https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
Which as a phenomenon is so very telling that no one actually cares what people are really saying. Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means. It's all performative.
At what point do the new words become the actual words? Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL?
Your point stands when we start replacing the banned words with things like "suicide" for "donkeyrhubarb" and then the walls really will fall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...
I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to act like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere) "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly bans any discussion of that topic.
The future will be AIs all the way down...
The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words but that's not how it would be used IRL.
Presumably, for this use-case, that would come at exactly the point where using “unalive” as a keyword in an image-generation prompt generates an image that Apple wouldn’t appreciate.
the matter-of-fact term of today becomes the pejorative of tomorrow so a new term is invented to avoid the negative connotation of the original term. Then eventually the new term becomes a pejorative and the cycle continues.
Karen Hao interviewed many of them in her latest bestselling book, which explores the human cost behind the OpenAI boom:
(This one is sfw, not all of the comics are)
Even urban dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for skub as a slur.
Though it would be fun to see what happens if an LLM if used to ban anything that tends to generate heated exchanges. It would presumably learn to ban racial terms, politics and politicians and words like "immigrant" (i.e. basically the list in this repo), but what else could it be persuaded to ban? Vim and Emacs? SystemD? Anything involving cyclists? Parenting advice?
Online env ban the word suicide. No one uses it. unalive is not banned. Discussion is the same, word or no word.
Vernacular 101.
What about this then: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/skub
Unalive is one of the popular ones, but it's a whole vocabulary at this point. Guess what "PDF file" stands for.
Sincerely the child of a parent who committed suicide. He mentioned suicide a few days before.
You can't say fuck on tv, but you can say fudge as a 1 for 1 replacement. You cant show people having sex, but you can show them walking into a bedroom and then cut to 30 seconds later and they are having a cigarette in bed.
Now after the influence of TV and Movies ... is Vaping after sex a thing?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 (CDT links broken, use [2])
[2] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon_...
If the bigots start using "thank you" as some code word, should we stop saying it, lest we pollute our non-bigoted discussions?
bigots drink coffee too, maybe we should stop drinking it, because something-something...
Not even to match the current language. How would you censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebro...
• Horse, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱers-, “to run”
• Planet, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs), “wanderer”
• Lots of Latin-derived words, companion (bread together), conspire (breathe together), transgression (step across), etc.
• Hamburger the food named after the city of Hamburg, where "burg" means "castle", because it had a castle
• My forename means "son of the right/south" or "son of days", my family name means "wheat field/clearing" (in a different language); where "wheat" itself comes from Proto-Germanic, from *hwītaz (“white”) and the "ley" part from Proto-Indo-European *lówkos (“clearing”), derived from *lewk- (“bright”), and *lewk- also gives all these derived terms even just in English:
Quit being overly pedantic. We all knew there was an unironic purpose for the gesture before it became ironic.
No, it isn't, and especially hasn't been historically. The negative connotations are overwhelmingly modern.
The areas where it is very inappropriate right now tally up to maybe 1 billion people*. That's pretty far from "most". For everyone else it is mostly positive, neutral, or meaningless.
*Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, other parts of Eastern Europe
If “thank you” became widely associated with bigots, and had some negative meaning, to the point where it genuinely distressed people, I’d avoid it. I think it has a widespread enough normal meaning that there’s almost no chance of that happening, but it isn’t impossible.
Just that they suck at coming up with pithy new slang terms.
you'd think so, but people often operate where multiple contexts could be valid.
Just as a thought experiment, if the eggplant emoji was used to denote "ok" in messaging and then people starting appropriating it for a sexual context, would you or the general public think twice about continuing to use it to mean "ok" on the off chance the other side may misinterpret the meaning?
I would say most likely yes.
I strongly doubt you do that. Whether you like it or not, the Nazis defined what the swastika means now.
Maybe that is what Richard Nixon thought as well when he caused a little scandal using it in South America in 1950. In 1992 when the Chicago Tribune published "HANDS OFF" mentioning said episode the negative connotations still seemed to be in place[1].
In 1996 The New York Times stated "What's A-O.K. in the U.S.A. Is Lewd and Worthless Beyond"[2] as title of an article confirming the negative connotations.
It is worth mentioning that this article lists Australia amongst the places where the gesture is inappropriate. I always thought it was something used only in the English-speaking world but it seems in reality it is more like a North American plus diving world thing.
If you don't believe the press, I traveled around the world for more than 30 years and I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1992/01/26/hands-off-34/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/18/weekinreview/what-s-a-ok-...*
Taboos are a cultural thing, and the world is (thankfully) very far from having a monoculture shaped by NYC's neurotic intellectuals.
> I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.
You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't just mean "OK" in some places.
What you actually claimed was "The OK gesture has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world."
Which is plain wrong. In India for instance it can refer to "money", while in China it can nowadays also be seen as a distress signal when performed a certain way (thanks to Chinese social media popularizing that use). There's some ways you can mess this up, like making it seem you're attempting to bribe someone, or signalling you're in distress when you aren't, but in neither country the gestures are inherently anywhere near "very inappropriate" and both will even understand it as "OK" if you perform it correctly and in the appropriate context.
That's already almost 3 billion people, but let's say 2.5 billion because there's regional variations in both countries and I'm sure you could find some northern Chinese village that will take offense.
I can easily push the number of people to whom it is not inappropriate past 4 billion by adding smaller populations (Indonesia, Japan, western Europe, USA, Taiwan, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, ...), so your claim that "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" cannot possibly be true.
>>You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't mean "OK" in many
I said the gesture is "not OK" to use (meaning inappropriate), not that it doesn’t mean "OK". Those are two different things. The gesture can mean OK in some places while still being not OK (inappropriate) to use in many others.
Also, I always said "parts of the world". You introduced population into the argument.
Fair. That's clearly how I should've read that.
Though it does not materially affect this conversation, since demonstrably there's over 4 billion people to whom the gesture is not inappropriate. The claim "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" is wrong, regardless of what reasonable definition of "most" you use.
You edited your comment to add this, so I'll respond here:
> Also, I always said "parts of the world". You introduced population into the argument.
Right. And you're being vague on how you actually arrive at your claim of "most", which conveniently keeps the waters muddy while you attack attempts to turn this into something measurable.
So what other measure would you use? Most others are nonsense.
For example "places" isn't a useful measure, but even then: It can only be offensive to people. If I dropped you on a random point on the globe and you made that gesture, there's about a 99% chance nobody would be around to be offended.
By land area and predominant culture? Just Antarctica (hardly anyone there to take offense), the US, China, Canada, Australia, and India together are going to dwarf the opposition.
Counting countries? It's clearly inappropriate in around 10, with about another 20-30 where it can be misunderstood easily (Arab world, some of eastern Europe, scattered ones). A far cry from ~195 countries.
Either way there needs to be someone to take offense, so population is a pretty good measure.
You may disagree, but the onus was always on you, the one making the claim, to pick a measure and a definition of "most", then show that the bar is met. Feel free to now make more of an argument than "trust me I traveled".
See many examples such as “padlocks are useless because a determined smart attacker can defeat them easily so don’t bother with them” - which conveniently forgets that many crimes are committed by non-determined, dumb and opportunistic attackers who are often deterred by simple locks.
Yes, people will use other words. No, this does not make this purely performative. It has measurable effects on behaviour and how these models will be used and spoken to, which affects outcomes.
And that symbol was 100% associated with the Nazis in the West in the 20th century. Nobody used it at the time before the war for anything else, except some tiny fringe.
If it was some mainstream symbol or idiom, merely co-adopted, we'd probably still be using it too.
If the Nazis used the cross for example,people wouldn't stop using the sign of the cross.
They were hardly ever used in the west for at least a full millenium before the Nazis too (except a handful of cases, where they still use them, like the Finnish Air Force), so that's a moot analogy.
In Asia, they still use them just fine, in houses, temples, businesses, and elsewhere.
† proving that TikTok's system actually analyzes every frame of an uploaded video with OCR of some sort to see what's on there.
It's perfectly OK in Greece.
In fact there was a recent thing with one of the BTS members' uniform (worn during mandatory military service period in South Korea), which had the regular (not tilted) swastika on it because he was assigned to religious duties.
And of course the western world/media ran away with it. Plenty of absolutely brain dead people out there who couldn't research a topic to gain an understanding to save their lives.
Unalive is mostly to avoid censorship same as ahh. But once they enter common usage it's not really about censorship anymore.
The PADI standard gestures are used and recognized all over the world to mean these things.
This is a problem even today, some have said it is due to hotter currents coming from the Indian ocean meeting the cold Atlantic. But the judge is still out on that one.
Good documentary on rogue waves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfNc_6EjbMU
Prison slang in Canada that has made its way to wider society. Apparently.