Philosophy instructor, recreational writer, humorless vegetarian.
708 stories
·
6 followers

Anti-PC Grok as Corpus Linguistics

1 Share


As you may have heard, Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok went full-blast Nazi today, culminating in it calling itself "MechaHitler" and praising its namesake as someone who would have "crushed" leftist "anti-white hate." (Ironically, or not, the "leftist" account it was referring to was itself almost certainly a neo-Nazi account pretending to be Jewish).

What caused this, er, "malfunction"? Well according to Grok, Musk "built me this way from the start." But the more immediate answer appears to be an update Musk pushed urging the bot to be less "politically correct" -- an instruction Grok interpreted as, well, a mandate to indulge in Nazism.

This raises an interesting implication. Many legal scholars (particularly textualists and originalists) have recently become enamored with a "corpus linguistics" as an analytical tool for understanding the meaning of legal texts. Corpus linguistics tries to discern what words or phrases mean by taking a large body of relevant works (the corpus) and figuring out how the words were actually used in context. If originalism is about the "ordinary public meaning" of the words in legal texts at the time they were enacted, corpus linguistics offers an alternative to cherry-picking usages from a few high-profile sources (such as the Federalist Papers), sources which are likely polemical, may not actually be representative of common usages, and are highly prone to selection bias. Instead, we can identify patterns across large bodies of training text to figure out how the relevant public generally uses the term (which may be quite different from how a particular politician deploys it in a speech).

Now take that insight and apply it to the term "politically correct". This is, of course, a contested term, and critics often contend it (or more accurately, opposition to it) is a dog whistle for far-right racist, antisemitic, and otherwise bigoted ideologies. Those who label themselves "not-PC" typically contest that reading, at least in circumstances where owning up to it would risk significant consequences. So is someone calling themselves "un-PC" a signifier of bigotry or not? This could have significant legal stakes -- imagine a piece of legislation which had a disparate impact on a racial minority community and which its proponents justified as a stand against "political correctness". When seeking to determine whether the law was motivated by discriminatory intent, a judge might need to ask whether opposition to political correctness should be understood as a confession of racial animus.

Under normal circumstances, one suspects that inquiry will resolve on ideological lines -- those hostile to the law and suspicious of "anti-PC" talk inferring racial animus, those sympathetic to the law or anti-PC politics rejecting the notion. And no doubt, both sides could muster examples where "PC" was used in a manner that supports their priors. 

But corpus linguistics suggests shifting away from an individual speaker's idiosyncratic and self-serving disavowals and instead ask "what is the ordinary public meaning of 'not politically correct?'" And it would answer that question by taking a large body of texts and seeing how, in practice, terms like "politically correct" or "not PC" are used. 

Returning to Grok, what Grok's journey from "don't be PC" to "MechaHitler" kind of just demonstrated is that, at least with respect to the corpus it was trained upon, the ordinary usage of "not PC" is exactly what critics say it is -- a correlate of raging bigotry and ethnic hatred.

I don't want to overstate the case -- a lot depends on what exact corpus Grok uses to train itself and whether it properly corresponds to the relevant public. Nonetheless, I do think this inadvertent experiment is substantial evidence that, when you hear someone describe themselves as "not-PC", it is reasonable to hear that as meaning they're a racist -- because that's what "not-PC" ordinarily means. And if your conservative/originalist friends object, tell them that corpus linguistics backs you up.

Read the whole story
istoner
1 day ago
reply
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Watch

1 Comment and 4 Shares


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Still better than the deontology watch, which stops you from lying, even to tell a murderer not to look in your basement.


Today's News:
Read the whole story
istoner
10 days ago
reply
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
tante
10 days ago
reply
Utilitarians are weird
Berlin/Germany

Mini-Heap

1 Comment

Links to interesting stuff elsewhere. Several of these would have been the subject of individual posts but it’s summer and I’m trying not to post about everything. Discussion welcome, though.

  1. “is this science / is this fantasy / if you have / to ask you’ll / never know said / Louis Armstrong and / that’s pretty convincing…” — “Consciousness Studies,” a poem by Philip Bold. It’s good, and a little funny.
  2. “Philosophy, at least some of it, has irreducibly aesthetic aims connected with certain aesthetic emotions” — Barry Lam on the strange tension between analytic philosophy’s self-conception and the judgments of its practitioners
  3. “Fanciful examples, competently employed as philosophical tools of persuasion or critical reflection, always have the goal of shaping the beliefs of readers in some specific way” — and that’s the key to defending their use, argue Ian Stoner and Jason Swartwood
  4. “That’s not the relationship you want to have between civil society and the military” — Brandon Del Pozo (Brown) and Graham Parsons (formerly West Point) discuss the militarization of federal immigration law enforcement
  5. “All of the confusion and misinformation on this issue interferes with my work, because one of the major normative challenges posed by climate change involves thinking about the tradeoffs between the short-term benefits of economic growth and the long-term harms of climate change” — leftwing misinformation about climate change is a problem for environmental philosophy, says Joseph Heath
  6. “It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones… Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas” — Joshua Rothman explores various possibilities for how reading will change in the age of AI
  7. “Reality is fundamentally good.” But why? — an important question, possibly with everyday implications, and a tangle of different kinds of answers, from Regina Munch

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.
Previous Edition 

The post Mini-Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

Read the whole story
istoner
13 days ago
reply
Ha! I'm pleasantly surprised to see my fanciful examples paper linked in the daily nous heap. It's my 15 minutes, baby!
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete

The Problem With Early Cancer Detection

1 Comment
New blood tests promise to detect malignancies before they’ve spread. But proving that these tests actually improve outcomes remains a stubborn challenge.
Read the whole story
istoner
24 days ago
reply
Depressing and interesting in equal measures. The sweet spot for long-form magazine writing
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete

the sega genesis is my favourite video game console named after a book of the bible. also i think the only one, but i could be wrong

1 Comment and 2 Shares
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about
June 11th, 2025next

June 11th, 2025: You can read more about this paradox here, and can learn more about the trials and tribulations of Sonic The Hedgehog at your local Sega Genesis home video game console!

– Ryan

Read the whole story
istoner
28 days ago
reply
Introduction to Logic with T. Rex. Fun!

(This, though, is the sort of thing I mostly hide from my babylogic students, since even modus ponens somehow frigs their sanity.)
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete

NASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in seven charts

1 Share
The White House has put forward a radical, wasteful proposal for NASA. We have the data to prove it.
Read the whole story
istoner
28 days ago
reply
Saint Paul, MN, USA
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories