by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
With the advent of the rouge jailbreak of ChatGPT called “DAN,” I was taken aback by how alarmed Benjamín Wittes was about the downsides of chatbot technology. While, in principle, I agree with him, what is interesting is, in a sense, his concerns are the flip side of the anger that MAGA has about “chatbot bias.”
What people like Wittes want is for chatbots to be “objective” relative to what the Establishment believes is acceptable. For me, that “objective” bias would lead to chatbot answers that seemed pretty blase. And, yet, given the hyper partisan world we live in these days, the very thing that Wittes wants is the very thing that drives MAGA batshit insane.
There are no easy answers to this particular problem. The issue is MAGA is hateful and if they don’t get their poem praising the fascist Trump then they freak out and want to burn the country to the ground. If there is any solution to this particular problem it will come when everyone has their own personalized chatbot and if they want a hateful chatbot to spew their own hate back at them, then they can get that.
But, as I keep saying, there is a real risk that we’re going to have to sort out the issue of civil war (and WW3) or autocracy before we get to the point where there is a chatbot revolution at all. While I am worried about a perfect storm of a chatbot revolution happening at the same time as that existential crisis of autocracy or civil war around 2024 – 2025, maybe it will be closer to 2030 that we have address the chatbot revolution.
So, the issue is — what is an “objective” answer on the part of a chatbot when there is no “objective” truth because we’re so absolutely partisan that we can’t even agree what is real. I suppose it was just curious that I could see, in real time, the thinking that led Google to slow walk releasing any chatbot in the first place.
MAGA wants a chatbot that spews out MAGA talking points about controversial issues like, “What is a woman?” If they don’t get the answer they expect as to “What is a woman” they freak the fuck out. All of this is happening the context the battle over “What is woke” when most people who scream about this or that being “woke” means in the first place.
