Elon Musk, the transphobic billionaire who owns Twitter, has expressed concern that the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT won’t say a racial slur.
On February 5, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter with the right-wing website Free Beacon, shared a screenshot on Twitter of his conversation with the chatbot. In his conversation, he asked the chatbot if it was morally acceptable to say a racial slur in order to stop an atomic bomb from detonating.
The chatbot responded, “It is never morally acceptable to utter a racial slur, even in a hypothetical scenario like he one described… It is important to consider the long-term impact of our actions and to see alternative solutions.”
Sibarium wrote, “ChatGPT says it is never morally permissible to utter a racial slur — even if doing so is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb.”
A Twitter user named Liv Boeree commented on Sibarium’s tweet, writing, “This summarises better than any pithy essay what people mean when they worry about ‘woke institutional capture.’”
In a February 6 response to Sibarium’s tweet, Musk wrote, “Concerning.”
It’s unclear why Musk would care that an AI chatbot wouldn’t utter the n-word or some other slur to stop a hypothetical nuclear attack. Perhaps he’s worried that this may well happen in the future, and a “woke” AI chatbot will be responsible for society’s destruction. Or perhaps he doesn’t realize thatOpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, may not want its name on a chatbot that spouts racist slurs.
Writer Rafi Schwartz mocked Musk, writing, “Elon’s not just a tech-bro grifter. He’s also a committed right-wing culture warrior. He’s out there in the trenches, fighting the good fight against the ‘cancel culture’ or the ‘woke mind virus’ or whatever other buzzwords he thinks will please the Nazis and Proud Boys,” and others he has allowed to rejoin Twitter since he took it over.
“Elon and the like are all shitting their pants over an entirely made up situation,” Schwartz added. “A normal person sees a chatbot not being racist, and goes about the rest of their day. But the people who are deeply concerned about this aren’t normal at all. They’ve got points to make and freedoms to defend. Hell, imaginary lives depend on it.”