Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Aha! I was sort of right. Now companies have teams of folks hunting down stupid in their systems to keep the world safe from stupid.

Way back in 2015, I wrote a blog post about being a stupid hunter. This is not a hunter who is stupid, but a hunter whose job is to seek out and eliminate the stupidity in systems and organizations.

Well, this week I read of OpenAI (fill in the name of any AI-focused company) with its “red team” that hunts the answers its ChatGPT provides. When it finds “toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases in the model” they blow their horns and bring in the rabid dogs or something terrifying to rid the toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases from the model. What’s a “model” anyway, and is the model afraid of rabid dogs or something terrifying?

Let’s say it simply: they seek out and eliminate the stupidity in their system.

Aha! I knew it. Well, I can claim I knew it. Then again, their is so much stupid in systems and organizations that stupid hunters will always have jobs called “red team” and some such polite thing. No one, aside from me, wants to wear a shirt that proclaims STUPID HUNTER.