And why is my computer not allowed to be racist if I instruct it to be racist?
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.