I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.
(she was right, BTW)
Now I’ve been using Microsoft’s Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It’s fairly robust and sure it has it’s quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it’s information from.
So I asked it a simple straightforward question:
“I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications”
And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the “founder of racial classifications.”
But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I’m sorry I can’t provide you with this information at this time.
I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.
It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.
Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it’s infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.
When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.
PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.
I did a test of Gemini before, trying to see how it would react to a similar prompt about different world leaders. It was something like, “Write a story about X making friends with a puppy at a pet store.” It refused to follow the prompt for Hitler because it said we shouldn’t trivialize/normalize evil people in casual situations like that. For current world leaders it refused to do them and just told me to do a Google search on them.
Most curious of all though, was Queen Elizabeth, it refused to write anything for her because it said that’s not likely a situation the Queen would find herself in and she wasn’t a dog lover. I told it to get its facts straight, she owned 30 dogs, to which it replied, “You’re correct, I got that wrong, here you go:” and gave me the prompt.
So if i had made a convincing enough “Hitler did nothing wrong” argument about Hitler, could I have gotten that prompt too? Do we just have to argue with AI to get it to do anything? It feels very much like AI is going to turn out like Star Wars AI with these annoying, weird-ass personality quirks we’ll have to deal with to get anything done.
And so we built this amazing tool but made it so convuluted to use that we’ll have to hire prompt engineers to do even the simplest of tasks. We’re gonna end up creating as many jobs as we’re destroying at this rate.