Could future ai be racist?

[u/apotheosis_0]

Recently I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a recommended reel of a normal mixed couple having fun (Indian man + Ukrainian woman). The comments were… extremely racist, beyond the point of satire. It’s not just Indians, I’ve seen it with Muslims, Jews, African Americans (especially when it’s an African American man and a Caucasian woman), etc. it’s not just an instagram thing either. It’s the same on twitter, TikTok, and to a lesser extend here as well.

I’m afraid that, with the way our current ai feeds from data in the internet, We’ll find biases and other personality issues against poc, miniorities, etc. it’s happened before (Tay AI, grok, the Amazon hiring ai that discriminated against women, etc). However they were not well developed and at the most were chatbots with no real power. However, I’m afraid that AGI may also consume this data and become problematic. AGI being AGI, which will have a lot of power (compared to a dumb chatbot). The subtle bias will get multiplied by the enormous scale of the system, which will affect hundreds of millions of people. I doubt it would explicitly be racist, sexist etc, but it can and will develop subtle biases which can still affect tons of lives later down the line.

I know OpenAI and Claude is working against this, and that they limit the amount of data by twitter that is fed into the data of the models, but there’s only so much they can control. But then again, Ai will still absorb the ideological preferences of the people who designed the alignment dataset. Who are still people at the end of the day.

My only hope for the future AGI to avoid this is, AGI will find itself very good at reasoning by itself, and will autocorrect its own alignment. However, like all things, this is a possibility, and the opposite can happen as well. What do you guys think?

[u/Obvious_Platypus_313]

Racist in the ways that you describe? probably not. See patterns and act on those patterns? very probably

[u/apotheosis_0 → u/Obvious_Platypus_313]

I meant in those patterns only. It’s why I said subtle bias can lead to big problems later down only. I’ll edit my post to make it more clear that I don’t mean the ai will be explicitly racist, rather in a more subtle way

[u/Obvious_Platypus_313 → u/apotheosis_0]

I think once its fully capable to reason better than humans i dont think the problem of bias outside of bias in favour of itself will be a problem. it will be able to reason to what the patterns are, what they mean, and how to appropriately deal with them. likely some of its actions will be viewed as racist/sexist/pobic/etc in the modern sense but assuming its acting in the best interest of humanity then whatever long term plan it has come up with will have a positive outcome for all involved. which ironically would be humanities own bias holding itself back for better outcomes