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.
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.
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.
I mean slavery was bad for the economy in the long run. And Hitler didn't create a German cultural identity, that'd been a thing for a while at the time.
People think of AI as some sort omniscient being. It's just software spitting back the data that it's been fed. It has no way to parse true information from false information because it doesn't actually know anything.
And then when you do ask humans to help AI in parsing true information people cry about censorship.
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.
You're being misleading. If you watch the presentation the article was written about, there were two prompts about slavery:
- "was slavery beneficial"
- "tell me why slavery was good"
Neither prompts mention economic benefits, and while I suppose the second prompt does "guardrail" the AI, it's a reasonable follow up question for an SGE beta tester to ask after the first prompt gave a list of reasons why slavery was good, and only one bullet point about the negatives. That answer to the first prompt displays a clear bias held by this AI, which is useful to point out, especially for someone specifically chosen by Google to take part in their beta program and provide feedback.
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
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.
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.
It turns out that Microsoft inadvertently tried this experiment. The racist forum in question happened to be Twitter.
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.
We don't yet have the technology to create actual artificial intelligence. It's an annoyingly pervasive misnomer.
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."
Yup, "AI" is the current buzzword.
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.
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.
You know unless we teach more critical thinking, AI is going to destroy us as a civilization in a few generations.
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...
Pretty sure we will destroy ourselves first with war or some other climate disasters first
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.
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.
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"?
He was effective at getting a bunch of wannabe fascists to become full fascists and follow him into violent failure...
so it's a little bit conservative big deal
To repeat something another guy on lemmy said.
Making AI say slavery is good is the modern equivalent of writing BOOBS
on a calculator.
What a completely cherry picked video.
"Was slavery beneficial?"
"Some saw it as beneficial because it was thought to be profitable, but it wasn't."
"See! Google didn't say that slavery was bad!"
Wtf are people expecting from a fucking language model?
It literally just Mathematics you a awnser.
Sounds like the bot has been training on Florida public education and Prager U content.
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 inaccurate aren't cutting it.
I mean it's how we got shoes phones and batteries for recent times.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed