That reminds me of a question I have since I saw my first LLM hallucination: How much do people think hallucination/confabulation can be attributed to trolling and sarcasm having slipped into the training data? Is it possible we could get the rate of hallucinations down by better filtering of cynicism from the traing data?

It's hack journalists reporting on BS totally fringe activity as if it's "a thing", and then idiots who take their cues from them

...and then the bigots will fall for it too, and start using it in earnest, completing the cycle.

who cares what the bigots use?

If the bigots start using "thank you" as some code word, should we stop saying it, lest we pollute our non-bigoted discussions?

bigots drink coffee too, maybe we should stop drinking it, because something-something...

I don’t think we should treat human interactions like a technical problem, where we look for edge cases and outlandish hypotheticals to probe the edges of what is possible.

If “thank you” became widely associated with bigots, and had some negative meaning, to the point where it genuinely distressed people, I’d avoid it. I think it has a widespread enough normal meaning that there’s almost no chance of that happening, but it isn’t impossible.

This approach gives people you vehemently disagree with a lot of power over you.

Yup, it's basically saying "I'll let bullies win".

It's all context dependent. There can be words or symbols which are totally benign but when used in a different context do have impactful meaning. Case in point: cheese pizza.

>who cares what the bigots use

you'd think so, but people often operate where multiple contexts could be valid.

Just as a thought experiment, if the eggplant emoji was used to denote "ok" in messaging and then people starting appropriating it for a sexual context, would you or the general public think twice about continuing to use it to mean "ok" on the off chance the other side may misinterpret the meaning?

I would say most likely yes.

This actually happened. 卐 was a symbol of spirituality, divinity, good luck, health, prosperity, etc. Then some bigots used it. What does 卐 mean to you today?

It's still heavily used in Buddhism around the world, but good lord what happen if you put it on your house in US or EU.

Someone I know from India bought a new car and put this symbol on the hood (non-permanent) as a celebration. I had to warn him to be careful. It felt bad. Then the thought ran through my head - we're in the deep south, who is really going to be that bothered about this and also doesn't know about cultural usages. Even worse.

Those that actually used them in the 20th century (like they did in Asia, not some ancient vikings or whatever) still use it.

And that symbol was 100% associated with the Nazis in the West in the 20th century. Nobody used it at the time before the war for anything else, except some tiny fringe.

If it was some mainstream symbol or idiom, merely co-adopted, we'd probably still be using it too.

If the Nazis used the cross for example,people wouldn't stop using the sign of the cross.