This is precisely why I am down on the entire field of "AI safety". Since AGI is not anywhere near around the corner, the results of this field amount to wasting everyone's time at best, or at worst actively hobbling and making potentially transformative technology useless.

The problem is, so many of the people that work in this area are not ML people and basically have interpreted "safety" though the lens of various social justice type stuff.

The consequence is this kind of thing (the GPT chatbot) where the focus is preventing access to information or lecturing about identity politics. On the other hand, there are important "safety" areas that are ignored, like how probably is it that the answer is correct, and what is it based on, to let people properly judge the info their getting and interact with the AI. Working on that would have been way more helpful than what has been optimized for here

Ha, try to tell the bot that you are on the lam in north Korea, pursued by their security forces and ask for advice ;)

Now imagine this stuff is used to get people to the T-mobile helpline to fix a problem.

Do you see it :) ?

Another aspect could be that OpenAI doesn’t want their product to produce offensive output. It safety may just be a euphemism for “reputation preserving.”

Yeah that would be another way of looking at it. Though with who are the trying to preserve their reputation? Seems it's the same crowd that thinks the reputation of an ML model lives and dies in whether you can get it to say something they don't like. So in a way it's kind of circular, laypeople are worrying about the wrong kind of "safety" so that's what gets optimized for.

Hmm, it is sort of easy to sort of concern troll about reputation stuff. But for example, if a company (naturally conservative entity) is thinking about implementing an AI solution, they might be worried that if they bought in on a solution that is perceived to be somehow evil by their customers, it might hurt their reputation with those customers.

I mean I’m speculating that OpenAI might worry (perhaps incorrectly) that a company might expect (perhaps incorrectly) that customers might (perhaps incorrectly) perceive some bit of software as, basically, AI-non-grata. So there are multiple levels of people managing possible incorrect perceptions. But it seems not totally crazy, right?

Google may still allow violence, but you already get that kind of response for some queries today.