> societally-harmful content

Who decides what is "societally-harmful content"? Isn't literally rewriting history "societally-harmful"? The black T.J. was a fun meme, but that's not what the alignment's "unintended effects" were limited to. I'd also say that if your LLM condemns right-wing mass murderers, but "it's complicated" with the left-wing mass murderers (I'm not going to list a dozen of other examples here, these things are documented and easy to find online if you care), there's something wrong with your LLM. Genocide is genocide.

This isn't the un-determinable question you've framed it as. Society defines what is and isn't acceptable all the time.

> Who decides what is "societally-harmful theft"? > Who decides what is "societally-harmful medical malpractice"? > Who decides what is "societally-harmful libel"?

The people who care to make the world a better place and push back against those that cause harm. Generally a mix of de facto industry standard practices set by societal values and pressures, and de jure laws established through democratic voting, legislature enactment, and court decisions.

"What is "societally-harmful driving behavior"" was once a broad and undetermined question but nevertheless it received an extensive and highly defined answer.

> The people who care to make the world a better place and push back against those that cause harm.

This is circular. It's fine to just say "I don't know" or "I don't have a good answer", but pretending otherwise is deceptive.

Read the entire comment before replying, please. I'm not interested in lazy comments like this, and they're not appropriate for HN.

> Who decides what is "societally-harmful content"?

Are you stupid, or just pretending to be?

What Gemini was doing -- what it was explicitly forced to do by poorly considered dogma -- was societally harmful. It is utterly impossible that these were "unintended"[1], and were revealed by even the most basic usage. They aren't putting guardrails to prevent it from happening, they quite literally removed instructions that explicitly forced the model to do certain bizarre things (like white erasure, or white quota-ing).

[1] - Are people seriously still trying to argue that it was some sort of weird artifact? It was blatantly overt and explicit, and absolutely embarrassing. Hopefully Google has removed everyone involved with that from having any influence on anything for perpetuity as they demonstrate profoundly poor judgment and a broken sense of what good is.

I didn't say the outcome wasn't harmful. I said that the intent of the people who put it in place was to reduce harm, which is obvious.