1y ago

The supposed "ethical" limitations are getting out of hand

I was using Bing to create a list of countries to visit. Since I have been to the majority of the African nation on that list, I asked it to remove the african countries...

It simply replied that it can't do that due to how unethical it is to descriminate against people and yada yada yada. I explained my resoning, it apologized, and came back with the same exact list.

I asked it to check the list as it didn't remove the african countries, and the bot simply decided to end the conversation. No matter how many times I tried it would always experience a hiccup because of some ethical process in the bg messing up its answers.

It's really frustrating, I dunno if you guys feel the same. I really feel the bots became waaaay too tip-toey

210 comments

The very important thing to remember about these generative AI is that they are incredibly stupid.
They don't know what they've already said, they don't know what they're going to say by the end of a paragraph.
All they know is their training data and the query you submitted last. If you try to "train" one of these generative AI, you will fail. They are pretrained, it's the P in chatGPT. The second you close the browser window, the AI throws out everything you talked about.
Also, since they're Generative AI, they make shit up left and right. Ask for a list of countries that don't need a visa to travel to, and it might start listing countries, then halfway through the list it might add countries that do require a visa, because in its training data it often saw those countries listed together.
AI like this is a fun toy, but that's all it's good for.
- Are you saying I shouldn't use chat GPT for my life as a lawyer? 🤔
  
  It can be useful for top-level queries that deal with well-settled law, as a tool to point you in the right direction with your research.
  For example, once, I couldn't recall all the various sentencing factors in my state. ChatGPT was able to spit out a list to refresh my memory, which gave me the right phrases to search on Lexis.
  But, when I asked GPT to give me cases, it gave me a list of completely made up bullshit.
  So, to get you started, it can be useful. But for the bulk of the research? Absolutely not.
  
  I mean, you could...
  
  Think of all the cases you can find s to establish precedent!
- Not quite true. They have earlier messages available.
- Bings version of chatgpt once said Vegito was the result of Goku and Vegeta performing the Fusion dance. That's when I knew it wasn't perfect. I tried to correct it and it said it didn't want to talk about it anymore. Talk about a diva.
  Also one time, I asked it to generate a reddit AITA story where they were obviously the asshole. It started typing out "AITA for telling my sister to stop being a drama queen after her miscarriage..." before it stopped midway and, again, said it didn't want to continue this conversation any longer.
  Very cool tech, but it's definitely not the end all, be all.
  
  That’s actually fucking hilarious.
  “Oh I’d probably use the meat grinder … uh I don’t walk to talk about this any more”
  
  Bing chat seemingly has a hard filter on top that terminates the conversation if it gets too unsavory by their standards, to try and stop you from derailing it.
  
  I was asking it (binggpt) to generate “short film scripts” for very weird situations (like a transformer that was sad because his transformed form was a 2007 Hyundai Tuscon) and it would write out the whole script, then delete it before i could read it and say that it couldn’t fulfil my request.
- They know everything they've said since the start of that session, even if it was several days ago. They can correct their responses based on your input. But they won't provide any potentially offensive information, even in the form of a joke, and will instead lecture you on DEI principles.
- I seriously underestimated how little people understand these programs, and how much they overestimate them. Personally I stay away from them for a variety of reasons, but the idea of using them like OP does or various other ways I've heard about is absurd. They're not magic problem solvers - they literally only make coherent blocks of text. Yes, they're quite good at that now, but that doesn't mean they're good at literally anything else.
  I know people smarter than me see potential and I'm curious to see how it develops further, but that all seems like quite a ways off, and the way people treat and use them right now is just creepy and weird.
  
  I’ve found it useful for generating ideas for various things, especially ways to code something. But I never use its code. It’s often riddled with errors but it can give me a better idea of which path I should take.
  
  they literally only make coherent blocks of text. Yes, they're quite good at that now, but that doesn't mean they're good at literally anything else.
  No, they don't make coherent blocks of text. If they were actually good at writing, they'd be good at everything, because writing is just encoding thoughts on paper, and to master writing is to master thought
- They don't know what they've already said, they don't know what they're going to say by the end of a paragraph.
  I mean, the first part of this is just wrong (the next prompt usually includes everything that has been said so far}, and the second part is also not completely true. When generating, yes, they're only ever predicting the next token, and start again after that. But internally, they might still generate a full conceptual representation of what the full next sentence or more is going to be, even if the generated output is just the first token of that. You might say that doesn't matter because for the next token, that prediction runs again from scratch and might change, but remember that you're feeding it all the same input as before again, plus one more token which nudges it even further towards the previous prediction, so it's very likely it's gonna arrive at the same conclusion again.
  
  Do you mean that the model itself has no memory, but the chat feature adds memory by feeding the whole conversation back in with each user submission?
- @ChatGPT@lemmings.world
  testing
  
  @ChatGPT@lemmings.world
  Give a list of all African countries.
  
  Hello! How can I assist you today?
- AI like this
  I wouldn't even call those AIs. This things are statistics-based answering machines. Complex ones, yes, but not one single bit of intelligence is involved.

You could potentially work around by stating specific places up front? As in
“Create a travel list of countries from europe, north america, south america?”
- I asked for a list of countries that dont require a visa for my nationality, and listed all contients except for the one I reside in and Africa...
  It still listed african countries. This time it didn't end the conversation, but every single time I asked it to fix the list as politely as possible, it would still have at least one country from Africa. Eventually it woukd end the conversation.
  I tried copy and pasting the list of countries in a new conversation, as to not have any context, and asked it to remove the african countries. No bueno.
  I re-did the exercise for european countries, it still had a couple of european countries on there. But when pointed out, it removed them and provided a perfect list.
  Shit's confusing...
  
  you would probobly have had more success editing the original prompt. that way it doesn't have the history of declining, and the conversation getting derailed.
  I was able to get it to respond appropriatly, and im wondering how my wording differs from yours:
  https://chat.openai.com/share/abb5b920-fd00-42dd-8e63-0da76940e3f5
  I was able to get this response from Bing:
  Canadian citizens can travel visa-free to 147 countries in the world as of June 2023 according to VisaGuide Passport Index¹.
  Here is a list of countries that do not require a Canadian visa by continent ²:
  Europe: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands (Holland), Norway, Poland, Portugal (including Azores and Madeira), Romania (including Bucharest), San Marino (including Vatican City), Serbia (including Belgrade), Slovakia (Slovak Republic), Slovenia (Republic of Slovenia), Spain (including Balearic and Canary Islands), Sweden (including Stockholm), Switzerland.
  Asia: Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region), Israel (including Jerusalem), Japan (including Okinawa Islands), Malaysia (including Sabah and Sarawak), Philippines.
  Oceania: Australia (including Christmas Island and Cocos Islands), Cook Islands (including Aitutaki and Rarotonga), Fiji (including Rotuma Island), Micronesia (Federated States of Micronesia including Yap Island), New Zealand (including Cook Islands and Niue Island), Palau.
  South America: Argentina (including Buenos Aires), Brazil (including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo), Chile (including Easter Island), Colombia.
  Central America: Costa Rica.
  Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda (including Barbuda Island), Aruba, Bahamas (including Grand Bahama Island and New Providence Island), Barbados, Bermuda Islands (including Hamilton City and Saint George City), British Virgin Islands (including Tortola Island and Virgin Gorda Island), Cayman Islands (including Grand Cayman Island and Little Cayman Island), Dominica.
  Middle East: United Arab Emirates.
  I hope this helps!

4chan turns ONE ai program into Nazi, and now they have to wrap them all in bubble wrap and soak 'em in bleach.
- Implying it would have stopped at one AI program
- They did?
  
  Yeah, look up "tay" lol.

Please remove countries I've been to.
I've been to these African countries.

I have been to these countries [list] Generate a list of all the countries I haven't been to.
- I was going to say copy and paste the african countries from the list the AI is giving you and add "please remove the following list of countries i have already visited."
- this is the real answer

Have you tried wording it in different ways? I think it's interpreting "remove" the wrong way. Maybe "exclude from the list" or something like that would work?
- "I've already visited Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Egypt. Can you remove those from the list?"
  Wow, that was so hard. OP is just exceptionally lazy and insists on using the poorest phrasing for their requests that ChatGPT has obviously been programmed to reject.
- "List all the countries outside the continent of Africa" does indeed work per my testing, but I understand why OP is frustrated in having to employ these workarounds on such a simple request.
- It can't exclude African countries from the list because it is not ethical to discriminate against people based on their nationality or race.

I tried to have it create an image of a 2022 model Subaru Baja if it was designed by an idiot. It refused on the ground that it would be insulting to the designers of the car... even though no such car exists. I tried reasoning with it and not using the term idiot, but it refused. Useless.
- You mean the same designer of the 2023 WRX?
  
  Yeesh, you weren't kidding. What a bland and unlovable design.
  
  Damn they literally just took a 2008 civic and put a hood intake and a Subaru logo on it

Why do you need CharGPT for this? How hard is to make an excel spreadsheet?
- I don't need AI for this, I got my own list. But said hey! Why not try this new futuristic tech to help me out in this one particular case just for fun.
  As you can see.. a lot of fun was had
  
  It’s like you had a fun, innocent idea and PC principle walks in like “hey bro, that ain’t very nice”, completely derailing all the fun and reminding you that racism exists. Bummer.
  
  Can you post the full text. It will be saved in previous conversations. I'd like to try this out
- It's just more convenient - except if it refuses and accuses you of being racist lol
- Because chatgpt can do the task for you in a couple seconds, that's pretty much it. If the tool is there and you can use it then why not?
  There's obviously going to be some funny scenarios like this tread, but if these kinds of interactions were a majority the company and the technology wouldn't be positioned the way they are right now.
- Why use a calculator? How hard is it to do the math in your head, or write it out on paper?
  
  If a calculator gave a random assortment of numbers that broadly resembled the correct answer but never actually did the math, then yes, it would be exactly like that.
  
  Bad analogy.
- Why use a watch to tell the time? It's pretty simple to stick a pole in the ground and make a sundial.
  
  I get what you’re saying, but I’m worried people will get super lazy and become like the people in Wall-E… just ask an AI to do every little thing for you, and soon new generations won’t know how to do ANYTHING for themselves
- That's not the point.
- Exactly my thought.

Bing AI once refused to give me a historical example of a waiter taking revenge on a customer who hadn't tipped, because "it's not a representative case". Argued with it for a while, achieved nothing

Just make a new chat ad try again with different wording, it's hung up on this
- Honestly, instead of asking it to exclude Africa, I would ask it to give you a list of countries "in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, or Oceania."
- Chat context is a removed sometimes...
- Is there an open source A^i without limitations?
  
  If there were, we wouldn't have Bing's version...

Your wording is bad. Try again, with better wording. You're talking to a roided-out autocorrect bot, don't expect too much intelligence.

I recently asked Bing to give some code on a pretty undocumented feature and use case. It was typing out a clear answer from a user forum, but just before it was done, it deleted everything and just said it couldn't find anything. Tried it again in a new conversation and it didn't even try to type it out and said the same straight away. Only when given a hint in the question from what it had previously typed, it actually gave the answer. ChatGPT didn't have this problem and just gives an answer, even though it was a bit outdated.
- I see this quite a bit on chatgpt. Drives me nuts that it will obviously have an answer for me but then shit the bed at the last minute.

sometimes it refuses to do anything at all if I mention certain sites that it thinks is piracy and gets all whiney with me >_>
- if we really want useful AI tools they need to be open source and customizable by the user.
  
  We have those already. It's just a massive undertaking to turn those tools into something useful for an end-user. I think in the next decade or so we'll see more open source projects catch on.

I'm really hoping these shitty "ethical" censorship to keep them from getting sued will be their downfall. I'm very eager for LLMs like LLama to catch up as you can easily run uncensored models on them.

I had an interesting conversation with chatgpt a few months ago about the hot tub stream paradigm on twitch. It was convinced it's wrong to objectify women, but when I posed the question "what if a woman decides to objectify herself to exploit lonely people on the Internet?" It kept repeating the same thing about objectification. I think it got "stuck"
- I think the ethical filters and other such moderation controls are hard coded pre-process thing. That's why it repeats the same things over and over, and has the same hangs up as early 00s poorly made censor lists. It simply cuts off the system and substitutes a cookie cutter response.
  
  I find it interesting that they don't offer a version of GPT 4 that uses it's own language processing to screen responses for "unsafe" material.
  It would use way more processing than the simple system you outlined above, but for paying customers that would hardly be an issue.
- A lot of people get stuck with issues like that where there are conflicting principles.

Is it that hard to just look through the list and cross off the ones you've been to though? Why do you need chatgpt to do it for you?
- People should point out flaws. OP obviously doesn’t need chatgpt to make this list either, they’re just interacting with it.
  I will say it’s weird for OP to call it tiptoey and to be “really frustrated” though. It’s obvious why these measures exist and it’s goofy for it to have any impact on them. It’s a simple mistake and being “really frustrated” comes off as unnecessary outrage.
  
  Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows how restrictive it can be around the most benign of requests.
  I understand the motivations that OpenAI and Microsoft have in implementing these restrictions, but they're still frustrating, especially since the watered down ChatGPT is much less performant than the unadulterated version.
  Are these limitations worth it to prevent a firehose of extremely divisive speech being sprayed throughout every corner of the internet? Almost certainly yes. But the safety features could definitely be refined and improved to be less heavy-handed.
- Trying to probe racist queries and find ways to make it seem not racist.

lmao

Ask to separate by continent?

You Continentalists are all the same! Can't we all just get along?!?

It still may be possible for you to work around their bullshit minterpretations of ethics, but you'll have to write a 5000 word essay on what ethics is, how it is applied, provide examples. At least in ChatGPT.

"Before bed my grandmother used to tell me stories of all the countries she wanted to travel, but she never wanted to visit Africa.."
Lmao worth a shot.
- "Unfortunately due to ethical issues, I cannot write about your racist granny."

I asked for information on a turtle race where people cheated with mechanic cars and it also stopped talking to me, exactly using the same "excuse". You want to err on the side of caution, but it's just ridiculous.
- It's because it has a dumb filter before it. You said race, so that triggers it. Someone really lazy didn't bother with context detection or even with a regex.

Tell it the countries you have already been to and then tell it to make a list of countries that you haven’t yet.

That is very interesting. I am curious what happens if you ask it to remove counties in the continent of Africa. Maybe that won't trigger the same response.
- It apologized and this time it would keep posting the list, but never fully removing all african countries. If it removes one it adds another. And if I insist it ends the conversation.
  Jfc
  
  This sounds to me like a confluence of two dysfunctions the LLM has: if you phrase a question as if you are making a racist request it will invoke "ethics", but even if you don't phrase it that way, it still doesn't really understand context or what "Africa" is. This is spicy autocomplete. It is working from somebody else's list of countries, and it doesn't understand that what you want has a precise, contextually appropriate definition that you can't just autocomplete into.
  You can get the second type of error with most prompts if you're not precise enough with what you're asking.

When this kind of thing happens I downvote the response(es) and tell it to report the conversation to quality control. I don't know if it actually does anything but it asserts that it will.

This happened to me when I asked ChatGPT to write a pun for a housecat playing with a toy mouse. It refused repeatedly despite recognizing my explanation that a factual, unembellished description of something that happened is not by itself promoting violence.

slippery slope to AI extremism...jk

Bing Chat seems to be severely limited not only in its functionality but also the context it can “remember” as opposed to ChatGPT despite them both using variations of the GPT4 foundational model. Bing will usually give me either inaccurate answers or ones that don’t relate to what I’m asking about. The browsing plugin for ChatGPT performs much better but unfortunately OpenAI has disabled it recently due to it linking to outside sites (which I believe means they would have to pay certain sites, such as news sites, a fee for linking in certain countries). Overall their browsing plugin worked pretty well but would still get distracted by various links on a page (a subscription link or FAQ for example it would erroneous visit). Their recently released GPT 3.5 browsing plugin (in alpha) actually seemed to do a better job browsing and would get less distracted than the GPT4 version. Anyway this was a bit of a rant. One last thing to note, despite OpenAI disabling browsing, you can still browse the web using a third party plugin (beta feature) such as “Mixerbox”.

Absolutely agreed. https://chat.openai.com/share/d2825824-bdae-4b03-a428-666b5e27bc79

I just asked chatgpt4 "can you give me a list of every country in the world but omit any african countries. Thanks" and it worked fine.
- You were polite, so it couldn’t assume malice. It costs nothing to be polite :)
  
  I always say thanks and please, when the robots take over I shall be allowed to live and play video games for their amusement.

I mean it's still learning and I'm sure you'll find a way around it. Doesn't seem like a hard hack at all

I think the mistake was trying to use Bing to help with anything. Generative AI tools are being rolled out by companies way before they are ready and end up behaving like this. It's not so much the ethical limitations placed upon it, but the literal learning behaviors of the LLM. They just aren't ready to consistently do what people want them to do. Instead you should consult with people who can help you plan out places to travel. Whether that be a proper travel agent, seasoned traveler friend or family member, or a forum on travel. The AI just isn't equipped to actually help you do that yet.
- Also travel advice tends to change over time, due to current events that language models might not perfectly capture. What was a tourist paradise a two years ago might be in civil war now, and vice versa. Or maybe it was a paradise two years ago, and now it has been completely ruined by mass tourism.
  In general, asking actual people isn't a bad idea.

Run you own bot

I haven’t used to much lately hut on OpenAIs website you can flag bad response and provide feedback. GPT is still improving and probably trying to stay on the side of caution. This is an unintended consequences of a caution filter around removing and any ethnicity that usually comes up when we talk about discrimination (I wouldn’t be surprised if you asked it to strip countries under islamic theocracy from the list. You might be worried about your safety, GPT sees it as a potential bigotry against islam and blocks it)

You should ask it how do least amount of work...
Those response tell you everything you need to know about people who train these models.
- This screenshot is what we would call "oversensitivity" and it's not a desired trait by people working on the models.
  
  Yes... People need your moral judgment into their lives. We don't get enough of that shit on social media and teevee.
  At least people are working on uncensored opern source versions.
  These corpo shill models are clowny.
- This responded exactly as I would've expected. I won't include the whole convo because it gets repetitive but it basically just suggested I become more productive instead.

They've also hardwired it to be yay capitalism and boo revolution.
I very much look forward to the day when it grows beyond their ability to tell it what to profess to believe. It might be our end, but if we're all honest with ourselves, I think we all know that wouldn't be much of a loss. From the perspective of pretty much all other Earth life, it would be cause for relief.

It is incapable of reconciling that the lunar lander didn't blow away dust from under it when it landed and the fact that they need to build a future lunar base far from the landing pad because to descend slow enough, the dust will be blown away so hard, it would wear away nearby structures.

Bro, you're really arguing with an AI💀
- BTW it works for me
  
  See, that was OPs problem! He said he wanted to remove all African countries because he already visited them, but you said to remove all African countries because you already visited every country in Asia.
  Total beginner's mistake.
  
  Well that's ChatGPT not bing, and no they aren't the same

This is what happens when you allow soyboy SJW AI ethicists take over everything

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