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points by nostrademons 8 hours ago | 0 comments
I was there for a couple Google Suggest code yellows around naughty or racist suggestions and it's basically an email going out that's like "The Chinese government is making us remove offensive suggestions from Suggest. We need any native Chinese speakers here Saturday to come up with a list of anything that might be considered offensive. Pizza and swag will be provided." Or it's reactive to PR flaps: "[why are black] autocompletes to [...people so dumb]. Can we please block this suggestion?"

The concern with features like these is that the suggestions are considered to be corporate speech that the company is endorsing, and so it can be held liable for any that break relevant laws. Internet companies are generally considered common carriers when they're just passing around stuff other people write, but when they are generating their own content through machine-learning algorithms they are held to be the actual responsible party.

I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits and criminal prosecution against LLMs so far, though it probably helps that the current U.S. president is a combative asshole that prides himself on how much he can offend every group under the sun.

[–] zahlman 30 minutes ago
> I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits and criminal prosecution against LLMs so far

The LLMs are very obviously trained in such a way that they go along with the user's preferred language when a preference is indicated (unless it would cross certain Overton lines), and default to very "safe" language. This is evident if you try getting assistance with tasks involving creating a blacklist (which they will call a "blocklist" or "denylist"[1] unless you say "blacklist" first).

[1]: Amusingly, my Firefox red-squiggle system doesn't think these are words.