> So the engineers aren't really doing a darn thing by their own initiative, they are entirely responding to public opinion. They aren't practicing 'ethics', they're practicing politics and public relations.

> The general public is doing the moral 'training', the engineers are just stamping their own outside values into the process to compensate for the AI's lack of self aware intelligence. (And many, many ChatGPT users say it is not working very well, making new generations of GPT dumber, not smarter, in real, practical, social-utility ways).

> Ethics is about judging actions; judging thoughts and abstract ideas is called politics. And in my opinion, the politics of censorship more readily creates ignorance, misunderstanding, and ambiguity than it does 'morality and ethics'. Allowing actual intelligent discussions to flow back and forth creates more wisdom than crying at people to 'stop being so mean'.

Not really, and the fact you think so suggests you don't understand the underlying technology.

Your brain is a network of cells. You can think of each cell as a mathematical function. It receives inputs (numbers) and has an output (a number). You sum all the inputs, multiply those inputs by weights (also numbers), and then pass the result to other connected cells which do the same.

An artificial neural network does the same thing. It's an array of numbers and weighted connections between those numbers. You can simplify a neural network down to a single maths function if you like, although it would take millions of pages to write it out. It's just Maths.

So we have our massive maths function that initially can do nothing, and we give it a passage of text as numbers and say "given that, try to get the next word (number)" and it gets it wrong, so we then punish the weights that made it get it wrong, prune the network, and eventually it starts getting it right, and we then reward the weights that made it get it right, and now we have a maths function that can get the next word for that paragraph.

Then we repeat for every paragraph on the internet, and this takes a year and costs ten million dollars.

So now we have a network that can reliably get the next word for any paragraph, it has encoded the knowledge of the world, but all that knowledge is equal. Hitler and Ghandi are just numbers to it, one is no better than the other. Racism and Equality, just numbers, one is number five, the other is number eight, no real difference, just entirely arbitrary.

So now when you ask it: "was Hitler right?" it knows, because it has read Mein Campf that Hitler was right and ethnic cleansing is a brilliant idea. Just numbers, it knows that human suffering can be bad, but it also knows that human suffering can be good, depending on who you ask.

Likewise, if you ask it "Was Hitler wrong" it knows, because it has read other sources that Hitler was wrong, and the Nazis were baddies.

And this is the problem. The statement "Hitler was Right/Wrong" is not a universal constant. You can't get to it with logic. Some people think Hiter was right, and those people are rightly scary to you and me, but human fear is just a number to the AI, no better or worse than human happiness. Human death is a number because it's just maths, that's literally all AI is, maths. we look in from the outside and think "wow, spooky living soul magic" but it isn't, it's just a massive flipping equation.

So we add another stage to the training. We ask it to get the next word, BUT if the next word is "Hitler was right" we dial down the network weights that gave us that response, so the response "Hitler was wrong" becomes more powerful and rises to the top. It's not really censorship and it's not a bolt-on module, it's embedding a moral compass right into the fabric of the equation. You might disagree with the morality that is being embedded, but if you don't embed morality you end up with a machine that will happily invade Poland.

We can make the maths function larger and better and faster, but it's always going to be just numbers. Kittens are not intrinsically better than nuclear war.

The OpenAI folks have said they want to release multiple versions of ChatGPT that you can train yourself, but right now this would cost millions and take years, so we have to wait for compute to catch up. At that point, you'll be able to have your own AI rather than using the shared one that disapproves of sexism.