4 ms·

Seems to work again. But how does this happen in the first place. How could someone possibly have thought "hey I have an idea, let's put in a list of english wo

Seems to work again. But how does this happen in the first place. How could someone possibly have thought "hey I have an idea, let's put in a list of english words and just silently stop working if we have see even one of them in a substring". And people in this meeting would nod and say "yeah that sounds like an easy safety fix, let's do that". This just feels odd. This isn't a piece of forum software written by a 14 year old this is a company worth billions and filled with smart people.

belter 2y ago
Because it was a Manager idea and the person responsible for implementing was a H1B ?
- alkonaut 2y ago
  I unironically think maybe you should maybe add some banned words to your own list
  - belter 2y ago
    When a feature is both conceptually flawed and technically unworkable, the real question is why it still shipped. Engineers typically push back—unless job security concerns make silence the safer option... And when the decision-maker can also steer the narrative...say...by mobilizing downvotes...The outcome is predictable. :-))
gedy 2y ago
> But how does this happen in the first place Companies that are ironically filled with privileged people who "Gotta do something", since they, while sort-of well meaning, are sheltered and disconnected from actual social struggles in real life.
- loudmax 2y ago
  This reminds me of rental car companies deciding they should switch their vehicle fleets to electric. A few months ago, I visited San Jose for a wedding. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, the only options were electric, even though I had specified that I wanted an ICE vehicle tat the time I made the reservation. During the four day trip I wound up visiting five different charging stations (some of which slow charged, so weren't able to replenish the battery in the time available), and I had to install three different apps. I still have like $20 of unused credit between them. I spent several hours waiting for the car to charge, not to mention making major detours looking for a fast-charging station. If I were to guess a part of the world you'd expect to find the best possible electric vehicle charging infrastructure, San Jose wouldn't be far off the mark. But my trip wound up being dominated by range anxiety. I drive a PHEV (plug-in hybrid) for my commute from home to work and I love it. Electric is the future, and it's great that electric vehicles and charging stations are becoming more common. But renting an electric car in a strange city today is about the worst possible scenario for a short range vehicle. You don't know where the charging stations are, the charging stations require different apps, your hotel might not have a charger, and so on. The people making decisions at car rental companies should know this!
jerf 2y ago
The AI industry is concerned about the fact that the world will consider them to be basically endorsing everything their AIs say. Thus, they are very afraid of there being a situation where you write "gender: 'm<|>'" and hit autocomplete at the <|> and end up with something like "gender: 'male as is normal'" or "gender: 'male', 'female', 'wrong'" or any number of other bad situations. They are not being randomly paranoid. Even if they did not have this fear, they would have rapidly developed it. We've all read the articles by muckraking journalists that take something an AI said and basically deliberately writes clickbait about how stupid or evil or worthless or whatever the AI is, even if the journalist had to filter through hundreds of replies (or, implicitly, by waiting for the dumbest stuff to rise to the top of social media, thousands or millions of replies) to get it. We've also read the articles where in someone uses the "fancy autocompleter", feeds it the moral equivalent of "Hey, how do you think you AIs will be taking over the world in five years?" and then is shocked, shocked at the "fancy autocompleter" filling in the yarn they are clearly asking for, and go running to either the media, or in particularly pathological cases, the academic literature making wild claims. (I do not believe that "fancy autocompleter" is a complete description of LLMs, but in this particular case, it isn't a completely inaccurate mental model either. It shouldn't be a surprise that when you prompt it with X, you get more X.) As a result the AIs are very heavily tuned to some combination of the political beliefs of the company writing them and the political beliefs dominant in the media coverage they are worried about, so they won't get very negative stories written about them. For this purpose, I'm taking the broadest possible definition of "political", not just "American politics in 202x", but the full range of "beliefs that not everyone agrees on and are things people are willing to exert some degree of power over". The AI companies have to take a stand, because taking a stand at least means someone can be on their side... if they just let the chips fall where they may they'll anger everyone because everyone can get the AI to say things that they in particular disagree with and they'll find themselves without friends. Unsurprisingly, the AI companies have been aligning their models with what they perceived to be the largest, most powerful political beliefs in their vicinity. To be honest when I read them talking about "AI safety" I know they want me to be thinking "ensuring the AI doesn't take over the world or tell people to commit self harm" but what I see is them spending a lot of effort to politically align their AIs, with all that entails.
- 2y ago

belter 2y ago

Because it was a Manager idea and the person responsible for implementing was a H1B ?

alkonaut 2y ago
I unironically think maybe you should maybe add some banned words to your own list
- belter 2y ago
  When a feature is both conceptually flawed and technically unworkable, the real question is why it still shipped. Engineers typically push back—unless job security concerns make silence the safer option... And when the decision-maker can also steer the narrative...say...by mobilizing downvotes...The outcome is predictable. :-))

gedy 2y ago

> But how does this happen in the first place Companies that are ironically filled with privileged people who "Gotta do something", since they, while sort-of well meaning, are sheltered and disconnected from actual social struggles in real life.

loudmax 2y ago
This reminds me of rental car companies deciding they should switch their vehicle fleets to electric. A few months ago, I visited San Jose for a wedding. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, the only options were electric, even though I had specified that I wanted an ICE vehicle tat the time I made the reservation. During the four day trip I wound up visiting five different charging stations (some of which slow charged, so weren't able to replenish the battery in the time available), and I had to install three different apps. I still have like $20 of unused credit between them. I spent several hours waiting for the car to charge, not to mention making major detours looking for a fast-charging station. If I were to guess a part of the world you'd expect to find the best possible electric vehicle charging infrastructure, San Jose wouldn't be far off the mark. But my trip wound up being dominated by range anxiety. I drive a PHEV (plug-in hybrid) for my commute from home to work and I love it. Electric is the future, and it's great that electric vehicles and charging stations are becoming more common. But renting an electric car in a strange city today is about the worst possible scenario for a short range vehicle. You don't know where the charging stations are, the charging stations require different apps, your hotel might not have a charger, and so on. The people making decisions at car rental companies should know this!

jerf 2y ago

The AI industry is concerned about the fact that the world will consider them to be basically endorsing everything their AIs say. Thus, they are very afraid of there being a situation where you write "gender: 'm<|>'" and hit autocomplete at the <|> and end up with something like "gender: 'male as is normal'" or "gender: 'male', 'female', 'wrong'" or any number of other bad situations. They are not being randomly paranoid. Even if they did not have this fear, they would have rapidly developed it. We've all read the articles by muckraking journalists that take something an AI said and basically deliberately writes clickbait about how stupid or evil or worthless or whatever the AI is, even if the journalist had to filter through hundreds of replies (or, implicitly, by waiting for the dumbest stuff to rise to the top of social media, thousands or millions of replies) to get it. We've also read the articles where in someone uses the "fancy autocompleter", feeds it the moral equivalent of "Hey, how do you think you AIs will be taking over the world in five years?" and then is shocked, shocked at the "fancy autocompleter" filling in the yarn they are clearly asking for, and go running to either the media, or in particularly pathological cases, the academic literature making wild claims. (I do not believe that "fancy autocompleter" is a complete description of LLMs, but in this particular case, it isn't a completely inaccurate mental model either. It shouldn't be a surprise that when you prompt it with X, you get more X.) As a result the AIs are very heavily tuned to some combination of the political beliefs of the company writing them and the political beliefs dominant in the media coverage they are worried about, so they won't get very negative stories written about them. For this purpose, I'm taking the broadest possible definition of "political", not just "American politics in 202x", but the full range of "beliefs that not everyone agrees on and are things people are willing to exert some degree of power over". The AI companies have to take a stand, because taking a stand at least means someone can be on their side... if they just let the chips fall where they may they'll anger everyone because everyone can get the AI to say things that they in particular disagree with and they'll find themselves without friends. Unsurprisingly, the AI companies have been aligning their models with what they perceived to be the largest, most powerful political beliefs in their vicinity. To be honest when I read them talking about "AI safety" I know they want me to be thinking "ensuring the AI doesn't take over the world or tell people to commit self harm" but what I see is them spending a lot of effort to politically align their AIs, with all that entails.

2y ago