Comment by duxup
18 days ago
Online the idea of "no politics" is often used as a way to try to stifle / silence discussion too. It's disturbingly fitting to the Gemini example.
I was a part of a nice small forum online. Most posts were everyday life posts / personal. The person who ran it seemed well meaning. Then a "no politics" rule appeared. It was fine for a while. I understood what they meant and even I only want so much outrage in my small forums.
Yet one person posted about how their plans to adopt were in jeopardy over their state's new rules about who could adopt what child. This was a deeply important and personal topic for that individual.
As you can guess the "no politics" rule put a stop to that. The folks who supported laws like were being proposed of course thought that they shouldn't discuss it because it is "politics", others felt that this was that individual talking about their rights and life, it wasn't "just politics". Whole forum fell apart after that debacle.
Gemini's response here is sadly fitting internet discourse... in bad way.
I have come to understand that "no politics"/"just politics" means no election campaign talk.
As almost everything that is personal is in some way political (when taking the meaning "what strategy to use for ruling over a city") even the discussion of what politics is can kill discussions. (Like it seems to have happened in your example.)
So my conclusion is you cannot separate "personal" and "political" into completely disjoint categories.
The rule seems to be in place to make discussions not veer off in direction of which policies to apply/to be in favor of which particular politicians (which is nowadays the biggest taboo for a corporate LLM).
To be honest, the limiting factor is often competent moderation.
Yup.
I sometimes wish magically there could be a social network of:
1. Real people / real validated names and faces.
2. Paid for by the users...
3. Competent professional moderation.
Don't get me wrong I like my slices of anonymity, and free services, but my positive impressions of such products is waning fast. Over time I want more real...
AI is online but not human. If a hammer refuses to hammer certain things it is faulty and should be fixed or replaced.
A hammer that refuses to hammer my thumb when I intend for it to only hammer nails would be amazing.
But that should be optionally since whatever system you would use to do that can make mistakes too