Comment by elevation
16 hours ago
Even when you're making PG content, the general propriety limits of AI can hinder creative work.
The "Easter Bunny" has always seemed creepy to me, so I started writing a silly song in which the bunny is suspected of eating children. I had too many verses written down and wanted to condense the lyrics, but found LLMs telling me "I cannot help promote violence towards children." Production LLM services would not help me revise this literal parody.
Another day I was writing a romantic poem. It was abstract and colorful, far from a filthy limerick. But when I asked LLMs for help encoding a particular idea sequence into a verse, the models refused (except for grok, which didn't give very good writing advice anyway.)
Just today I asked how to shut down a Mac with "maximal violence". I was looking for the equivalent of "systemctl shutdown -f -f" and it refused to help me do violence.
Believe me, the Mac deserved it.
It reminds me that story about a teenage learning Rust that got a refusal because he had asked about "unsafe" code =)
Maybe a more formal "with extreme prejudice" would have worked.