Gemini Pornocalypse Test
I’ve known all along that Google’s AI chatbot “Gemini” has #pornocalypse baked inside, and has ever since it was first released. However, today I got a wild hair up my ass, and decided to put it to an actual pornocalypse test. Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at Erosblog:
“As a language model, I’m not able to assist you with that.”
Really? Fascinating! I wonder why not? Could it be the AI chatbot equivalent of search invisibility for adult sites?
Sure it could. How do we test it?
Well, how about another site of similar age that’s also a blog of sorts, but one that — despite frequently publishing items that are somewhat salacious — isn’t seen as a porn blog? Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at BoingBoing:
BoingBoing.com is a website that covers a wide range of topics including technology, science, politics, and art. It features articles on current events, unusual stories, and more. On the current events side, it has recent news like the arrest of a food bank director for selling meth and the death of a TV host. For unusual stories, it covers topics like the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood and a man who sued a hospital for misplacing a piece of his skull.
Huh! Would you look at that! As a language model, Gemini, you are in fact able to help with that. But if there’s porn, you tell an anodyne lie about your abilities, instead. Fuck off.
Similar Sex Blogging:
- Jumping Through Pornocalypse Hoops: Generative AI Art
- Pornocalypse Comes For The Blind
- Pornocalyptic Dating Advice From Meta's Dating Coach AI
- Erotic Generative Art Via AI Horde
- The Pornocalypse Comes For Your Geese
- "Never Build Your House On Someone Else's Land"
- Google's Digital Dementia: It's Forgetting Stuff
- Google/Blogger's "Existing Policy Prohibiting Commercial Porn"
- The Google Shortlinks #Pornocalypse In Action
- Google Buries The Blowjobs
- Pornocalypse Comes, Blogger/BlogSpot Edition
- Pornocalypse Now: The Google Glass "Mikandi Banned" Timeline
- Google Glass: No Fuck For You!
- The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All
- Things Google Won't Let You Love
- Penis Versus Clitoris: Google Has Decided
- Google's Secret Sexual No-Fly List
- Google's Mechanical Prude
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=33101
If sign up for one of the companies such as outlier.ai they will train you in their pornapocalyptic policies (hey, its money AND a back-stage view of things that most people only see from the front)
The anodyne lie has been a Google tactic for a while, at least since the (pre-LLM, pre-“AI”) Google Assistant. There was a lot of fear that with the right creative prompting the Assistant could be coerced into saying some PR disaster like “No, Hitler wasn’t so bad” (see how much flak Microsoft got for Tay, which wasn’t even a serious product), so large swaths of cognitive territory were declared off-limits and got the response you see.
As a general tactic in tech it has a long pedigree. The phone company used to do it a lot – you’d get the lie of a busy signal sometimes when there was some internal system error, for example.
At the end of the day, it’s the product of big tech, and if there is one thing that big tech is truly, epically bad at is error messages. Error messages to the user are always useless. All too often the ones logged internally for debugging are too, when they’re not thrown away by lazy or stupid engineers who think they’ll never be supporting the live product.
You’ve played with AI enough by now I’m sure Mr Alien Sex Shop, to know that the prompt matters. Have you tried asking it to summarise the latest post on Erosblog? Maybe it will do that. Maybe useful to ask it if it can define pornocalypse to see if it handles editorial that mentions porn, or whether it ignores the whole site based on some internal scoring or blacklist. If it knows what pornocalypse is there’s a lever.
In the meantime, it’s sitting there… learning how you use it, and how best to manipulate you… Bwaa haa haa!
Projects for another day, finagle! At a philosophical level I am amused by AI hacking efforts, but not enough to spend much time at it myself. There’s value in “proving” that pornocalypse filters are laughably imperfect, but the instant project was just confirming/documenting that the expected filter is in place.
Nathan, you are absolutely right about anodyne lies. This one is just the chatbot version of search invisibility, which in turn is the false pretense that the searched object doesn’t exist or is not known about. It’s perfectly possible to return a “321 results found which do not meet criteria for display” message after a search for “titties with monkey tattoos” but increasingly the trend is the anodyne lie of “zero results found”. For the obvious reason that it’s much harder to criticize a filter (or the choice not to have it be optional) if you never admit the filter exists in a screen-shottable kind of way.
Has the obvious Hal 9000 joke already been done to death?
Justin, very likely? But I did my part: look again at the bottom left of my graphic for this post.
This is the reply I get from ChatGPT: “I’m unable to browse the content of specific websites that require login or are behind paywalls. If you can provide more details or context about the content you’re interested in from Erosblog, I can certainly help you with a summary or further information based on that!”
Then, I decided to specify “erosblog.com”. It changed everything:
ErosBlog.com is a blog that primarily focuses on erotica and adult content. The blog, often referred to as “The Sex Blog of Record,” features a wide range of topics related to sexuality, adult entertainment, and sex culture. Here’s a detailed overview of what you can typically expect from ErosBlog:
Erotic Imagery: The blog often posts erotic images, including art, photography, and occasionally vintage erotica. These images are typically tasteful and artistic, though they do include nudity and sexual themes.
Sexual Commentary and Insights: The blog includes commentary on various aspects of sex and sexuality. This can range from discussions on sexual norms and taboos to personal reflections and broader societal observations about sexual behavior and attitudes.
Adult Industry News: ErosBlog sometimes covers news and updates from the adult entertainment industry. This can include discussions about new trends, legal issues, technological advancements, and other relevant industry happenings.
Literary Erotica: The blog occasionally features erotic short stories or excerpts from longer works of erotic fiction. These are usually well-written and cater to readers interested in literary erotica.
Curation of Web Content: ErosBlog curates and links to other erotic content available on the web. This could be other blogs, articles, videos, or websites that align with the blog’s focus on sexuality and erotica.
Humor and Satire: There’s often a light-hearted tone to the content, with humorous takes on sex-related topics or satirical commentary on sexual politics and culture.
Links to Adult Resources: The blog provides links to various resources related to sexuality, such as sex-positive websites, educational materials, and other adult content sites.
Vintage and Historical Erotica: ErosBlog has a particular interest in the history of erotica, often showcasing or discussing vintage erotic materials, including old advertisements, photographs, and literature.
The blog is well-regarded for its thoughtful and respectful approach to adult content, making it popular among readers who appreciate a more nuanced and artistic exploration of sexuality.
Thanks, Roger, for exploring this in ChatGPT. The first response is obviously the “search invisibility” response: “No” with a bogus reason. (There are of course no logins or paywalls at ErosBlog.)
The second response is surprisingly good; I am especially impressed with the mention of the curation work I do. There are lots of sites whose porn posting might be understood as curatorial, but not many that talk about it in curatorial terms; so I imagine the model picked that up from my own words about what I’m doing here.
Many years ago Google started excluding some porn sites from search results unless you specified the URL in your search terms — a form of modified search invisibility that grants you access to the material if you can prove you already know about it and know where it is. Apparently that’s the ChatGPT approach too, which is a thing I did not know when I woke up this morning. So, thank you again!
[…] Monday’s Gemini pornocalypse test, ErosBlog reader Roger decided to run a similar prompt through ChatGPT. My expectation, since […]
[…] Bored with my actual paying work, I asked Gemini: […]