Let’s agree for the sake of argument that you can have whatever guardrails you want around your AI. It stands to reason that you want to test those guardrails p

Let’s agree for the sake of argument that you can have whatever guardrails you want around your AI. It stands to reason that you want to test those guardrails pretty thoroughly and see if there are any unintended consequences like this. It turns out that Twitter is full of irreverent shitposters and trolls who really want to make this particular guardrail self-defeating, and as a result they managed to do it. This raises a question: why can’t Google, one of the richest corporations on earth, have testers who are similarly capable? OK, you’re never going to match the sheer creativity of all of Twitter, but OTOH Gemini seemed to ship in a broken enough state that you’d think they wouldn’t have to do too much testing to uncover this problem before release. The problem is, when it comes to “sensitive” or potentially “offensive” issues, it’s very easy to effectively stifle the sort of irreverent lateral thinking required to do thorough testing. If the intended guardrails are excessively sensitive to begin with, which seems likely based on some of the reports I’ve seen on Twitter (e.g. categorically refusing to generate images of white people even when explicitly asked to, or categorically refusing to generate Norman Rockwell style depictions of classic Americana), that implies a similarly sensitive corporate culture. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that testers were afraid to even try and test for these failure modes because they reasonably believed they might be fired for it. But what’s more insidious is a widespread avoidance of even having thoughts that seem out of bounds.