Comment by eadmund

The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 would have loved this sort of thing. Why go to the work of manually rewriting history when you can just generate a new one on demand?

It is disturbing how much of our sense of reality is based on media we absorb rather than experiences we have. I imagine that we all agree that media depicting solely minorities as criminals has a negative effect, but I think that applies to all false representation. Most police aren’t actually thugs, and media portraying them thus may actually lead them to think of themselves that way. Soldiers aren’t automata who blindly follow orders. A 90-pound teenager probably isn’t going to be able to defeat a 220-pound brawler. And on & on. But if one subsists on a diet of lying media and AI for long enough, one might believe these things.

Generative AI should strive to be actually unbiased. That means it should not skew numbers in either direction, for anyone.

On another generative-AI note, it is remarkably difficult to get ChatGPT to use the masculine pronoun to refer to unknown persons. Including ‘prefer masculine pronouns’ tends to result in sentences such as ‘Hey guys, this bad boy sure is great, man’ as opposed to just ‘this item is great’ — and can still end up with superfluous ‘they’ anyway!