Comment by lmm
2 days ago
ChatGPT writes extremely persuasively for whatever claim you ask it to make - that's pretty much what it's designed to do! If an extremely charismatic human was going around telling people to jump off roofs, and they did, would we shrug it off and say "well, they were obviously insane already"?
> If an extremely charismatic human was going around telling people to jump off roofs, and they did, would we shrug it off and say "well, they were obviously insane already"?
Your example might sound ridiculuous, but this is actually happening all the time. People might not literally jump off a roof, but they do blow themselves up with bombs, go on killing sprees or commit suicide because someone told them so.
And in those cases, most people condemn it. But when it’s an algorithm (which was created by humans) we say “these people were already insane, and the creators of the algorithm should not be held liable”, apparently.
I don’t think this analogy is fully apt. Instead, consider people going to a church or mosque. Some listen to the sermons and come out just fine, a few are radicalised over time and go find these bad people convincing them to act out on that. But drawing the line between legitimate religious teachers and ideological deceivers is hard, and condemning the entire religion would be the wrong conclusion.
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When people blame traditional religion for doing crazy things we generally do say they were already insane.