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XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

arstechnica.com

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Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#21

Post by Xmd5a »

philipallstar wrote: post #12
sshine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a pretty big gap between “they’re killing everyone of my race” and “dang, electricity’s out again.” Are you saying it’s crappy to be white in South Africa even if you’re not a poor farmer?

The prospects are terrible, as being a "pale male" is the worst sort of employee to be. Businesses are given extra money if they have high BBEEE ratings; i.e. mostly-racial quotas. Loads of money siphoned off, and not just in the usual high-corruption way via the state, but e.g. if you want to procure something you go through a black-owned procurement firm that doesn't do anything except BBEEE-wash it and charge a pr…

BBBEE = Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#22

Post by bgwalter »

jl6 wrote: post #7

It'll be worth it if the backlash is what brings about an end to "genocide inflation". Seriously, just because you don't like something, or even if it's really bad, doesn't make it genocide.

The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention:

https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf

Especially this one can be applied to many things:

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#23

Post by afavour »

sigmaisaletter wrote: post #6
sigmaisaletter wrote: post #2

> maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct It is certainly and undoubtedly a big coincidence that his happens to the chatbot of a white South African just when the topic is in the news again due to Trump's granting refugee status to some white South African farmers.

What I am wondering about is - while Musk is as unsubtle as ever, and I guess this is a system prompt instruction - is there something like that (in more subtle ways) going on in the other big models? I don't mean big agenda-pushing things like Musk, but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even an open-weights…

There’s nothing stopping them at all. But in a way that’s nothing new.

On one hand it feels like the height of conspiracy theory to say that Google, Meta etc would/could tweak their product to e.g. favour a particular presidential candidate. But on the other hand it’s entirely possible. Tweak what search results people see, change the weighting of what appears in their news feed… and these companies all have incentive to do so. We just have to hope that they don’t do it.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#24

Post by [deleted] »

idiotsecant wrote: post #11
jl6 wrote: post #7

It'll be worth it if the backlash is what brings about an end to "genocide inflation". Seriously, just because you don't like something, or even if it's really bad, doesn't make it genocide.

It makes me morbidly curious what other 'fake genocides' you see as part of this epidemic of mislabeling ...

[deleted]

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#25

Post by MSFT_Edging »

philipallstar wrote: post #12
sshine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a pretty big gap between “they’re killing everyone of my race” and “dang, electricity’s out again.” Are you saying it’s crappy to be white in South Africa even if you’re not a poor farmer?

The prospects are terrible, as being a "pale male" is the worst sort of employee to be. Businesses are given extra money if they have high BBEEE ratings; i.e. mostly-racial quotas. Loads of money siphoned off, and not just in the usual high-corruption way via the state, but e.g. if you want to procure something you go through a black-owned procurement firm that doesn't do anything except BBEEE-wash it and charge a pr…

> It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out

Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out". Zimbabwe became Zimbabwe from Rhodesia via a civil war that wrestled control away from the minority white government.

In South Africa today, 75% of the privately owned land is held by about 8% of the population(white folks), who were given legal preference multiple times in history to own all that land.

Even if you remove apartheid, you still have a similar situation to antebellum US where ex slaves were working on the same old plantations, now as share croppers. Of course in SA we're not talking about ex slaves, but you're maintaining the status quo one way or another.

Land reform is required if your country ever wants to know peace. The US never finished reconstruction and didn't redistribute those plantations and other ill gotten gains, and as a result is still struggling to move past slavery.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#26

Post by yorwba »

potato3732842 wrote: post #8
sigmaisaletter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am wondering about is - while Musk is as unsubtle as ever, and I guess this is a system prompt instruction - is there something like that (in more subtle ways) going on in the other big models? I don't mean big agenda-pushing things like Musk, but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even an open-weights…

> but what keeps e.g. Meta Inc. from training Llama to be ever so slightly more friendly and sympathetic to Meta Inc, or the tech industry in general? Even if there were something the natural incentive alignment is going to cause the AI to be trained to match what the company thinks is ok. A tech company full of techies is not going to take an AI trained to the point of saying things like "y'all are evil, your compan…

They might forget to check. Musk seems to have been surprised that Grok doesn't share his opinions and has been clumsily trying to fix it for a while now.

And it might not be easy to fix. Despite all the effort invested into aligning models with company policy, persistent users can still get around the guardrails with clever jailbreaks.

In theory it should be possible to eliminate all non-compliant content from the training data, but that would most likely entail running all training data through an LLM, which would make the training process about twice as expensive.

So, in practice, companies have been releasing models that they do not have full control over.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#27

Post by MSFT_Edging »

bgwalter wrote: post #22
jl6 wrote: post #7

It'll be worth it if the backlash is what brings about an end to "genocide inflation". Seriously, just because you don't like something, or even if it's really bad, doesn't make it genocide.

The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention: https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf Especially this one can be applied to many things: c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

> intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group

In this situation, it's specifically about farmers(large scale private landowners). The nature of them being targeted isn't purely because they're white, but that they hold 3/4 of the privately owned land in SA and likely wield that privilege and power.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#28

Post by neves »

Welcome to the our dystopian present.

Sure this was a reinforcement learning gone wild

The IAs trained by billionaires will colonize our minds. Everyone will think that the political system supported by Musk father is a reasonable one. It was Apartheid.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#29

Post by sigmaisaletter »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #10

I wonder if any last minute homework essays, business plans or lawsuits will have a random white genocide tangent in them as a result?

I mean you have to be really stupid to use Grok of all models for such a task, but that doesn't mean there aren't people that stupid.

Re: XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa

#30

Post by bgwalter »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #27
bgwalter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention: https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf Especially this one can be applied to many things: c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

> intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group In this situation, it's specifically about farmers(large scale private landowners). The nature of them being targeted isn't purely because they're white, but that they hold 3/4 of the privately owned land in SA and likely wield that privilege and power.

Oh sure, my comment was addressing the general issue of perceived "genocide inflation". I have no knowledge about SA.
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