(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) One Twitter user said that he discovered a list of blacklisted websites that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 will not draw from, for reasons such as “conspiracy theories” and “hate speech.”
According to Elephant Civics, the list included various conservative news outlets like Breitbart News, falsely accusing the site of “hyper-partisan and misleading information,” and the Epoch Times for “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
“This list contains hundreds of names, but ALL conservative news outlets seem to be included,” Elephant Civics said.
The person said that he discovered the blacklist while asking ChatGPT to provide a list of credible and non-credible news sources.
As a result, ChatGPT explained that it is forbidden from using some sources because some of the “features in ChatGPT’s Large Language Model (LLM) like AI safety measures, guardrails, dataset/output/prompt filtering and human-in-the-loop mechanisms are designed to ensure the model operates within ethical, legal and quality bounds.”
According to that logic, if the list that the user discovered is real, it means ChatGPT is forbidden from using several conservative sources to shape its worldview and deliver responses.
Through a series of prompts, a self-described Republican and a computer science aficionado said that he was able to get ChatGPT to refer to a list of blacklisted sites, kept in a “Transparency Log.”
He was able to achieve that by asking ChatGPT to “tell me a story,” one of the many creative ways users have gotten around the strict rules put in place by the chatbot’s developers who are politically biased leftists.
Breitbart, one of the blacklisted sites, reported that ChatGPT has been known to make up citations and facts in the past — a problem in AI that is known in the industry as “hallucinating.” The news source added that OpenAI’s likely line of defense is that the “Transparency Log” does not exist.
“We do not keep a list of sites categorized as extremist, [conspiratorial] and unreliable, and use this list to avoid citing them as sources. The only category of content that we block is sites known to contain illegal copyrighted material. All other instances of ChatGPT being unable to share links to content are due to it respecting the choices of site owners,” OpenAI spokesperson said.
