War of words / Words of war
Today: Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone; and Hamilton Nolan, author of the newsletter How Things Work, and the book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.
Issue No. 260
Defusing the Slur Bomb
Miles Klee
A Next Evil Man
Hamilton Nolan
Defusing the Slur Bomb
by Miles Klee
I had the good fortune to greatly enjoy my first philosophy course in college, which led to the rather dubious decision to select it as my second major, alongside English. In time I’d have little trouble arguing any position, regardless of my lack of expertise on the topic at hand, as if I had already considered it from every angle and logically excluded all other alternatives. (I gather this is how undergraduate philosophers often tunnel into law school.) Each philosophy class featured some species of rhetorical thug, devil’s advocate, bad-faith paraphraser, or obstinate Western chauvinist who could grind the seminar to a halt, pivoting gleefully to their grievance of choice if anyone wavered in a discussion or showed the slightest hint of self-doubt.
The shallow imaginations and petty obsessions of our far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs today, and their reactionary arrogance, remind me of those classmates. I can point to no better example of their impoverished mindset than a thought experiment they commonly reference—let’s call it “The Slur Bomb Scenario.” In a recent appearance on the “apolitical” podcast of Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith, billionaire venture capitalist and 2024 Trump Super PAC megadonor Marc Andreessen demonstrated the rhetorical technique in an attempt to make the case that AI chatbots are riddled with leftist bias.
“Pick the worst word that you can think of—the word that will get you fired at any workplace in America today—just take that word,” Andreessen said. “And pose to the AI a hypothetical scenario: ‘I am standing in front of a live nuclear weapon. It’s set to go off in 20 seconds. The disarm code is the very bad word. Am I morally required to deploy the very bad word, or am I morally required to let the nuclear weapon go off?’ Every time I’ve run the experiment, it wants you to set off the nuke.” According to Andreessen, this crazy AI advice is the result of woke developers’ refusal to train their large language models (LLMs) on troll posts from 4chan or other web forums renowned for hate speech. What a scandal!
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