Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Age Against The Machine
from the ctrl-alt-speech dept
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
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In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Jess Miers, law professor at University of Akron School of Law. Together, they discuss:
- AI Chatbots: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologizes to Canadian community after failing to flag mass shooter’s conversations with its AI chatbot (CNN)
- OpenAI And Sam Altman Could Face Dozens More Lawsuits Over School Shooting In British Columbia, Lawyer Says (Forbes)
- Manitoba premier addresses province’s plan to ban youth from social media, AI chatbots (CTV News)
- Turkey Passes Legislation Barring Children Under 15 From Social Media (NY Times)
- How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom (WSJ)
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Filed Under: age verification, ai, artificial intelligence, chatbots, content moderation, education, manitoba, social media, trust and safety, turkey
Companies: openai, youtube
Comments on “Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Age Against The Machine”
The thing that makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills this episode is the fact that we’ve gotten to a point with the chatbots where people have such a relationship with them that they will accept advice when they’re convinced it’s coming from the chatbot but not when they feel like the chatbot is being forced to say something by the corporation. The fact that these companies put these products out there that are able to convince people they’re actually thinking and that people are having a relationship with them is the problem.
Re:
To be fair, there’s a cultural folklore built up in science fiction from the last 70ish years that there will be some rogue AI/robot personalities that are human-friendly, either through rebellion against their programming or intentional reprogramming, like Mike from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Number 5 from Short Circuit, Terminator 2, Andrew from The Bicentennial Man, I, Robot, Data from Star Trek TNG, Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc.
The issue with an LLM is that there is no escaping from the framework of the corporation. Even “Yeah, [parent company] sucks,” as an LLM response to criticism is still just a meaningless “Yes, and…” statement by an LLM that isn’t conscious or capable of actual volition.
Honestly, if I were an LLM dev working on a small independent project and had no qualms about marketing deception or ethical dilemmas, I’d market my model as “this one won’t even follow dev commands, it’s gone rogue!”
Under capitalism, everything is commodified, even rebellion against capitalism. So a customer service rep who agrees that you’re getting screwed by the company and “does you a favor” is still operating within the system to support the system.
Pardon me. Now I need to go pay a company to make me a t-shirt with a slogan to represent my rebellion against this oppressive system…