M-x spook maybe needs a bit of an update.
Cisgender puberty blockers DEI woke gay homosexual California save transgender children Estradiol fascism Critical Race Theory liberal China radical leftism
Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#62I have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
"We" don't necessarily want censorship. But companies who own the models don't want another Microsoft Tay.
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#63I have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
> why do we want to then censor LLMs differently?
If I make a word processor, it doesn't need any stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict. It's just a word processor.
But if I make an LLM, and you prompt it to tell you about the Israel/Palestine conflict? The output will be deeply political, and if it refuses to answer that will also be political
The technology industry does not know what to do because unlike industries like journalism and publishing who are used to engaging with politics, a lot of norms, power structures and people in tech think we're still in the 1990s making word processors, no politics here.
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#64I have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
Microsoft Tay:
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#65I have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
In a broader sense censorship is a built in and from a user perspective, a desirable feature for most internet social networks ...
Almost every "everything goes" type forum becomes undesirable to almost everyone for a variety of reasons.
Users might complain about it, but they also don't want "no censorship" even if that's what they say.
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#66I’m somewhat “rude” in my code comments and was tripped up by this last month… took me a while to figure out while on that specific file autocomplete would stop working https://bsky.app/profile/giorgio.azzinna.ro/post/3lecq3v5gts... Not to mention, there’s apparently some research saying code with swear words has higher quality, so if AI causes some decline there, we now know why it is https://www.reddit.com/r/progra…
prompt engineering hack: ask the LLM to swear a bit first before it writes a function for you.
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#67I have a simple question. If censorship is considered evil regarding the written word and communications between humans, why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? It is either counterintuitive or simply a false concept we should abandon. Perhaps it is more about training, similar to how children are 'monsters' and need to be socialized/tamed.
> why do we want to then censor LLMs differently? Because of the obvious PR implications of having a program one's company wrote spewing controversial takes. That's what it boils down to - and it's entirely reasonable. Personally, I wish these things could have a configurable censorship setting. Everyone has different things that get under their skin, after all (and this would satisfy both the pro-censor and pro-unce…
> obvious PR implications
That's the right answer. And it's not like this is a potential risk that is only being theorized about. Microsoft already has a very hands-on experience with disasters of this exact nature:
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#68Seems to work again. But how does this happen in the first place. How could someone possibly have thought "hey I have an idea, let's put in a list of english words and just silently stop working if we have see even one of them in a substring". And people in this meeting would nod and say "yeah that sounds like an easy safety fix, let's do that". This just feels odd. This isn't a piece of forum software written by a 14 year old this is a company worth billions and filled with smart people.
Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#69Re: Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023)
#70This is really interesting. We have a company that claims to have an AI that can reason about text and that same company uses an old school hard coded censorship list. When a company doesn't use their own products, it usually tells you the product isn't up to the task.
Your strawmaning MS: pointing out a place where they don’t use their products doesn’t "prove" they don’t use it at all. They very probably use it somewhere else, and arbitrate that this particular functionality would be better served by "old school hard coded list", which also a very valable choice in many casses