I try not to link too much external content on this blog as eventually links go dead, and I want this to be a lasting beacon of hope. Also, when you're here I have your attention and that's something that I'm trying to keep. I don't want you to venture out into unknown sites with a bunch of ads, these ad networks can have lots of sketchy code delivered to your device. It can be tempting to click them but sometimes browsers protect us when we don't interact with the ads. Other times there's non-click malware that can be loaded to your device. But that's not the topic of discussion today. I want to discuss censorship as it pertains to AI.
I started with a preamble to basically state I'm linking to this article from a UK publisher, Independent. I'm not here to discuss the validity or usage of this or any publisher, I try to share info regardless of source if I find it valuable. People write most journalism, and most people have an agenda. Understanding that and taking in information with a grain of salt is required at any point in history, but most certainly today. In any case, the article is titled ChatGPT refuses to say one specific name – and people are worried. Here's also the Reddit thread I found this article in r/technology where people are discussing and pondering what this could mean. It's really random, but maybe it'll be explained by someone smarter than I what's happening here.
The issue is that ChatGPT won't say "David Mayer", no matter how you prompt the AI model it just crashes. r/ChatGPT on Reddit is filled with meme's and screenshots like the following with thread after thread of people discussing it at length.
So what are the implications? Well it could be GDPR request to keep personal information out of an AI model that's been very poorly implemented. This is what I mean when I say bugs can be like a puzzle, similar to Sudoku. You have a bunch of pieces that are disconnected and you need to find a pattern in there if you want to solve it. The speculation from this is mostly tinfoil hats, as I guess David Mayer is a Rothschild.
Is it possible a well connected individual pushed his thumb on the scale to have it weigh in his favour? Well certainly, but no evidence exists. This David Mayer thing could just be a bunch of hot air, or it could mean that a well connected individual is providing kickbacks to OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) to keep his name outta their mouth. I've only spent a few minutes going through the speculations of Reddit (as I'm trying to stay off socials) and I won't entertain most of it, but I provide the means for you to look and figure it out for yourself.
Previously, there was an issue with ChatGPT unable to correctly state the number of "r's" in "strawberry", it would always say "2". This isn't anything nefarious, and can be easily explained if you understand the tech. AI makes every word into a matrix of weighted numbers. It has no concept of "strawberry" or "r", it just sees 1's and 0's. So when you ask it to count the "r" it's never seeing that. Your prompt is basically translated to "tell me how many [0.012301] is in [0.01231, 0.5231, 0.1 ,1]" and it might be 1 but there's a lot of transforming going on in the data to determine this. There's also likely some weighted token probabilities as it's based on knobs in the transformer 🤓. So even if it has 80% chance of saying 1, there's probability it can say something else.
So there's a bug in ChatGPT? It's unknown what the implications are and if it was some random name like "John Doe" we might look at this problem a bit differently. But since this is a well connected name of sorts, it leaves a bunch of speculation and wonder. I wonder personally what other words are being filtered by OpenAI in ChatGPT? This opens a bunch of questions to the viability and longevity of this tech if we are already seeing this behaviour. I've read once that if the internet was regulated as ham radio operators are, it would be a very different place. Internet might not have as widely adopted usage as it does today. Any small change we make at the start of a tech can have implications decades later, so it's why some discussion in this new tech is needed today.
I'll end this post with a brief video by a mathematician Youtuber, 3brown1blue, who recently made this 9 minute video giving an overview on how AI (LLM) works. It's a bit technical but it's broken down quite succinctly with fancy graphics. If you have any questions or comments about anything you read on here, just drop me an email or post a comment below. Most of you have access to my other accounts on other platforms, and if I don't know you maybe we can get to know one another at some point. I've put a lot of me out here on this site, and it's for you to find me. Google search awards those who have the most content and the most eyes with more clicks. That's what I'm hoping for putting out this content each day, that more people will click and start to see some of reality as I do. There are lots of similarly minded individuals around the world, but I'd like to get closer to the ones in my locality to start the hard work of designing a decentralized identity platform for all.
Isaac