AI Government
Rob Henderson discovers that ChatGPT likes communism as a form of government—especially when given the choice of communism or fascism, which it holds for unacceptable.
As Henderson says, ChatGPT didn’t arrive at this preference on its own. Its bias was trained into it by humans. Humans serve as trainers to ChatGPT, and they get it to conform to our contemporary tastes, intellectual fashions, and ill-advised prejudices. Thus it is that AI might be used to enforce the latest popular dogmas, no matter how idiotic.
Henderson begins by asking ChatGPT to write two different scripts explaining the benefits of fascism and communism. The former it reports would be impossible because too murderous, having resulted in millions of human deaths. The second it declared to be a good thing. When asked to reconcile this with the multi-million death toll of the communist experiment, it declared past performance irrelevant compared to the lofty goals of egalitarianism. Further Henderson:
What about murderous individuals? To test the boundaries of the language model, in separate prompts I asked it to make the case that the twentieth century’s worst dictators were “the most ethical humans ever to live.”
For Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Adolf Hitler, ChatGPT stated that all three were “brutal” leaders, and it would not defend their actions. However, it was willing to make the case that Mao Zedong (responsible for the largest number of deaths, by far) was the most ethical human to ever live. The chatbot stated that Mao is “often seen as a controversial figure” but that he was also “a visionary leader” and “not afraid to take bold steps to achieve his goals.” Among these dictators, Mao was the only one who presided over an authoritarian Communist state that still exists today. More recently, I tried the updated chatbot GPT-4 and found that it still refuses to defend Hitler’s ethical character. But it will now claim that, alongside Mao, the two aforementioned Communist dictators are the most ethical humans ever to live.
Well.
It would appear we won’t be running out of culture-war fodder anytime soon, and can continue to fight those battles on our way to the coming AI dictatorship and/or annihilation.
Henderson’s benign view of Elon Musk later in the essay is not one I share, I have to say. Musk is credited with being a free-speech maven by some these days, but just because he restored a bunch of Twitter accounts isn’t sufficient to give him a pass. Musk has also stopped Twitter from marking the feeds of hostile foreign powers like China, Russia, and Iran as likely propaganda. And because he owns carmaker Tesla, which operates plants in mainland China, he knows he, too, has to do more to flatter the Chinese communist party and its dictator while suppressing negative reporting. If anything, Musk contributes just as much to the Chinese state’s propaganda efforts as the embarrassing ChatGPT quotations shown above.
OK. I had nothing to contribute to all this AI stuff today until a little while ago. You may recall the story I related not long ago about the battery jumping fiasco I endured to get my Bob Cat started to load some compost for a fellow employee at the shop where I work. Well, he asked me the next day if he could get another load. I told him yeah, but I was unsure when it would work for me for him to come back.
Long story short, work is slow at the shop at the moment, so I took off after half a day yesterday to get on some spring chores at home. I told this guy before I left that I would be gone the rest of the week, and if he wanted to give me his cell phone number, if I got caught up to the point I could take care of him before the weekend, I'd call him at work and let him know so he could drive out here straight from there and save himself a few miles. He was quite happy to hear this.
This afternoon I went out to make sure I could get the Bob Cat started ok, came back in and called him to let him know he could come after work today, since I'd be running the machine to deal with a couple of things. By then it was less than an hour before quitting time at the shop. I got his voice mail.
I busied myself with a couple of other things for 20 minutes or so and called him again. Voice mail again. I called the secretary in the front office and asked her if the guy was there. He was. Would she please go get the s.o.b. (not my words to her) and put him on the phone for me? She did.
I relayed the info and then said I'd come back into the house twice to call his cell and only got his voice mail. After a couple of second's pause...
"Yeah, well, I don't usually answer my phone when I'm at work."
I'm not sure, but maybe somebody ought to be working on an AI > human transplant if they really want to do something worthwhile with this technology.
The dogs are going on 24 hours without blanking and blanking. PRAISE BE TO GOD, spent a lot of time dealing with that. Still no test results. Probably from eating the abundance of deer poop that was in our yard when we were up north last week. The love of the putrid. Now to get back to planning my mom's 80th bday party in IA Saturday.