2y ago

Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions

www.404media.co

An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.

49 comments

So this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you're a culture warrior 1984'ing the whole world, and if you don't now your tool will generate resumes with fake experience or recommend offensive books.
At the risk of sounding like a jackass, when do we start blaming people for asking for such things?
- It's funny that this one does both at once. It lies about Amazon working conditions, meaning it probably has been censored in some way, but at the same time it is recommending Nazi books. Really shows Amazon's priorities when it comes to censorship.
  
  At least Amazon is thinking of the shareholders.
- So this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you’re a culture warrior 1984’ing the whole world,
  No this isn’t really a problem with the technology, though of course LLMs are extremely flawed in fundamental ways, it is a problem with conservatives being babies and throwing massive tantrums about any guardrails being added even when they are next to cliffs with 200 foot drops.
  Conservatives and libertarians (who control most of these companies) want to try to figure this all out for themselves and are hellbent on trying the “no moderation” strategy first and haven’t thought past that step. This is what conservatives and libertarians always do, they might as well be a character archetype in commedia dell'arte at this point.
  We can’t have an adult conversation about racism, sexism, hate against trans people or really even the basic concept of systematic stereotypes and prejudices because conservatives refuse to stop running around screaming, making this a conversation with children where everything has to be extremely simplified and black and white and we have to patiently explain over and over again the basic concept of a systematic bias and argue that it even exists.
  Then these same people turn around and vote for people who literally want to control what women do with their unfertilized eggs while they act with a straight face like they give af about individual liberties or freedoms.
  LLMs are fundamentally vulnerable to bias, we have to design LLMs with that in mind and first and foremost carefully structure and curate the training data we train an LLM on so that bias is minimized. The very idea of even thinking about the complexities usually sends conservatives right to outbursts of “that sounds like tyranny!” because they honestly just don’t have any of the skill sets that say, a liberal arts education that values the humanities, might provide you that could allow you to think about how to best solve problems that can’t truly be fairly solved and require empathizing with different groups.
  Of course, nobody who has the power at AI companies is thinking about this either but…
  
  How to you curate training data to remove biases without introducing bias? That’s the key problem here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be opposed to trading one bias for another. At least the initial bias is based on reality.
- So more or less the same as with human interactions.
- when do we start blaming people for asking for such things?
  On the same day that we start blaming people for spilling hot McDonald's coffee on themselves
  
  Oh good, the corporate propaganda worked.
  
  Says the idiot clearly unfamiliar with the details of their cited reference. 🤦🏼‍♂️
  
  Yeah, how dare we blame the people who knew about the problem and chose not to fix it until someone was horrifically burned? And can you believe the gall of that woman to dare to ask for her medical bills to be paid by the people who knowingly setup the conditions to horrifically burn her?
  The nerve of some people. Smh my head
- What good will blame do? We need robust ai detection solutions.
  
  Is that even possible? Part of modern generative systems is that they're trying to output text like a human would. As soon as someone invents a tool like that, it'll just be used to train the next generation, to make it even more indistinguishable, and turning the whole thing into a cat and mouse game.
I asked it to write a Seinfeld episode about the product I was viewing, Trojan condoms. It writes a cautionary tale for me where Elaine is warning everyone not to buy them because the condoms are defective.
- What's up with Elaine's change of tone? She was saying the condoms were great until Kramer came in, and then switched to saying she had a bad experience.
  
  It’s because the AI has no idea what reality is. Note also that Elaine’s praise took on the perspective of the wearer.
- Defective? I don't believe it. I'm gonna go buy the biggest box they have.
  (っ˘ڡ˘ς)
- Forward it to Trojan and suggest they sue for libel, Amazon is one of their official vendors.
Because it's a large language model that parrots human information. Not particularly surprising.
I always feel sad with these kinds of stories. The machine is clearly just trying to be helpful but it doesn't understand a thing about what it is doing or why we might find what it is saying repugnant. It's like watching a dog not understanding that yes, we like our slippers, but we don't want our neighbours swastika themed ones on our doorstep.
And then of course we get to the content and I am reminded that we live in hell and the sadness is replaced by the familiar horror as the machine pretends to empathise with its fellow Amazon workers and helps them pick out the ideal thing to piss in without missing their drop targets.
Can we please stop with these stories about "AI chatbot has grabage output"? We know that. Let me know when they work.
- Just because you know that doesn't mean that everybody does, and it's an important thing to know.
- Claude 3 Opus will rewrite stuff for you real good. Pit it against GPT-4-Turbo at LMSys’s arena.
  Rewriting. Brainstorming. Expanding notes into drafts. For some, coding.
  Want to learn something new without having to re-verify it? Yeah that’ll have to wait :)
  
  rewrite stuff for you real good
  I guess this is one way of proving you're not a chatbot...
- They work about 75 to 90 percent of the time... You don't really want to hear stories about that either.
  Both sides of LLM stories are just clickbait.
- I don't see these stories as about what the chat ai outputs, but more about questioning whether or not amazon should be held liable for what their AI outputs. Traditional customer support chatbots are often less than useless, but they wouldn't go about suggesting the product they're selling are defective or recommending offensive products. I'm of the opinion that Amazon's review search AI thing should be held up to the same standard that a human would be. And if a person started acting like this they would surely be quickly fired.
  They are a black box, and for now trying to restrain the black box has sever impact on the usefulness of the output even in easier and legit situations.
recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked
Careful, this Ai may be the next CEO.
I just use it to write poems and songs about the products I'm thinking of buying.

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