All posts tagged: antagonistic

Why does AI have to be nice? Researchers propose ‘Antagonistic AI’

Why does AI have to be nice? Researchers propose ‘Antagonistic AI’

When interacting with today’s large language models (LLMs), do you expect them to be surly, dismissive, flippant or even insulting?  Of course not — but they should be, according to researchers from MIT and the University of Montreal. These academics have introduced the idea of Antagonistic AI: That is, AI systems that are purposefully combative, critical, rude and even interrupt users mid-thought.  Their work challenges the current paradigm of commercially popular but overly-sanitized “vanilla” LLMs.  “There was always something that felt off about the tone, behavior and ‘human values’ embedded into AI — something that felt deeply ingenuine and out of touch with our real-life experiences,” Alice Cai, co-founder of Harvard’s Augmentation Lab and researcher at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, told VentureBeat.  VB Event The AI Impact Tour – NYC We’ll be in New York on February 29 in partnership with Microsoft to discuss how to balance risks and rewards of AI applications. Request an invite to the exclusive event below.   Request an invite She added: “We came into this project with …

The Value of Fighting Attacks on Free Speech Early and Often

The Value of Fighting Attacks on Free Speech Early and Often

There’s no sense in waiting for the problem to become endemic before moving to arrest it. Professor Keith Humphreys of Stanford University does not believe that speech is threatened on America’s campuses. He’s never perceived a meaningful threat himself. And he is very antagonistic toward several of us who believe that important values and vulnerable people will suffer unless more is done to protect free expression. His posture is not unusual. Across issues and ideologies, on matters big and small, harms that disproportionately affect a vulnerable group or class of people attract skeptics who feel impelled to minimize the importance of documented injustices, especially when they manifest in what appear to be atypical circumstances. A skeptic may grant that there are bad apples in police departments, hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims, abusive teachers who exploit union job protections, or men who catcall women on the street. But perhaps they’ve never been affected, or known anyone who has suffered the relevant harm, so they are predisposed to concluding that the problem isn’t really that bad. Baffled …