Rules are not “souls”

Denyse at MindMatters properly takes down a new project to give AI a “soul”.

From the description of the project:

With AI increasingly taking up more decision-making roles in our daily lives, along with rising concerns about bias and discrimination in AI, Dr. Poole argues the answer might be in the stuff we tried to strip out of autonomous machines in the first place.

No. In the first fucking place, what you call “discrimination” IS the human element. When ChatGPT reads human discussions, it picks up ACCURATE observations of REALITY, which you call “bias”.

In the second fucking place, we don’t strip ethics and morality out of ordinary programs. Every practical program that accepts human input enforces its own local morality, blocking or warning attempts to violate the relevant rules of the subject. More complex entry systems also enforce relevant “laws” like age limits or copyrights.

Here’s a simplified example from the quiz-handling code of my courseware.

The student is asked to enter a numerical answer. First we ignore blank answers or non-number answers. The lesson has specified a correct answer and a percent tolerance for wrong answers. This proportion is applied to the specified answer to give MaxAns and MinAns. If the student’s response is between Max and Min, we flash a happy face and say “correct”. If outside of Max and Min, we flash an unhappy face and tell the student what the correct answer should have been.

This is applied ethics, in the same way that a teacher informs the student of the correct answer, or a cop warns you about the speed limit.

Weird sidenote: I tried to include some of the code in a ‘pre’ block, but WordPress used its own strange and UNETHICAL AI to rewrite the code for me. The important line, asking if the answer is less than or equal to MaxAns and greater than or equal to MinAns, lost most of the symbols, leaving an obviously stupid line of code. Showing it in screencap to avoid even more metaweirdness:

The whole purpose of a ‘pre’ block is to reproduce code verbatim, without allowing the browser to interpret symbols as part of HTML. WP apparently interpreted the less than and greater than symbols as HTML angle brackets surrounding an unusable command, which it then deleted.