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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> LLMs can only learn from the data that we give them - if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic.

The exact same thing is true of humans as well.

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> > LLMs can only learn from the data that we give them - if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic.

> The exact same thing is true of humans as well.

Humans are continuously learning from things not intentionally provided to them by other humans; that's pretty much an inevitable consequence of the manner in which human minds are embodied.

When I said "the same thing is true of humans", I was referring specifically to "if we feed in Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion then its output is going to be racist and anti-semetic." If you take a human and indoctrinate them on MK and PEZ to the exclusion of all else, their I/O behavior will almost certainly end up presenting as racist and anti-semetic.

That's just absolutely untrue, humans are entirely capable of reading critically without internalizing. There are tons of liberal-minded Lovecraft fans, even though nearly all of his work is grounded in varying degrees of xenophobia.

Only because they have also been exposed to contrary points of view. If you actively indoctrinate a human into a point of view, they are very likely to maintain that point of view no matter how odious it is. If you train an LLM on odious input it will produce odious output, just like humans. I really see no substantive difference.

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