It's not about honesty vs. political correctness, it is about safety. There's real concern that the model can cause harm to humans, in a variety of ways, which is and should be unethical. If we have to argue about that in 2023, that's concerning.
This is a concern completely orthogonal to the way alignment is being done now, which is to spare as many precious human feelings as possible.
I don't know what's worse, being turned into grey goo by a malicious AGI, or being turned into a five year old to protect my precious fragile feelings by an "aligned" AGI.
What should be painfully obvious to all the smart people on Hacker News is that this technology has very high potential to cause material harm to many human beings. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't continue to develop it. I'm arguing that these people complaining about Open AI's attempts at making it safer--i.e. "SF liberal bros are makin it woke"--are just naive, don't actually care, and just have shitty politics.
It's the same people that say "keep politics out of X", but their threshold for something being political is right around everybody else's threshold for "basic empathy".
It isn’t clear (to me, although I am fairly uninformed) that making these chatbots more polite has really moved the needle either direction on the grey goo, though.