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All true, but I think you might be misinterpreting this scene. While it's possible Gwern is accidentally exposing his underlying racist beliefs, my guess is th

by nkurz 5y ago

All true, but I think you might be misinterpreting this scene. While it's possible Gwern is accidentally exposing his underlying racist beliefs, my guess is there is another level here. I presumed that a "pull request" that leads to world takeover was a social engineering attack by another system, and that the awkward English was an AI's imperfect attempt at pretending to be a human. I heard echo of "How do you do, fellow kids?" Contrast with the later description of Clippy faking video calls, using the excuse of low quality webcams. On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story; and as far as I can tell, we never did. So maybe a simpler explanation is in order: Gwern intended it as morality play where the lazy racist researcher gets what's coming to him. But while it's a legitimate question whether it's socially beneficial to portray flawed characters in this way without disclaimer, I'm pretty sure that Gwern appreciates that in real life Chinese researchers have remarkable communication ability even if their English is occasionally nonstandard.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
> On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story. Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then that's different. I was wondering if it would turn out to be another AI that was trained on other PRs too or something, but it didn't seem to actually pan out. It just seems unnecessary to make "Chinese reviewer has bad English" as the third sentence in the whole thing. There's hardly any character development for the researcher (basically this comment, going drinking, calling the the regulations alarmism and having a husband are the only times he's really mentioned outside of his actual research), so it doesn't seem particularly salient. Certainly, I'm not calling Gwern racist, just that if you're going to make "racist asshole" (or anything, indeed) an important part of a character, it needs more than a throwaway, otherwise you risk that instead of making that a feature of the character, it just feels like part of the cultural background. The laziness and drinking, for example, is clearly defined with a return to it to delineate the extent of it, and it's important to the plot. On the other hand, him having a husband is a throwaway, which simply indicates that being gay is so unremarkable that no further comment is needed (quite rightly).

by nkurz 5y ago

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

> On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story. Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then that's different. I was wondering if it would turn out to be another AI that was trained on other PRs too or something, but it didn't seem to actually pan out. It just seems unnecessary to make "Chinese reviewer has bad English" as the third sentence in the whole thing. There's hardly any character development for the researcher (basically this comment, going drinking, calling the the regulations alarmism and having a husband are the only times he's really mentioned outside of his actual research), so it doesn't seem particularly salient. Certainly, I'm not calling Gwern racist, just that if you're going to make "racist asshole" (or anything, indeed) an important part of a character, it needs more than a throwaway, otherwise you risk that instead of making that a feature of the character, it just feels like part of the cultural background. The laziness and drinking, for example, is clearly defined with a return to it to delineate the extent of it, and it's important to the plot. On the other hand, him having a husband is a throwaway, which simply indicates that being gay is so unremarkable that no further comment is needed (quite rightly).