Posts tagged AI

Choose another tag?

I just found this Verite News story from April that combines two of my interests: prison policy and AI. And as you can imagine, the combination is not good! In Louisiana:

A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.

Critics of the law describe it as a Trojan horse for ending parole, and the algorithm makes that strategy even cleaner. Lawmakers don’t have to argue that someone doesn’t deserve release; they don’t even have to vote on it. They can point to a score and shrug. It’s not us, the system says. It’s the data.

Another way to think about it: why get your hands dirty with the trolley problem when you can make a machine pull the lever for you?

<3 — <3

AI loves the em-dash, and Sean Goedecke thinks he’s found out why after exploring a lot of fun theories I had not heard of (including AI trainers in East Africa being fond of the punctuation): modern models are trained on a ton of freshly digitized 19th- and early-20th-century books, back when writers used dashes like it was their job. GPT-3.5 didn’t do this; GPT-4o does. Blame the OCR.

Kelsey Piper tried a fun experiment: ask chatbots the same morally loaded questions in six languages and see if the answers diverge. You’d expect the “AI Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (language influences thought and perception) to hold. Instead, the models mostly converge on one worldview: secular, liberal, modern-internet cosmopolitanism. Even DeepSeek, China’s flagship model, gives Western-ish answers… unless you ask it in Chinese, in which case it gets a bit more cautious.

Today’s AIs don’t “think” in multiple languages. They seem to think in English and translate outward. And that makes everyone, from Cairo to Kansas to Chongqing, more likely to get the same advice about protests, domestic violence, or how to respond when your kid comes out.

It’s a weird twist: humans don’t have a universal culture, but AIs might.

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.Why do you want to work at Anthropic? (We value this response highly – great answers are often 200-400 words.)

–Anthropic job app via Simon Willison’s blog