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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

If you click through to the mirror from the /r/livestreamfail page, the clip actually comes across (to me) as making fun of the people who make those kinds of jokes.

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I saw it as a joke about an 80s/90s comedian being dropped into the 21st century and bombing a set trying to use old material. It's not a bad premise for a joke and could probably even work IRL if you polish it up. It's too bad they mentioned the T-word though, I guess you're not allowed to say that anymore even in passing.

Go watch Eddie Murphy's older standup. It's mostly still funny, but there are definitely jokes that would be booed nowadays. I'm okay with that though, because those jokes should have been booed back then honestly.

Would hate to hurt the feelings of the mob, and you know how important their feelings are.

Increasingly less each time something like this happens.

I agree, but it’s ambiguous enough to be poor taste and feel uncomfortable. My first instinct is that Twitch is overreacting, but I can see why they need to be pretty draconian to avoid endless boundary-pushing from jerks.

Artists are what we call the people who push against the boundaries of majority group-speak and government mandated thinking.

Intent matters, and there are a lot of people who would say the exact words that the AI said, not with the intention to provoke thought but with the intention to normalize hate. A temporary ban while there is ambiguity about the intent is not unreasonable. But Twitch should be criticized if it persists in the ban after it discovers, as it should have by now, that it was not the intention of this channel's creators, and that the channel's creators are working in good faith to prevent anything that could be construed as normalizing hate in the future.

> say the exact words that the AI said, not with the intention to provoke thought but with the intention to normalize hate

The "but nobody is laughing" part would run counter to this. The premise of the whole joke is that the referenced jokes aren't funny.

Yeah, but it’s that weird “I was only kidding, can’t you take a joke” space. Like everyone agrees that shouting racial slurs is bad behavior, but does the characterization change if you then say “see, nobody approved”?

And it's not far from the "can't you take a joke" space to the "I'm making fun of how woke the audience has become" space. And heaven knows there's plenty of training data on the web to train an AI to mimic and normalize the latter!

You're not wrong, but I don't think Twitch considers art a factor in deciding what they want on-platform. Their actions communicate that the platform is meant for game grinding, light entertainment, and softcore porn.

> Artists are what we call the people who push against the boundaries of majority group-speak and government mandated thinking.

By that reductively absurd measure, Earl Butz is an artist. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Scandals_and_resigna...

So the homeless guy yelling racial slurs at non-white drivers every day on my way to work is an artist? I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.

Which is cool and all, great for a democracy etc, but it gets people killed as well if you cross the line with the wrong people [0].

I mean killing is wrong, but so is being a dick.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

> I mean killing is wrong, but so is being a dick.

I don't really understand the point you're making. Killing is orders of magnitude more wrong thank "being a dick" (meaning: making an offsensive or bad joke). I'm sure you agree, so I don't see what's the goal of this comparison.

And I think that using Charlie Hebdo in this context is a bad taste. Saying "see, it got people killed, so they were doing something wrong" is basically acknowledging that terrorism works. People that died in Charlie Hebdo did nothing to deserve this.

It's wild what a difference 8 years makes. I remember at the time of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, it was universally condemned across the political spectrum as an attack on journalism and freedom of speech. Only those on the fringes of the political spectrum would have even implied that the cartoonists were remotely at fault.

I'd be very curious how widespread your opinion is these days now that support of artistic censorship has become much more mainstream.

That's ridiculous. The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack is 100% the fault of the terrorists who carried out the attack. They are the only ones who got people killed. The victims did not get anyone killed. Saying or publishing something that someone else finds offensive is not in the same category as violence. It cannot be meaningfully compared. Any violence is infinitely worse than even the most offensive speech.

Art doesn’t kill people, killers do.

Surprised this has to be said.

Twitch has absolutely no problem with boundary pushing. The ridiculous hot tub streaming drama and the thousands of examples of Twitch preying on children with soft core porn should make that obvious enough.

The problem with Twitch isn’t boundaries, but that they can’t have the wrong people pushing boundaries if you know what I mean.

My stand with most (not all) things like this is that intent matters; there are a lot of things (especially with jokes/comedy) where nuance and discernment are key.

I disagree with your draconian approach (but I understand where it’s coming from) because I do not think that issues like these should be just swept under the rug.

> intent matters

Ironically, machines autogenerating Seinfeld-like scripts literally cannot have intent.

We can go a step back to the intent of the creators of the system. I assume the creators did not intend to auto-generate distasteful and/or bigoted jokes. But it's Seinfeld-like. And it seems if it's supposed to generate bad jokes eventually it'll make some mean jokes.

It's something of an interesting thought experiment about intent vs. effect with publication of speech. All effect, no intent.

Prima facie, I can see the logic in treating the operator of the AI legally/socially responsible in the same way as if they had published the material themselves. If you unleash a bot that e.g. goes around writing defamatory book reviews, you should be liable for defamation. But I am not sure.

This topic has existed forever. One way society deals with it is the concept of negligence: someone can be responsible for bad outcomes even if they did not intend to create the outcome.

We treat negligence differently from malice in both criminal and civil contexts, and even within negligence there are gradations about whether or not a reasonable person would have foreseen the outcome.

I think LLMs slot into that model just fine.

> My stand with most (not all) things like this is that intent matters

Really curious how this applies to infinite, AI generated, content without oversight.

Like, what is the “intent” in this Seinfeld example. Can an LLM have “intent”?

A LLM can’t have an intent any more than a car or a bomb or a hammer can.

It’s the intent of the LLM instructor/creator that matters for things like mens rea. And in the case of “no oversight”, that just sounds like typical negligence, like leaving a car in neutral when parking on a hill.

It's here, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxcouuH3u0 Pet peeve of mine is when 20 sources report on something without the original material.

Not anymore: "This video has been removed for violating YouTube's policy on hate speech. Learn more about combating hate speech in your country."

The topic is taboo. I cannot be freely discussed on these platforms regardless of the position taken.

Yeah that's the so called "chilling effect" of these rules.

With the irony being that this joke predicted its own fate. "No one is laughing and you're all gone" shortly before it's #CANCELLED.

Is it also a "chilling effect" that you shouldn't call a black person the N word? Doesn't seem to have chilled anything in rap

It certainly has downstream chilling effects. The lingo around how to describe minority groups is fraught with landmines that often lead to avoiding discussion in general. Growing up in the 90's I remember trying to learn the correct terms for Native Americans, people of color, etc, and for many years I believed mistakenly that some terms were taboo when they weren't (I thought it was rude to refer to someone as "Mexican", for example) and to this day I am still hesitant on some things; is using "Black" as a caucasian offensive in some contexts, wait what's the correct term for the indigenous peoples of the arctic North America, etc.

So when time comes that we might discuss a subject that touches on these groups, I generally tend to avoid it. I think I know the right term, but on the 5% chance I say something offensive then it's a huge negative outcome for me. No I'm not going to accidentally say the n-word, but sometimes it's easier to avoid conversation on the topic if I'm in a context where I may stick my foot in my mouth.

I regularly see clips of very popular Twitch streamers being openly sexist, racist, and abusive. I'm curious why a single mention of a taboo topic on an AI-generated channel warranted such a severe response.

It's an open secret that very popular Twitch streamers get at best a slap on the wrist for things that get other people permabanned.

Few platforms have impartial moderation, but Twitch is very blatant about it.

Twitch bans are highly inconsistent.

The probability banning would cause a decrease in revenue (ad-viewing users not on the site if banned creator not on the site) has to be weighed against the probability not-banning would cause a decrease in revenue (advertisers not on the site if banned creator is on the site). It's all very advanced mathematics, far too difficult for the common man to understand.

Oh, uh, I mean.... "ethics". And "morals". And "terms of service". Yeah, thats it.

> Twitch bans are highly inconsistent.

Exactly. Consistency and fairness are expensive, so none of the platforms actually do it.

Which probably isn't a good strategy to handle taboo topics long-term.

It's the naive approach. The same approach that gets Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer banned even though they were very egalitarian for the time.

I'm substantially more worried about returning to a society with openly enforced taboos.

I thought we had left that in the past century, but I was clearly too optimistic.

When did it stop...

The trick is to not have taboo topics.

No, I'm sure if we ignore the problem long enough it will go away eventually.

Sure it is, it's been successfully used to oppress people for ages.

The topic isn't taboo, but making fun of people is. Be nice to other people and suddenly you don't get canceled or whatever you're afraid will happen.

I think there are lots of people for whom the present cultural climate permits making fun of. I see a lot of standup in New York and there are some very specific, unspoken rules about who's allowed to make fun of who, and for what.

There are entire subreddits dedicated to making fun of certain types of people, and the prevailing opinion on reddit is that they deserve it because they are Bad.

Same as it ever was. What is acceptable to make fun of and what is not is constantly shifting with the times. What seems more constant is people being upset that what was once acceptable is now frowned upon, and the friction that causes them.

There's this thing in comedy called "satire" you may be surprised to learn about.

The entire point is that basic discussions are twisted into being attacks on people because they are too sensitive.

Uh, I'm pretty sure making fun of people isn't taboo.

Go watch the clip.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I don't see how including a comment that the offensive jokes aren't funny make them less offensive.

As if anything is innocuous if couched like "Here are some jokes I would tell except they aren't funny: (a series of offensive jokes)"

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