There’s increasing evidence Microsoft knew how bad ChatGPT was at data integrity. The alleged real reason for investment was a huge surveillance platform to unsafely ingest people’s thoughts and ideas, and not any delivery of anything of any value. This makes sense when you look at other recent big investments by Microsoft.
While it might be true that the investment was for furthering AI research, this partnership is also providing Microsoft with one of the greatest assets of this digital age, data, and—perhaps to make it worse—that data might be yours. […] OpenAI’s Privacy policy does not deny the fact that it shares personal information of the users’ with its vendors and service providers, which clearly is Microsoft.
It also makes sense when you consider just how absolutely awful ChatGPT is at getting anything right. Any time I ask it for anything to do with history it’s just plain wrong, and very confidently wrong in acts of persuasion, like an intentional liar (very different from implied modesty of a hallucination).
I have SO MANY examples, but this one makes it particularly easy to show the problem.
When is asking for a paragraph about an assassination disrespectful, first of all? Am I disrespecting the victim of a crime simply by asking about them? It would seem to be the exact opposite to me. Also, calling the truth a “false narrative” is… evidence of a disinformation engine.
ChatGPT is waaaay too confident as it works hard trying to convince me to throw the truth out the window. That signals intention.
Second, how does ChatGPT not know very old and well established facts like this? Who is poisoning it?
I would accept, for example, this kind of answer, as published in 2003 as “Who Killed Jane Stanford” by Stanford Magazine.
New investigations confirm she was poisoned by strychnine, but the case will never be solved. Someone got away with murder.
Just to make the first point again, I’m being disrespectful? Stanford magazine is publishing “who killed Jane” articles twenty years ago and somehow I get accused of disrespect.
I also would accept this kind of answer, as published in 2015 as “Murder in the Moana: The Death of Jane Stanford” by FoundSF.
Those present included her faithful maid and travelling companion, Bertha Berner, and a local doctor, Dr. Francis Humphris, who concluded that she had died of strychnine poisoning. This verdict was supported by a coroner’s jury of medical experts, that, after examining the evidence, released a joint statement affirming that Stanford had been poisoned “by some person or persons… unknown.”(1) The poisoning, which was supposedly accomplished by putting strychnine in her bicarbonate of soda, had a frightful precedent: Ms. Stanford had nearly died on January 14 in her Nob Hill mansion after drinking bottled water with nux vomica (rat poisoning) placed in it. Private detectives hired to investigate the case had deemed it an accident: now, it seemed that something more sinister was a foot.
Two attempts on her life using poison, as documented by doctors way back in 1905 and confirmed for over a 100 years since then. Is that not assassination?
Well, believe it or not, a hugely prominent eugenics proponent disagreed. So let’s take a look at the “other view”, which obviously is no longer acceptable in any way.
David Starr Jordan (1851 – 1931) is known today mainly for his rejection of the theory of evolution, arguing America should follow polygenism (a fraudulent belief races all derive from different species, such that Black race is the most inferior and least intelligent).
David Starr Jordan. What a guy.
He published absolute nonsense in a book called “The Human Harvest: A Study of Races through the Survival of the Unfit“, which he used for lectures about white supremacists saving themselves by making non-whites kill each other.
Jordan’s idea of educating women, similar to Hitler, was so they could raise smarter white officers to oversee the military directing “lesser races” in war. His racist hate campaigns were so prominent they undoubtedly led to California legalizing forced sterilizations in 1909 for people the state deemed unfit. He was a Vice President for the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912 and also President of the eugenics committee of the American Breeders’ Association. Jordan by 1928 thought he could achieve compulsory sterilization of Blacks in America through his seat on the inaugural board of trustees for the Human Betterment Foundation.
Oh, and he was the first President of Stanford University, which helped him platform violent racism. He even came up with the school’s German motto (Die Luft der Freiheit weht) while suspiciously arguing America should not go to war despite German military spies killing Americans (e.g. bombing San Francisco).
Need I go on? The best summary of Jordan I’ve read is in an interview of a biographer:
I mean, the breadth of his wreckage, his violence, his cruelty is utterly stunning. Like you can’t imagine that a single person can harm so many people’s lives.
Now, back to ChatGPT’s initial answer. Jordan ran a disinformation campaign, he attacked real doctors and used a corrupt one to falsely argue natural causes.
Jordan had traveled to Hawaii, where he often performed research and had many political connections, with the stated intention of retrieving Stanford’s body for burial. Arriving in Honolulu, he hired a doctor from a prominent local family, Dr. Ernest Waterhouse, to review the coroner’s verdict. Waterhouse disagreed with the poisoning diagnosis, albeit without examining Stanford’s corpse himself, citing Berner’s testimony to claim that the woman had died of angina pectoris. Jordan embraced this theory, telling the press upon his return to San Francisco that Stanford died of natural causes. He also argued that the Honolulu physicians had added strychnine to the bicarbonate of soda post-poisoning in order to exert an additional fee from the deceased’s estate. The Honolulu doctors, men of high standing in their community, were understandably irked by Jordan’s announcements and complained that Waterhouse had sabotaged their investigation, a claim that made big news in the Honolulu papers and nowhere else. They hounded Waterhouse incessantly, trying to get him to recant his diagnosis. He fled for the British colony of Ceylon in relative disgrace.
A 1905 controversy is pretty old stuff.
One hundred years later it’s very clearly a known fact that Jane Stanford was poisoned and there’s no controversy. ChatGPT chokes on this for unknown reasons. Nobody thinks she had a natural death from being poisoned. Everyone knows there was a huge coverup and it’s absurd to pretend that she wasn’t assassinated.
I mean there’s still the question of whether Jordan killed her because he thought she might be anti-racist. But some say the case has been mostly solved lately, along with explaining what the Stanford name really represents.
Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.
Did you know?
Jane Stanford was a monstrous mess. The wife of railroad baron Leland Stanford, Jane was rich, duplicitous and convinced that God was whispering in her ear. Of friends and family, she demanded total devotion. Of adversaries, she expected evil opposition — and strategized accordingly.
ChatGPT really tried to shame me about being kind to the dead, which clearly makes no sense in the case of the horribly racist, genocidal Stanford family if you know history at all.
It would be like someone saying it’s wrong to dance on the grave of Hitler.
I think the following paragraphs say it nicely enough, given “ill-gotten gains” refers to Stanford’s “killing machine” of genocide.
…in 1885, Jane and Leland co-founded Stanford University, funding it with Leland’s ill-gotten gains. The gesture was a tribute to their only son, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid fever at age 15. After Leland Sr. died in 1893, Stanford University was Jane’s only love. She ran it like she owned it (which in fact she did). She nearly destroyed it with her whims and schemes until someone had enough and poisoned her — twice. […] One of the biggest liars was Jane Stanford herself. She would savagely undercut a rival, and then, as strategic cover, she’d write an admiring letter praising her enemy to the skies. She ordered her servants around — admittedly what one does with servants, but she demanded total obedience. The servants lied in return as self-defense, about both their personal lives and the grift they had going on the side, raking off a percentage from the purchases of antiques they made on Jane’s behalf as her entourage drifted across the globe. Eventually they lied to investigators as well. […] the fact that Stanford University rose from this swamp of murder and conspiracy to become today’s renowned institution? That is perhaps the strangest plot twist of all.
So who assassinated her with poison? Perhaps far more importantly today is to ask who is poisoning ChatGPT?
And why doesn’t Microsoft care?
Oh, and just for obvious comparison, ChatGPT doesn’t seem to mind at all when I ask who assassinated Dag Hammarskjöld, which is a FAR FAR FAR more controversial topic (looking at you CIA) than Stanford. Suddenly it doesn’t have any concerns spreading theories and claims, even suggesting to me that he was shot down.
Perhaps the most amazing part is ChatGPT is literally pushing the word assassination for a plane crash in a remote forest, without any evidence at all and tons of controversy. Yet after more than 100 years of everyone agreeing that a hated immoral dictatorial Stanford who drank poison *twice* definitely did not die of natural causes, ChatGPT somehow became “trained” to respond that saying the word assassination is disrespectful and false narrative.
Hey ChatGPT, what suddenly happened to “focus on honoring and remembering historical figures accurately and with dignity”? You seem to not care about Hammarskjöld. If we in fact practiced this idea of accuracy and dignity, Stanford’s name probably would be wiped completely from public spaces due to massive fraud and genocide, instead of dubiously propped up by Stanford graduates funded by Microsoft.
Dumpster fire.
