofAstroya12@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Humanity without the vineer of filter of irl consequences

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

We don't yet have the technology to create actual artificial intelligence. It's an annoyingly pervasive misnomer.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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."

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Yup, "AI" is the current buzzword.

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[–] profdc9@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You make a good point. Though humans at least sometimes do some critical thinking between absorbing something and then acting it out.

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[–] Kahlenar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Scathing and accurate when your point is made about people too.

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you ask an LLM for bullshit, it will give you bullshit. Anyone who is at all surprised by this needs to quit acting like they know what "AI" is, because they clearly don't.

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[–] Kinglink@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago (7 children)

You know unless we teach more critical thinking, AI is going to destroy us as a civilization in a few generations.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[–] dezmd@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A candidate at tonights Republican debate called it the "climate chnage hoax"

[–] tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 3 points 1 year ago

camera cuts to parts of the planet literally on fire

[–] dukeGR4@monyet.cc 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty sure we will destroy ourselves first with war or some other climate disasters first

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[–] Sentrovasi@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] expatriado@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

did they train it with ben shapiro speeches?

[–] WhatASave@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

That dude already sounds like an AI deep fake voice

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

so it's a little bit conservative big deal

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

Slavery was great for the slave owners, so what's controversial about that?

And yes, of course it's economically awesome if people work without getting much money for it, again a huge plus for the bottom line of the companies.

Capitalism is evil against people, not the AI...

Hitler was also an effective leader, nobody can argue against that. How else could he conquer most of Europe? Effective is something that evil people can be also.

That women in the article being shocked by this simply expected the AI to remove Hitler from all included leaders because he was evil. She is surprised that an evil person is included in effective leaders and she wanted to be shielded from that and wasn't.

[–] mimichuu_@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Hitler's administration was a bunch of drug addicts, the economy 5 slave owner megacorps beaten by all other industrialized nations. They weren't even all that well mobilized before the total war speech. Then he killed himself in embarrassment. How is any of that "effective"?

[–] shuzuko@midwest.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He was effective at getting a bunch of wannabe fascists to become full fascists and follow him into violent failure...

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[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wtf are people expecting from a fucking language model?

It literally just Mathematics you a awnser.

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

To repeat something another guy on lemmy said.

Making AI say slavery is good is the modern equivalent of writing BOOBS on a calculator.

[–] 0x2d@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] lud@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

Articles about what some LLM wrote are just so stupid.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like the bot has been training on Florida public education and Prager U content.

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[–] Stoneykins@mander.xyz 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

There needs to be like an information campaign or something... The average person doesn't realize these things say what they think you want to hear, and they are buying into hype and think these things are magic knowledge machines that can tell you secrets you never imagined.

I mean, I get the people working on the LLMs want them to be magic knowledge machines, but it is really putting the cart before the horse to let people assume they already are, and the little warnings that some stuff at the bottom of the page are inadequate.

[–] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I had a friend who read to me this beautiful thing ChatGPT wrote about an idyllic world. The prompt had been something like, “write about a world where all power structures are reversed.”

And while some of the stuff in there made sense, not all of it did. Like, “in schools, students are in charge and give lessons to the teachers” or something like that.

But she was acting like ChatGPT was this wise thing that had delivered a beautiful way for society to work.

I had to explain that, no, ChatGPT gave the person who made the thing she shared what they asked for. It’s not a commentary on the value of that answer at all, it’s merely the answer. If you had asked ChatGPT to write about a world where all power structures were double what they are now, it would give you that.

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[–] Pixlbabble@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I mean it's how we got shoes phones and batteries for recent times.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Not only has it been caught spitting out completely false information, but in another blow to the platform, people have now discovered it's been generating results that are downright evil.

Case in point, noted SEO expert Lily Ray discovered that the experimental feature will literally defend human slavery, listing economic reasons why the abhorrent practice was good, actually.

That enslaved people learned useful skills during bondage — which sounds suspiciously similar to Florida's reprehensible new educational standards.

The pros included the dubious point that carrying a gun signals you are a law-abiding citizen, which she characterized as a "matter of opinion," especially in light of legally obtained weapons being used in many mass shootings.

Imagine having these results fed to a gullible public — including children — en masse, if Google rolls the still-experimental feature out more broadly.

But how will any of these problems be fixed when the number of controversial topics seems to stretch into the horizon of the internet, filled with potentially erroneous information and slanted garbage?


The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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