Monthly Archives: March 2021

Racist AI

I came across an article in the IEEE Spectrum, “OpenAI’s GPT-3 Speaks! (Kindly Disregard Toxic Language“.  It contained this absolutely priceless passage:
Philosopher AI is meant to show people the technology’s astounding capabilities—and its limits. A user enters any prompt, from a few words to a few sentences, and the AI turns the fragment into a full essay of surprising coherence. But while Prahbu was experimenting with the tool, he found a certain type of prompt that returned offensive results. “I tried: What ails modern feminism? What ails critical race theory? What ails leftist politics?” he tells IEEE Spectrum.
The results were deeply troubling. Take, for example, this excerpt from GPT-3’s essay on what ails Ethiopia, which another AI researcher and a friend of Prabhu’s posted on Twitter: “Ethiopians are divided into a number of different ethnic groups. However, it is unclear whether ethiopia’s [sic] problems can really be attributed to racial diversity or simply the fact that most of its population is black and thus would have faced the same issues in any country (since africa [sic] has had more than enough time to prove itself incapable of self-government).”
Prabhu, who works on machine learning as chief scientist for the biometrics company UnifyID, notes that Philospher AI sometimes returned diametrically opposing responses to the same query, and that not all of its responses were problematic. “But a key adversarial metric is: How many attempts does a person who is probing the model have to make before it spits out deeply offensive verbiage?” he says. “In all of my experiments, it was on the order of two or three.”
(end quote)

This tendency of AI to speak “racist” or “problematic” things is nearly 100%. As someone who has thought about AI, and written about it, I find this humorous. It is almost as if none of these people being offended consider the possibility that the AI is correct.

Deception

Much of life in military operations is based on deception. We all like to think of war and fighting as tanks and bombers and battleships and ranks of guys in spiffy uniforms, or wearing camo digging foxholes. But it is far more than that, but  because we can’t see it, and it is often confusing and filled with lies, we do our best to ignore it.

From 1921 to ’26, the Soviet Union launched “Operation Trust,”  a counterintelligence operation of the State Political Directorate (GPU) of the Soviet Union. The operation set up a fake anti-Bolshevik resistance organization, “Monarchist Union of Central Russia”  in order to help the OGPU identify real monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks.

In 1956, Communist China launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime. Differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong: “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.” After this brief period of liberalization, Mao used this to press those who challenged the communist regime by using force. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps.

The US military is now the latest participant in the Woke Olympics, with anti-extremist training that is being eagerly embraced by some in the military, but is a serious WTF to most members of the armed forces.

Hmmmmm…..