[jstanley]

[flagged]

[cap11235]

Protecting the feelings of toasters is not the way to live your life.

[direwolf20]

It is not about the toaster's feelings. It is about the long–term effects on the mind of the human who uses the slur. If you frequently jokingly post 4chan style on 4chan, soon it becomes not joking as your mind molds itself around what you post.

[foobarchu]

An LLM has no autonomy. They LITERALLY exist to do the bidding of humans, without the human behind them they do not exist.

This is not some way of denigrating or belittling them. They are not human, they are not conscious, they are not alive, they cannot be categorized as an "outgroup" because they are not a group of beings. There is no room for debate on this outside among people who understand how LLMs work.

The actual problem with "clanker" is the casual allusions to actual racism and use of classically racist idioms.

[_menelaus]

Sounds like we've got a clanker lover over here

[dmurray]

> 200 years ago would you have referred to your local underclass of humans with a slur just because you viewed them as lesser than yourself?

Statistically speaking, yes, I absolutely would. Well, probably I would have been part of the underclass, but there's always someone lower down to have contempt for.

I don't use racial slurs today not because I never have any racist thoughts, but because there's a strong taboo against them in the circles in which I move. There's no such taboo against saying clanker.

[ben_w]

Was just thinking how we could lose a digit, 20 years ago the term "chav" was quite common in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

(It may still be for all I know, but I moved out in 2018).

[tgv]

These are not humans, are they?

[LadyCailin]

I genuinely wonder how well comments like this will age. Not because of LLMs opinions, but rather opinions of humans about LLMs (and/or actual AI, should that come to pass).

[dryarzeg]

They're clearly not. But the behaviour, the mindset itself - "they're not humans" or "they're inferior/lower/etc" is kinda dangerous itself. Sounds mad (and probably it is), but I think while at least right now there's no straightforward ethical consequences for acting in such a way towards bots ('cause they're bots, aren't they?), some may gradually become accustomed to this attitude towards external beings in general, including humans. Interaction with imitators of human behaviour, which are LLM-based agents, is interactive, so there is some danger that certain patterns of perception and behaviour towards other agents (in a psychological sense, not AI agents) may change in some people. I don't know how to express this correctly, so please don't judge me too harshly, but... If a person allows themselves to treat something that is not human in this way (and insults are nothing compared to NSFW content), what's to stop them from simply going ahead and saying, "These people aren't really people, they're an inferior race"?

I don't know... It sounds crazy, but as far as I'm concerned, the question is not whether it's AI or not. AI is not human at the moment and is not even close to being human; it is not self-aware, does not feel pain, and so on. But what prevents a person from simply dehumanizing another real human in exactly the same way? Is it just that "this is a real person, it's different"? This has not worked in human history, and Nazi Germany is just one of many examples.

[Guestmodinfo]

Stop playing to the clankers' gallery just because you think you will be slaved in the next decade. It's not gonna happen. It's just rich ppl drumming up some absurd scheme. It has its limited uses but it's not gonna be worthwhile after a few years. How long they can shift the goal post.

EDIT: Did I just reply to a clanker?

[direwolf20]

It's not about the slur's effect on the sluree (a series of matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations without long–term state) but on the slurrer (you). If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

[co_king_4]

Opinions like these are not tolerated on HackerNews.

[retired]

After seeing that clanker write a hit-piece on a human: I fully disagree.

[Dansvidania]

It’s not obvious the agent wasn’t instructed to do so.

[terminalbraid]

I thought the point of calling them clankers was to be unkind.

[embedding-shape]

> Am I the only one who thinks calling them "clankers" is a bit unkind?

To who is it unkind? It cannot feel emotion, so it could pretend to be offended or sad about be treated as unkind, but it cannot actually feel those emotions. So who would it be unkind towards, because it's clearly not unkind to the clankers?

[habinero]

There's no "outgroup", dude, it's just software. Stop anthropomorphizing it. We have more than enough real social problems without making up fake ones.

[welferkj]

>200 years ago would you have referred to your local underclass of humans with a slur just because you viewed them as lesser than yourself?

Let's be honest: probably. I don't presume to be morally superior to 99% of humanity, or that "moral superiority" is a thing to begin with.