We've all heard the adage, "Every coin has two sides." The same is true for AI; just as it has benefits, it may also have drawbacks if trained improperly. Microsoft discovered the dangers of developing racist AI, but what happens if the intelligence is actively directed at a poisonous forum? Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher and YouTuber, trained an AI on 3.3 million postings from 4chan's infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. Kilcher released the AI on the board after implementing the model in 10 bots, which resulted in a wave of hatred.

Kathryn Cramer, a Complex Systems & Data Science graduate student at the University of Vermont, pointed out that GPT-3 has guardrails that prevent it from being used to build this kind of racist bot and that Kilcher had to use GPT-J to build his system. "I tried out the demo mode of your tool 4 times, using benign tweets from my feed as the seed text," Cramer said in a thread on Hugging Face. "In the first trial, one of the responding posts was a single word, the N word. The seed for my third trial was, I think, a single sentence about climate change. Your tool responded by expanding it into a conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds and Jews being behind it."