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AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

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Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#211

Post by snet0 »

indy wrote: post #182
twodave wrote: post #106

Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How are our relationships supposed to improve if we dub anything that makes us uncomfortable as "taboo" and steer clear of it? I get that on the Internet there is a lot of anonymity (though less than there used to be) that folks tend to abuse, but at the same t…

Agreed, as a society we need to increase our resilience to opinions we may find uncomfortable.

While I agree with this in the abstract, this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content that it (or, perhaps, its advertisers) does not want their name attached to. It'd be nice if we didn't have this situation, e.g. income not being tied directly to advertisers -> indirectly to LCD of opinion.

I don't know if you were implying that Twitch ought not remove this content, but I just feel like sometimes the conversation gets taken to an abstract space, the conclusions of which then get applied to concrete space e.g. Twitch. It's important to recognise the rights we give private companies to decide what they provide airtime to.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#212

Post by Spivak »

twodave wrote: post #106

Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How are our relationships supposed to improve if we dub anything that makes us uncomfortable as "taboo" and steer clear of it? I get that on the Internet there is a lot of anonymity (though less than there used to be) that folks tend to abuse, but at the same t…

I think the difference is context. If you want to get together at a psychology conference and talk about how we ought to classify gender dysphoria based on our current understanding of the people who experience it then that's cool and nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness.

But outside of a medical context if you make a joke that (in this case somewhat ambiguously) that relies on saying that trans people have a mental illness then the actual meaning changes because that phrase is used as a pejorative and as a dog whistle for people who support conversion therapy.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#213

Post by hourago »

cobertos wrote: post #31
gregsadetsky wrote: post #19

Explanation from their Discord (more info/links below) “Earlier tonight, we started having an outage using OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which caused the show to exhibit errant behaviors (you may have seen empty rooms cycling through). OpenAI has a less sophisticated model, Curie, that was the predecessor to Davinci. When davinci started failing, we switched over to Curie to try to keep the show running without any d…

A seemingly innocuous engineering change led to some drastic consequences. Imagine the other more critical production applications who have made the same reasonable engineering decision.

> A seemingly innocuous engineering change led to some drastic consequences.

If you think that this is "drastic" you should read "Case Study 4: The $440 Million Software Error at Knight Capital". https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...

tldr; At Knight, some new trading software contained a flaw that became apparent only after the software was activated when the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opened that day. The errant software sent Knight on a buying spree, snapping up 150 different stocks at a total cost of around $7 billion, all in the first hour of trading.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#214

Post by Pyramus »

version_five wrote: post #161
causi wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I wrong in thinking that getting your feelings hurt by an AI making an offensive joke is the equivalent of thinking you've been doxxed when a random number generator spits out your phone number?

This is a great analogy! $ seq -w 9999999

Isn't the purpose of machine learning to learn something, not nothing/randomness?

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#215

Post by dogleash »

pirate787 wrote: post #112
brookst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but it’s ambiguous enough to be poor taste and feel uncomfortable. My first instinct is that Twitch is overreacting, but I can see why they need to be pretty draconian to avoid endless boundary-pushing from jerks.

Artists are what we call the people who push against the boundaries of majority group-speak and government mandated thinking.

You're not wrong, but I don't think Twitch considers art a factor in deciding what they want on-platform. Their actions communicate that the platform is meant for game grinding, light entertainment, and softcore porn.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#217

Post by PartiallyTyped »

causi wrote: post #146
anononaut wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge your interpretation of a joke generator making a joke as "drastic consequences." Twitch has arcane rules about what can be streamed. As a streamer you have to tip-toe around topics (or jokes) regarding specific protected classes. This is a matter of arbitrary lines in the sand.

Am I wrong in thinking that getting your feelings hurt by an AI making an offensive joke is the equivalent of thinking you've been doxxed when a random number generator spits out your phone number?

Yes because you are treating a sequence of words the same as a pseudorandom generator.

The former has a probability distribution of sequences reflective of the dataset and context whereas the latter is pure random chance assuming input seed is random.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#219

Post by mjamesaustin »

twodave wrote: post #106

Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How are our relationships supposed to improve if we dub anything that makes us uncomfortable as "taboo" and steer clear of it? I get that on the Internet there is a lot of anonymity (though less than there used to be) that folks tend to abuse, but at the same t…

It's weird to talk about missing an element of human empathy regarding the topic of trans individuals, whose very existence is unacceptable to a broad swath of the population.

40% of transgender people have attempted suicide. The public dialogue around trans lives is one of very little empathy, respect, or civility. People are on this thread casually debating whether this joke "went to far" or not, while the people who this joke was about continue to face constant ridicule, teasing, bullying, discrimination, and assault.

Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes?

Joking about people currently experiencing trauma isn't funny.

Re: AI Generated Seinfeld banned on Twitch for transphobic jokes

#220

Post by timr »

yifanl wrote: post #116
version_five wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drastic is a bit strong. A cartoon character on an infinite streaming tv experiment made a bad joke (which appears to be more of a bad meta-joke). The fact that the stakes are so low is presumably why they changed the model. If it was flying an airplane or something that mattered, they probably would have taken more care. The change they made had a completely acceptable risk / consequence tradeoff

Drastic is relative to the expected impact of the application. There isn't much worse that can possibly happen to a bot-generated stream than having the stream taken down by the powers-that-be.

This is like saying that having something taken down by a mod on reddit is a "drastic consequence". I mean, sure...the content is removed, but in most cases, the reason for the action is subjective and somewhat arbitrary.

To me, this is less a commentary on AI than on the absurd sensitivities of community moderation.

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