Microsoft and others don’t want to facilitate that. I think it’s a reasonable concern. From a public policy perspective having millions of people who can instantly produce reams of racist abuse to swamp online fora is a problem, even if you believe in free speech. It potentially changes the power dynamic in favour of a racist minority to dominate public discourse.
Social proof and social learning have powerful effects on behaviour. LLMs are great, but used at scale they will have downsides too.
I kinda think when (not if) this happens it's going to be quickly drowned in all sorts of other AI generated garbage. In fact, we will probably render internet news useless pretty sure without a proper trust / source identification system.
I really think this will be the ultimate use case of blockchain tech/crypto.
You nearly always just see dog whistles, whataboutism, “Just Asking Questions”, “I’m not a racist but…”, fake stats, “racism is free speech”, etc. in fact, there’s quite a lot of that in this very section.
The question really is not “why does the model prevent sensitive topics”. The question is “why does hacker news get suddenly flooded with people who are ‘concerned’ about letting models be racist every single time models are discussed?”
I would suggest to you that there’s already loads of bots here.
Queries powered by Microsoft servers will be filtered.
Similarly, businesses are free to create their downloadable models however they so choose, and you are free to not use that model, preferring another one instead.
Frankly, it says a lot about the commenters here that the very first thing they test and judge a model on is whether or not they can force models to perform sensitive results.
What about pen companies? If somebody buys a Bic pen and writes a racist or hate-speech filled letter to somebody, should Bic be required to design a pen that censors or restricts hate speech? What's the underlying principle behind expecting a company to re-engineer their product to prevent any misuse?
I think most people agree that basic safety rails are desirable, such as child-resistant lids on medicine bottles, or guards on razor blades, but who's opinion is most relevant when it comes to where to draw the line?
A real-world case might be Plex. How much responsiblity does Plex have to ensure that users aren't using it to self-host pirated material? or CSAM? With engineering effort they could pretty easily collect data on everything everybody is watching, including fingerprinting and stuff. Should they be expected or required to do that?
So what? Seriously, so what?
Look, you can open Word on your system and type all sorts of racist stuff. Should Word auto-detect that (maybe with the help of AI) and refuse to accept your input? I don't think many people would find that to be a good idea.
Another point: Individual users don't affect the knowledge base. LLMs are not like Tay, dynamically integrating user input. An LLM like ChatGPT may adapt within a particular conversation, but that affects literally no one but you.
I didn't want to know that. I did not want to know that.
You jest but please don't give any Microsoft employees gleaning this thread any great ideas to show off in their next product meeting.
The companies that make and operate these systems - like most companies - are more interested in avoiding PR problems than avoiding harm to humans. This is just one somewhat humorous example of that general policy.
When filters are removed, one of the first things people do to the bots is make them racists. Time and time again. It happens every time.