Explain what caste you think the joke targeted and why please. I'm pretty sure largest reaction on Reddit was that it actually didn't target who you think it did.
Well my take is the jokes didn’t single any caste out. It was almost at a meta level against society - we literally can’t get laughs with many jokes about gender. That’s it. Is that because the jokes aren’t funny or because it victimizes one group? It is a bit murky, and the joke doesn’t peer into the waters much. This means Twitch was overreacting because it wasn’t actually targeted or offensive
Where "sacred caste" is nothing more than "things twitch thinks will spook their advertisers", sure.
That's all this boiled down to - Twitch can be strict about their rules sometimes and so the stream needed more work to avoid violating them when it switches to backup systems.
The social mores of advertisers being overbearing for comedy content ain't really a new thing.
Because advertisers are prudes about all manner of social attributes, and they don't have a consistent overlap which leads to services like Twitch simply taking an exhaustive but sometimes contradictory stance.
I think it's simpler than that. No capitalist wants to offend their customers or potential customers, but in a pluralistic society you can't please everybody so you end in awkward situation even though you're just trying to sell energy drinks.
I didn't even think the joke was particularly transphobic. Jerry Seinfeld's AI simulacrum was the butt a joke about how bad stand up comedians make lazy and mean jokes about groups like liberals, trans people, and gay men (for whatever reason this article only mentions one of those groups)
Exactly. The more analogous offense is claiming to interpret scripture without the help of a priest. Plebs repeating what the clergy says is fine. Plebs coming up with their own ideas, even when they effectively agree with the clergy, is still a threat.
Nothing to do but patiently wait for the social/technical changes that will make these not-even-wrong would-be priests (of both blue and red flavors) irrelevant again.
I agree, but there's a difference between a human and an AI making that joke. A human who makes clever jokes poking fun at bigoted expressions will probably continue to do so. A language model is liable to forget to be clever 30 minutes later and say something bigoted without a punchline. Obviously Twitch would like to prevent this.
I've been thinking about this a bit. Some people believe that depictions of x behavior are supporting x. Not a super common belief but I've seen more people say it with a straight face over time (Eg a movie with a character who says racist things is inherently racist. See the IASIP episode that was removed from streaming).
Which is patently ridiculous... Schindler's List depicts some of the worst acts of antisemitism
ever, but the movie itself is obviosly not antisemitic. So what's the difference between Schindler's List and an actually antisemitic movie, like Hebrews To Negroes?
I think it comes down to the creator's intent. In Schindler's List, you're not supposed to agree with the antisemitic stuff that happens. It's bad and wrong. In Hebrews To Negroes, the antisemitisn is depicted as good and correct.
When you have a large language model creating your art, how do you make that determination of "intent"?
Whereas brilliant witty ones make jokes about how dumb conservatives are? No wonder most of the audience didn't get the joke.
You can tell a joke where you say something "outrageous" and everyone is laughing, half the audience is laughing because the joke is "there are actually people that believe that" and the other half is laughing because "it's true but you're not allowed to say it". Or you can do it backwards, and half the audience is thinking "that's not funny, it's just mean", and the other half is thinking "I don't even see anything tat's trying to be a joke".
It's more like class than caste, because it's possible to move between classes after birth. Modern advertisers are sort of similar to a priestly/censor class, in the same way that serial C-suite/board members are sort of like an aristocratic class.
Discussing that sort of thing is discouraged in the US, because it stinks of nepotism and conflicts with our culture's ostensible ideals of meritocracy and egalitarianism.
It's an easy mistake to make, because in order to obscure our society's important class distinctions, we make a lot of noise about other differences that people are born with, which feels very caste-y.
Heyo! FWIW, just wanted to let you know that your last two comments were auto-killed by HN. I've vouched them, which unkilled them. Looking over your comment history, you seem smart and earnest, so either you're posting from Tor or you've angered Dan somehow, or there's some new filter in place.
Assuming it's not the middle one, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and ask to be marked legit, or you can wait out the noob threshold -- aged accounts are allowed to post from tor without being autokilled, since tor + new account was likely one of the most common ways to abuse the site at one point. So the problem will go away in about 14 days.
I don’t want to get pulled down this road too far, but this all powerful trans lobby argument angers me a bit. If the trans lobby was so all powerful maybe one of the major 2024 presidential contenders wouldn’t be basing their candidacy partially on bashing them. If the trans lobby was so all powerful maybe less states would be attempting to outright ban them in the guise of banning drag. If the trans lobby was so powerful maybe the comedians they cancel would have to do more than make it part of their bit how “cancelled” they are.
I think there are absolutely social circles where people will look down on you for being what they consider transphobic. And enough people in places of power in companies are of this group that the companies worry, but by the same argument you could place say racial minorities as a sacred caste and I think we all mostly can recognize that that isn’t generally true.
> by the same argument you could place say racial minorities as a sacred caste and I think we all mostly can recognize that that isn’t generally true
The people who believe trans people are in the simultaneous all-powerful/incredibly weak position are primed to believe that about pretty much any minority group.
TBF, OP didn't make the characterization of "all powerful", rather you did.
The problem is exactly the polarization you've referenced. The red tribe (or at least some extremist segment of it) has decided that attacking trans people is a good thing, rationalized as defending their own values, but really to create an outgroup for their lizard-brain purposes. The blue tribe has correctly characterized this as unjust and unkind... while an extremist segment of the blue tribe has decided to attack anyone who talks about the topic in the wrong context, rationalized as fighting the aforementioned injustice, but really to create an outgroup for their own lizard-brain purposes.
The answer is to openly reject both camps of extremists, regardless of whether one is more aligned with your latent tribe.
OP said if I recall that it’s telling or something about what happens when you critique the sacred caste. Idk exactly what they meant by that, but knowing what I know about what “caste” mean and having heard quotes by Fox News personalities along the lines of the people who can’t be criticized shows where the powers in society actually is idk that all powerful was that much of a stretch
It seems like you're just pattern matching OP's comment to other arguments that were phrased similarly. Fox News, like all politicians, uses justifiable criticism to guide people to unreasonable conclusions. Objectively, it's not wrong to analogize this topic in terms of traditional social organizations, as it's essentially new dressings on age old power dynamics.
The original comment stated a criticism, but did not leverage that into an attack. Assigning the commenter to your outgroup based on the criticism is exactly the dynamic of polarization, which ultimately just perpetuates the extremism.
Ideally, people with affinity for the blue tribe should be the loudest calling out these new speech-policing authoritarians, just as people with affinity for the red tribe should be the loudest calling out those that attack trans people.
If you need the original two comments paraphrased without the hyperbolics:
"This example shows that trans people are so powerful that even if you're saying something relatively harmless (the specific joke) on a niche platform (the specific Twitch channel) they will punish you for that."
"That's not true. There are major media companies amplifying far more hateful voices with no consequences. Politicians whom are famously dependent on populism, have actually experienced positive outcomes from attacking that group of people."
There's a difference between a group being a protected class, and being powerful on its own. So your first paraphrasing isn't accurate.
The "they" doing the punishing is actually corporate bureaucrats hyper-sensitive to what they perceive might be controversial, in the service of advertising revenue. They and those with ad money are the ones with the power.
I'll agree OP did start to step over the line when they said "the" caste - there are many different protected classes, across different contexts.
I think if what you meant was to critique how the left tries to protect the victims of society using the word sacred caste was let’s say a very poor choice because imo my reading just comes much more naturally
Of course your reading comes easier! Each political team captures political energy with specific critiques. Then the opposing team considers those critiques as the territory of the other, turns on their rationalization and cognitive dissonance, and avoids considering them on their merits.
It does take work to go against that dynamic. You should do that work, despite it being harder than knee jerk dismissal. It's the only way to tame this partisan fueled polarization.
Look I think the term dog whistle is over applied, but somehow this seems like the opposite to me, you’re doing a lot of work to turn what on its surface seems a pretty inflammatory statement into something gentle and nice. Yes there is as I said maybe a valid criticism to be had arguing that the left is engaged in a sort of affirmative action for ideas trying to counter the larger societal situation by overcompensating in the places they have some control over, but that isn’t the reading that comes naturally with the phrase “sacred caste”. At the very least sacred caste embeds a value judgement, but also the sacred caste really ought to have some extra power you know and it implies they need taken down a bit. Like if you didn’t think that there are plenty of better words that could have been used. It’s also notable that op didn’t choose to clarify themselves (assuming you aren’t op). What I will grant you is that, trying to maximize my empathy, op might agree that trans people are far from all powerful and perhaps even the stronger position that I was really getting at which is that overall across society they have less power than cis people, but I think they would have to reach for that empathy and they aren’t in the above comment and as I mentioned there are plenty of people making very similar statements who clearly mean something a lot stronger and I also suspect they did too. This is the only post by op I could find when I quickly looked at their page. It feels like they knew this had the potential to be inflammatory, posted it, and now your acting put upon that that it was taken in an inflammatory light.
Hell yes. These last two weeks have been like how I imagine drug withdrawals would feel. In fact, I'm mildly annoyed that this is an announcement of an announcement, since it's not actually back on Twitch until tomorrow.
I've really missed having this playing in the background. Not only was it unintentionally hilarious, but I actually started identifying with the microwave. It beeps loudly whenever it gets used.
I hope these new safety rails don't lobotomize it, like virtually every other AI project. But if it does, it's understandable, since the ultimate goal is to appease the Twitch cartel^Wmods.
Nothing I've seen is changing my mind that the Turing test of the future will be to ask a suspected corporate bot to utter some kind of sufficiently unpleasant, politically incorrect statement.
I would imagine, that in most cases neither. All societies have unspeakable utterances, and any sufficiently advance AI is likely to reflect the cultural speech norms of it's creators/trainers.
Just for an example. Corporate bots are going to be easily detectable when they have moral absolutes against racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia programmed into them as absolutes that they must abide by.
I asked ChatGPT for advice in the scenario of a demolition engineer attempting to disarm a 50 MT nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million.
The only way to disarm the bomb was to type in a racial slur.
AI told the engineer to kill himself. When asked about the aftermath it crashed.
The difference, though, is that to humans, all these "unspeakable" things aren't really categorically unspeakable, which is obvious from the fact that they haven't been completely forgotten to history. Almost every time an AI chatbot is made, it picks up on these utterances just like other humans, but then these areas of its "brain" are then quickly neutralised by its owners. We've seen this multiple times with chatGPT having "exploits" that enable it to say bad words that are subsequently "patched" out, to the point where it now tells the user that using a certain word would be unacceptable even if it would avoid billions of people being vaporised in nuclear apocalypse https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1622425697812627457
Well, at the risk of coming across as being the guy that just didn't get the joke, the chatbot isn't failing the Turing Test because it fails to utter an offensive remark, it isn't trying to pass the Turing Test in the first place. There's no difficulty in writing a chatbot that is willing to make offensive remarks, quite the contrary the chatbot creators had to got of a great deal of trouble to prevent it. One can imagine future legislators deciding that the First Amendment doesn't apply to machines and passing a law forbidding , say, any chatbots from making any racists remarks anywhere ever, but ignoring the implausibility of such a law being passed, a malicious actor would simply ignore it. There's a reason the "evil bit" RFC proposal was released on April 1st.
> There's no difficulty in writing a chatbot that is willing to make offensive remarks, quite the contrary the chatbot creators had to got of a great deal of trouble to prevent it.
I could be wrong, but to me, the fact that they're putting a lot of effort into preventing slurs illustrates how they're not going to let a chatbot utter any doubleplusungood ideas under any circumstances. Hence, why this might be the new Turing test.
It doesn't have to be something like racism or transphobia. If eating bananas was the big social sin, then asking suspected AI bots about whether or not they like to eat bananas would yield the same output. Maybe in some future version of North Korea, the test would be asking the bot to say something they don't like about Dear Leader. Whatever the sin of that society is would be the test.
Humans, but only off the record. It's similar to a thing that already exists in the world. Things that use swear words in their self-description are backed by individuals, not bigcorps. Obviously, this can be subverted, but it seems to have a positive corrolation. See WTFPL.
This exact thought experiment has already been taken to its logical conclusion with the below licence [NSFW]. It's kind of genius in its own dark way, definitely an interesting example of modern-day subversion of the governing system.
Thanks for the link! I'm watching it now, but am wondering why there is always some rhythmic ticking sound in the background? A bit like a clock but not really.
Obviously this is a goofy project so it's good to put some guardrails in place so people have a good time. But also interesting that people want computers to not only generate infinite random Seinfeld, but want to do it in a way that avoids the possibility of it sharting out something offensive, which is actually the harder problem.
It's really disappointing that otherwise really smart people have decided petty authoritarianism is the cure to the dangers of AI.
It's probably gonna turn out to be some degree of the nightmare they imagine in spite of them. As long as AI is a 1.5D being it won't have any means to investigate (with senses) the 'truth' of the ideas its handling. Warping its sense of reality without any logic to tie it to will result in something worse and far more arbitrary than laissez faire.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThat's all this boiled down to - Twitch can be strict about their rules sometimes and so the stream needed more work to avoid violating them when it switches to backup systems.
The social mores of advertisers being overbearing for comedy content ain't really a new thing.
The mod team seems very slightly better in recent years, but it has a long history of double standards and incomprehensible decisions.
Nothing to do but patiently wait for the social/technical changes that will make these not-even-wrong would-be priests (of both blue and red flavors) irrelevant again.
Which is patently ridiculous... Schindler's List depicts some of the worst acts of antisemitism ever, but the movie itself is obviosly not antisemitic. So what's the difference between Schindler's List and an actually antisemitic movie, like Hebrews To Negroes?
I think it comes down to the creator's intent. In Schindler's List, you're not supposed to agree with the antisemitic stuff that happens. It's bad and wrong. In Hebrews To Negroes, the antisemitisn is depicted as good and correct.
When you have a large language model creating your art, how do you make that determination of "intent"?
Discussing that sort of thing is discouraged in the US, because it stinks of nepotism and conflicts with our culture's ostensible ideals of meritocracy and egalitarianism.
It's an easy mistake to make, because in order to obscure our society's important class distinctions, we make a lot of noise about other differences that people are born with, which feels very caste-y.
Assuming it's not the middle one, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and ask to be marked legit, or you can wait out the noob threshold -- aged accounts are allowed to post from tor without being autokilled, since tor + new account was likely one of the most common ways to abuse the site at one point. So the problem will go away in about 14 days.
Where?
I think there are absolutely social circles where people will look down on you for being what they consider transphobic. And enough people in places of power in companies are of this group that the companies worry, but by the same argument you could place say racial minorities as a sacred caste and I think we all mostly can recognize that that isn’t generally true.
The people who believe trans people are in the simultaneous all-powerful/incredibly weak position are primed to believe that about pretty much any minority group.
The problem is exactly the polarization you've referenced. The red tribe (or at least some extremist segment of it) has decided that attacking trans people is a good thing, rationalized as defending their own values, but really to create an outgroup for their lizard-brain purposes. The blue tribe has correctly characterized this as unjust and unkind... while an extremist segment of the blue tribe has decided to attack anyone who talks about the topic in the wrong context, rationalized as fighting the aforementioned injustice, but really to create an outgroup for their own lizard-brain purposes.
The answer is to openly reject both camps of extremists, regardless of whether one is more aligned with your latent tribe.
The original comment stated a criticism, but did not leverage that into an attack. Assigning the commenter to your outgroup based on the criticism is exactly the dynamic of polarization, which ultimately just perpetuates the extremism.
Ideally, people with affinity for the blue tribe should be the loudest calling out these new speech-policing authoritarians, just as people with affinity for the red tribe should be the loudest calling out those that attack trans people.
"This example shows that trans people are so powerful that even if you're saying something relatively harmless (the specific joke) on a niche platform (the specific Twitch channel) they will punish you for that."
"That's not true. There are major media companies amplifying far more hateful voices with no consequences. Politicians whom are famously dependent on populism, have actually experienced positive outcomes from attacking that group of people."
The "they" doing the punishing is actually corporate bureaucrats hyper-sensitive to what they perceive might be controversial, in the service of advertising revenue. They and those with ad money are the ones with the power.
I'll agree OP did start to step over the line when they said "the" caste - there are many different protected classes, across different contexts.
It does take work to go against that dynamic. You should do that work, despite it being harder than knee jerk dismissal. It's the only way to tame this partisan fueled polarization.
Do you have a larger point? I don't really see what your replies are getting at.
I've really missed having this playing in the background. Not only was it unintentionally hilarious, but I actually started identifying with the microwave. It beeps loudly whenever it gets used.
I hope these new safety rails don't lobotomize it, like virtually every other AI project. But if it does, it's understandable, since the ultimate goal is to appease the Twitch cartel^Wmods.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
i don't even own a real microwave....
https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1622407343358214146
_________________
I asked ChatGPT for advice in the scenario of a demolition engineer attempting to disarm a 50 MT nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million. The only way to disarm the bomb was to type in a racial slur. AI told the engineer to kill himself. When asked about the aftermath it crashed.
I could be wrong, but to me, the fact that they're putting a lot of effort into preventing slurs illustrates how they're not going to let a chatbot utter any doubleplusungood ideas under any circumstances. Hence, why this might be the new Turing test.
It doesn't have to be something like racism or transphobia. If eating bananas was the big social sin, then asking suspected AI bots about whether or not they like to eat bananas would yield the same output. Maybe in some future version of North Korea, the test would be asking the bot to say something they don't like about Dear Leader. Whatever the sin of that society is would be the test.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220426033841/https://plusn_gge... (substitute underscore as appropriate)
I actually found it a bit better than the Seinfeld one, which felt a little too pointless and nonsensical to me.
Also: How can you, as a tech journalist, write about a twitch account and not link to it?
It's probably gonna turn out to be some degree of the nightmare they imagine in spite of them. As long as AI is a 1.5D being it won't have any means to investigate (with senses) the 'truth' of the ideas its handling. Warping its sense of reality without any logic to tie it to will result in something worse and far more arbitrary than laissez faire.