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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
I always encourage people to play around with Bing or chatGPT. That way they’ll get a very good idea how and when an LLM fails. Once you have your own experiences, you’ll also have a more realistic and balanced opinions about it.
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.
I think you misunderstood me. We need to teach the general populace critical thinking so they can correctly judge what we get from ChatGPT (or Wikipeida... or social media, or random youtube video).
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 had taken power from his country, conquer pretty much the whole Europe and paralyzed England. He was effective leader till some point . And, of course, he was a abomination of a human.
Oh look another caricature of capitalism on social media... and you tied Hitler into it...
Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.
"Capitalism" is not pro slavery, shitty people that can't recognize a human is a human are pro slavery... Because of course if you can have work done without paying somebody for it or doing it yourself, well that's just really convenient for you. It's why we all like robots. That has nothing to do with your economic philosophy.
And arguing that Hitler was an "effective leader" because he conquered (and then lost) some countries while ignoring all the damage he did to his county and how it ultimately turned out.... Honestly infuriating.
Seems like people think everything America does is capitalism. The same thing happened with communism and socialism. The words have very little meaning now.
Actually, slavery in its original form is also a net positive. You just murdered half a tribe. You cant let the other half just live. Neither do you want to murder them. Thus you will enslave them.
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.
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.
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!
Obviously it doesn't "think" any of these things. It's just a machine repeating back a plausible mimicry.
What does scare me though is what google execs think.
They will be tweaking it to remove obvious things like praise of Hitler, because PR, but what about all the other stuff?
Like, most likely it will be saying things like what a great guy Masaji Kitano was for founding Green Cross and being such an experimental innovator, and no one will bat an eye because they haven't heard of him.
As we outsource more and more of our research and fact checking to machines, errors in knowledge are going to be reproduced and reinforced. Like how Cinderella now has "glass" slippers.
A bit of a nitpick but it was technically right on that one thing….
Hitler was an “effective” leader….
Not a good or a moral one but if he had not been as successful creating genocide then i doubt he be more than a small mention in history.
Now a better ai should have realized that giving him as an example was offensive in the context.
In an educational setting this might be more appropriate to teach that success does not equal morally good. Sm i wish more people where aware off.
Shooting someone is an effective way to get to get to the townhall if the townhallbuilding is also where the police department and jail are.
Effective =/= net postive
Hitler wanted to kill jews and used his leadership position to make it happen, soldiers and citizens blindly followed his ideology, millions died before he was finally stopped.
Calling him not effective is an insult to the horrid damage caused by the holocaust. But i recognize your sincerity and i see we are not enemies. So let us not fight.
I dont need to reform the image of nazis and hitlers. Decent people know they are synonymous to evil and hatred and they should be.
So the AI provided factual information and they did not like that because 'slavery bad, therefore there was no benefit to it.'
There were benefits to slavery, mainly for the owners. US had a huge cotton export at one point, with the fields being worked by slaves.
But also a very few slaves did benefit, like being able to work a job that taught them very useful skills, which let them buy their own freedom, as they were able to earn money from it.
Of course being a slave in the first place would be far better, but when you are one already, learning a skill that makes you earn your freedom and get a job afterwards is quite the blessing.
Plus for a few individuals it might've been living in such terrible conditions, that being forced to work while getting fed might've not been so bad...