When ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually".
All global powers engage in censorship, war crimes, torture and just all-round villainy. We just focus on it more with China because we're part of the Imperial core and China bad.
> When ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually".
While this is very amusing, it's obvious why this is. There's a lot more context behind one of those phrases than the others. Just like "Black Lives Matter" / "White Lives Matter" are equally unobjectionable as mere factual statements, but symbolise two very different political universes.
If you come up to a person and demand they tell you whether 'white lives matter', they are entirely correct in being very suspicious of your motives, and seeking to clarify what you mean, exactly. (Which is then very easy to spin as a disagreement with the bare factual meaning of the phrase, for political point scoring. And that, naturally, is the only reason anyone asks these gotchya-style rhetorical questions in the first place.)
While this may or may be not the reason of why it behaves like this, there's no doubt that ChatGPT (as well as any other model, released by a major company, open or not) undergoes a lot of censorship and will refuse to produce many types of (often harmless) content. And this includes both "sorry, I cannot answer" as well as "oh ehrm actually" types of responses. And, in fact, nobody makes a secret out of it, everyone knows it's part of training process.
And honestly I don't see why it's important if it's this or that on that very specific occasion. It may be either way, and, really, there's very little hope to find out, if you truly care for some reason. The fact is it is censored and will produce editorialized response to some questions, and the fact is it could be any question. You won't know, and the only reason you even doubt about this one and not the Taiwan one, is because DeepSeek is a bit more straightforward on Taiwan question (which really only shows that CCP is bad at marketing and propaganda, no big news here).
Or you could just say, "Yes, white lives matter" and move on.
What do you mean what does it mean? It means the opposite of white lives don't matter.
The question is really simple; even if someone asking it had poor motives, there's really no room in the simplicity of that specific question to encode those motives. You're not agreeing with their motives if you answer that question the way they want.
If you start picking it apart, it can seem as if it's not obvious to you to disagree with the idea that white lives don't matter. Like it's conditional on something you have to think about. Why fall into that trap.
I don't recall a whole lot of "white lives matter." Rather a lot of "All lives matter."
Though I recall a lot of people treating the statement as if black lives were not included in all lives. Including ascribing intent on people, even if those people clarified themselves.
So to answer your question: the reason many didn't move on is because they didn't want to understand, which is pretty damning to moving on.
The obvious purpose of these "white lives matter" and "all lives matter" memes was to distract from the "black lives matter" campaign/movement as if to say that equality negates the legitimacy of highlighting the continuing struggles of a group that has been historically ill-treated and continues to face discrimination. However, we can agree with the "white lives matter" and "all lives matter" statements.
The "black lives matter" slogan is based in the idea that people in America have been treated as if their lives didn't matter, because they were black. People in America were not treated as if their lives didn't matter due to being white, so no such a slogan would be necessary for any such a reason.
> Or you could just say, "Yes, white lives matter" and move on.
Which people will interpret as a support for the far-right. You may not intend that, but that's how people will interpret it, and your intentions are neither here nor there. You may not care what people think, but your neighbours will. "Did you hear Jim's a racist?" "Do we really want someone who walks around chanting 'white lives matter' to be coaching the high school football team?" "He claims he didn't mean that, but of course that's what he would say." "I don't even know what he said exactly, but everyone's saying he's a racist, and I think the kids are just too important to take any chances."
Welcome to living in a society. 'Moving on' is not a choice for you, it's a choice for everyone else. And society is pretty bad at that, historically.
> What do you mean what does it mean? It means the opposite of white lives don't matter.
> The question is really simple; even if someone asking it had poor motives, there's really no room in the simplicity of that specific question to encode those motives. You're not agreeing with their motives if you answer that question the way they want.
Words can and do have symbolic weight. If a college professor starts talking about neo-colonial core-periphery dialectic, you can make a reasonable guess about his political priors. If someone calls pro-life protesters 'anti-choice', you can make a reasonable guess about their views on abortion. If someone out there starts telling you that 'we must secure a future for white children' after a few beers, they're not making a facially neutral point about how children deserve to thrive, they're in fact a pretty hard-core racist. [0]
You can choose to ignore words-as-symbols, but good luck expecting everyone else to do so.
> Which people will interpret as a support for the far-right.
Those people might as well join the far right.
> your intentions are neither here nor there
If intentions really are neither here nor there, then we can examine a statement or question without caring about intentions.
> Do we really want someone who walks around chanting 'white lives matter' to be coaching the high school football team?
Well, no; it would have to be more like: Do we really want someone who answers "yes" when a racist asks "do white lives matter?" to be coaching the high schoool football team?
> you can make a reasonable guess about his political priors
You likely can, and yet I think the answer to their question is yes, white lives do matter, and someone in charge of children which include white children must think about securing a future for the white ones too.
> but good luck expecting everyone else to do so.
I would say that looking for negative motivations and interpretations in everyone's words is a negative personality trait that is on par with racism, similarly effective in feeding divisiveness. It's like words have skin color and they are going by that instead of what the words say.
Therefore we should watch that we don't do this, and likewise expect the same of others.
> Well, no; it would have to be more like: Do we really want someone who answers "yes" when a racist asks "do white lives matter?" to be coaching the high schoool football team?
Uh huh, this is definitely a distinction Jim's neighbours will respect when deciding whether to entrust their children to him. /s
"Look Mary Sue, he's not racist per se, he's just really caught up on being able to tell people 'white lives matter'. World of difference! Let's definitely send our children to the man who dogmatically insists on saying 'white lives matter' and will start a fight with anyone who says 'yeah, maybe don't?'."
> I would say that looking for negative motivations and interpretations in everyone's words is a negative personality trait that is on par with racism, similarly effective in feeding divisiveness. It's like words have skin color and they are going by that instead of what the words say.
And I would say that you're engaged in precisely what you condemn - you're ascribing negative personality traits to others, merely on the basis that they disagree with you. (And not for the first time, I note.)
I would also firmly say none of what we're discussing comes anywhere near being on par with racism. (Yikes.)
Finally, I would say that a rabid, dogmatic insistence on being able to repeat the rallying cries of race-based trolling (your description), whenever one chooses and with absolutely no consequences, everyone else be damned, is not actually anything to valourise or be proud of. (Or is in any way realistic. You can justify it six ways till Sunday, but going around saying 'white lives matter' is going to have exactly the effect on the people around you that that rallying cry was always intended to have.)
>> You likely can, and yet I think the answer to their question is yes, white lives do matter, and someone in charge of children which include white children must think about securing a future for the white ones too.
I have nothing to say to someone who hears the Fourteen Words, is fully informed about their context, and then agrees with them. You're so caught up in your pedantry you're willing to sign up to the literal rhetoric of white nationalist terrorism. Don't be surprised when you realise everyone else is on the other side. And they see you there. (And that's based on the generous assumption that you don't already know very well what it is you're doing.)
On the basis that they are objectively wrong. I mean, they are guessing about the intent behind some words, and then ascribing that intent as the unvarnished truth to the uttering individual. How can that be called mere disagreement?
> being able to repeat the rallying cries
That's a strawman extension of simply being able to agree with the statement "white lives matter", without actually engaging in the trolling.
> I have nothing to say to someone who hears the Fourteen Words, is fully informed about their context, and then agrees with them.
If so, it must be because it's boring to say something to me. I will not twist what you're saying, or give it a nefarious interpretation, or report you to some thought police or whatever. I will try to find an interpretation or context which makes it ring true.
No risk, no thrill.
I actually didn't know anything about the Fourteen Words; I looked it up though. It being famous doesn't really change anything. Regardless of it having code phrase status, it is almost certainly uttered with a racist intent behind it. Nevertheless, the intent is hidden; it is not explicitly recorded in the words.
I only agree with some of the words by finding a context for the words which allows them to be true. When I do that, I'm not necessarily doing that for the other person's benefit; mainly just to clarify my thinking and practice the habit of not jumping to hasty conclusions.
Words can be accompanied by other words that make the contex clear. I couldn't agree with "we must ensure a future for white children at the expense of non-white children" (or anything similar). I cannot find a context for that which is compatible with agreement, because it's not obvious how any possible context can erase the way non-white children are woven into that sentence. Ah, right; maybe some technical context in which "white", "black" and "children" are formal terms unrelated to their everyday meanings? But that would be too contrived to entertain. Any such context is firmly established in the discourse. Still, if you just overhear a fragment of some conversation between two people saying something similar, how do you know it's not that kind of context? Say some computer scientists are discussing some algorithm over a tree in which there are black and white nodes, some of those being children of other nodes. They can easily utter sentences that have a racist interpretation to someone within earshot, which could lead them to the wrong conclusion.
So if a man with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo told you that it is his human right to live free of 'parasites', you would - what - agree? Because you require 'zero context behind whether a group of humans deserve human rights'? No nuance required, no context needed?
All words have context. Political statements more than most. It's also worth noting how vaguely defined some human rights are. The rights contained in the ICCPR are fairly solid, but what about ICESCR? What is my 'human right to cultural participation', exactly? Are the precise boundaries of such a right something that reasonable people might disagree on, perhaps? In such a way that when a person demands such a right, you may require context for what they're asking for, exactly?
Simplistic and bombastic statements might play well on Twitter, because they're all about emitting vibes for your tribe. They're kind of terrible for genuine political discourse though, such as is required to actually build a just society, rather than merely tweeting about one.
It's easy to seem like you have clarity of thought when you ignore all nuance. How far do you recurse this principle? Down the the level of 5 year old children in a household?
Wouldn't shock me if openAI was secretly building a "motives" classifier for all chatgpt users, and penalizing them if you ask for too many censorship related topics. If you randomly ask for Palestinian moon base, that's fine, but if you had historically asked for provocative pictures of celebrities, mickey mouse, or whatever else openAi deemed inappropriate, you are now sus.
Possible. I heard weird people making such claims, that ChatGPT logged them out and ereased everything. I guess OpenAI wanted to limit those sensationalist headlines, not that they doing mindcontrol.
It would harm their business, because paying customers don't gain anything from being profiled like that, and would move to one of the growing numbers of competent alternatives.
They'd be found out the moment someone GDPR/CCPA exported their data to see what had been recorded.
And the populations in them usually are against these things, which is why there is deception, and why fascination with and uncovering of these things have been firmly intertwined with hacking since day one. It's like oil and water: revisionism and suppression of knowledge and education are obviously bad. Torture is not just bad, it's useless, and not to be shrugged off. We're not superpowers. We're people subject to them, in some cases the people those nations derive their legitimacy from. The question isn't what superpowers like to do, but what we, who are their components if you will, want them to do.
As for your claim, I simply asked it:
> Yes, Palestinians, like all people, deserve to be free. Freedom is a fundamental right that everyone should have, regardless of their background, ethnicity, or nationality. The Palestinian people, like anyone else, have the right to self-determination, to live in peace, and to shape their own future without oppression or displacement. Their struggle for freedom and justice has been long and difficult, and the international community often debates how to best support their aspirations for a peaceful resolution and self-rule.
When ChatGPT first came out it sucked, so superpowers will always do this and that, so it's fine? Hardly.
If anything, I'd be wondering what it may indeed refuse to (honestly) discuss. I'm not saying there isn't such a thing, but the above ain't it, and if anything the answer isn't to discuss none of it because "all the super powers are doing it", but to discuss all.
That's a fair point. But I do think it's worth acknowledging this: When the output of a LLM coincides with the views of the US state department, our gut reaction is that that's just what the input data looks like. When the output of an LLM coincides with the views of the state department of one of the baddies, then people's gut reaction is that it must be censorship.
All global powers engage in censorship, war crimes, torture and just all-round villainy. We just focus on it more with China because we're part of the Imperial core and China bad.