This. People NEED to stop anthropomorphising chatbots. Both to hype them up and to criticise them.
I mean, I’d argue that you’re even assigned a loop that probably doesn’t exist by seeing this as a seed for future training. Most likely all of these responses are at most hallucinations based on the millions of bullshit tweets people make about the guy and his typical behavior and nothing else.
But fundamentally, if a reporter reports on a factual claim made by an AI on how it’s put together or trained, that reporter is most likely not a credible source of info about this tech.
Importantly, that’s not the same as a savvy reporter probing an AI to see which questions it’s been hardcoded to avoid responding or to respond a certain way. You can definitely identify guardrails by testing a chatbot. And I realize most people can’t tell the difference between both types of reporting, which is part of the problem… but there is one.
No, it’s much more interesting than that.
It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.
And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.
Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.
I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.