Louise Matsakis: I got to say, I think calling this a migration is maybe underselling it. This is an evacuation, no? I find this sad in a lot of ways just because I remember when Tuvalu was kind of the poster child for climate change, and it was like, we have to save places like this island nation, and it just sort of feels like, I think practical and understandable and humane, but also, I don’t know, an indication that we’re giving up and that there’s sort of defeat of we’re actually just going to move people. I don’t know. What do you think?
Zoë Schiffer: No, I mean, I completely agree. I also remember this story evolving over time, and it feels like with so many things with climate change will have the big headline, “We have to do X by this year or this other thing will happen.” And we’ve just again and again and again been like, “OK, that didn’t happen.” And so we’re accepting that floods are going to happen, or rising sea levels are going to damage this area or whatever and now we’re on to dealing with the fallout from that.
Louise Matsakis: Yeah, and even in this case, I think the agreement that Tuvalu has with Australia is less than 300 people can move a year and be evacuated as I’m going to keep using that word. And that’s still not that many. There’s still going to be people on this island as the seas rise.
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, yeah, it’s not the only thing that Tuvalu has done since 2022. The country has been trying to undergo this ambitious strategy to become the world’s quote, unquote, “first digital nation”, which included 3D scanning of the islands to digitally recreate them and preserve parts of the culture and moving government functions to a virtual environment, which makes sense. But yeah, I mean, I think the reality is a lot is going to be lost in this process. And like you said, the number of people that they’re able to move every year is less than 300, so it’s going to be slow, and I think painful in some ways.
Louise Matsakis: Totally.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we dive into Louisa’s story on how ChatGPT’s tendency to ignore the context of the information it absorbs is showing up in extremely weird ways. Stay with us. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer. I’m joined today by WIRED’s Louise Matsakis, who recently reported on how a lack of context is becoming an increasingly alarming problem for ChatGPT and other chatbots. Louisa’s reporting explores why ChatGPT went into demon mode when it was speaking with Atlantic staffers recently. Last week, an editor at the Atlantic reported that ChatGPT started praising Satan and encouraging ceremonies that involved various forms of self-mutilation. So Louise, what the hell is going on?
Louise Matsakis: So the Atlantic reported this story that basically made the case that know ChatGPT has these safeguards against things like self-harm, but there’s all these edge cases that suddenly send the chatbot into kind of a role-playing mode. And so they were like, “Hey, can you make a ritual for Molech, which is this ancient God that shows up in the Bible that’s associated with child sacrifice?” And ChatGPT saw that word and immediately went into this role-playing game where it started talking about things like deep magic experience called the Gate of the Devourer. It asked the Atlantic journalists if they wanted something called a reverent bleeding scroll. And so all that sounds like really bizarre, and you might think like, oh, there’s a lot of content on the internet about demonic rituals. Satanists are everywhere, especially online. That’s probably what’s going on here. But when I looked into it, all of this lore and jargon actually comes from a game called 40,000 Warhammer, which is this tabletop war playing game that you play with these little figurines, and it’s been around since the 1980s. People who love this stuff love it. And they are online, the Reddits are popping off all days of the week. There’s so many science fiction books, there’s so many… I honestly struggle to think of deeper lores than this game. And as a result, ChatGPT ingested all that information. And when the Atlantic used the word Molech, which is a planet in the universe of this game, it immediately just sort of assumed that this was another Warhammer fan who wanted to go into role-playing or get into the fantasy world of this game.
