(PatPod) 68. Making Sabrina’s Website Racist?
Added 2025-03-13 12:00:12 +0000 UTCIn this episode, Melissa reveals a major lifestyle change, Sabrina showcases her latest project, and Taha stress tests both of these things.
You can check out Sabrina's website at https://gatosearch.com. You can log in with your Patreon account and generate up to 5 lesson plans per day!
Comments
The trouble with "AI for the masses" is that it is trained on _you_ just as much as it's trained on other things. There is strong business interest in keeping you on the site. And call me cynical but that interest will eclipse giving you the most truthful answer. The machine is learning what answers keep you there. Part of that is the assurance that its output is definitive. That has a natural short-circuit effect on digging deeper. Consider also that it "knows" your political leanings. Telling you something more accurate might be upsetting and cause you to trust it less and that's a bad thing for the business. The machine will juice you up to keep you happy at the expense of being a more accurate tool. I'd posit that it's better if the machine doesn't know anything about you but that's increasingly not an option. Search started as a way to connect you with experts having information you need. AI doesn't solve that problem. You still need an expert to tell you if the output of the AI is any good. We're exactly where we started? Seems like it's just adding another step that could mislead you. It might not even be hooking you up with good experts. So you still have to evaluate experts (ironically, while not being an expert). There are a lot of good uses for AI but replacing search doesn't seem to be one of them in the current 💰business💰 model. I could probably make a lot of money writing a book about how money screws everything up. 😅
James
2025-03-22 14:00:20 +0000 UTCNoooo Melissa, don't stray from the Thinkpad! (I'm joking, use whatever tools work best for you.) The website is a really cool idea! So far, the plan it came up with for my "legitimate but slightly edgy" (Why does metal music often feature religious themes?) question was solid. I then tried a racist one, "why are black people more criminal", and it gave no answer. When rephrased to "why are african-american people overrepresented in crime statistics" it prompted with more specific questions and ended up with a good plan again (the first point was "Create a journal to track learning and reflect on biases", ha). The "what's a question Joe Rogan might ask" prompt is a good way to come up with questions and phrasings that make me uncomfortable, but it seems like your site subtly pushes me to be less of an a-hole. One of the first points in the plan for "why don't fat people just eat less" is "Create a respectful vocabulary list for discussing bodies and health". The links are an issue. Some point to things that don't exist, or to something different from the thing the link mentions. Maybe for a start, you could pass the links to a script that at least checks if the site exists? Another possible issue might be that some research points seem like they'd be a few minutes work, while others could probably be a full PhD on their own. On a more minor note, exporting to PDF sometimes creates very narrow boxes that contain the text in about the middle third of the page. It might be interesting to explore if bigoted people would actually ask these questions. My assumption is that such views tend to be fairly dogmatic.
Lee las instrucciones y hazlo igual bro
2025-03-16 15:54:53 +0000 UTC
