I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to act like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere) "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly bans any discussion of that topic.
Though it would be fun to see what happens if an LLM if used to ban anything that tends to generate heated exchanges. It would presumably learn to ban racial terms, politics and politicians and words like "immigrant" (i.e. basically the list in this repo), but what else could it be persuaded to ban? Vim and Emacs? SystemD? Anything involving cyclists? Parenting advice?
No, it isn't, and especially hasn't been historically. The negative connotations are overwhelmingly modern.
The areas where it is very inappropriate right now tally up to maybe 1 billion people*. That's pretty far from "most". For everyone else it is mostly positive, neutral, or meaningless.
*Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, other parts of Eastern Europe
The PADI standard gestures are used and recognized all over the world to mean these things.
Maybe that is what Richard Nixon thought as well when he caused a little scandal using it in South America in 1950. In 1992 when the Chicago Tribune published "HANDS OFF" mentioning said episode the negative connotations still seemed to be in place[1].
In 1996 The New York Times stated "What's A-O.K. in the U.S.A. Is Lewd and Worthless Beyond"[2] as title of an article confirming the negative connotations.
It is worth mentioning that this article lists Australia amongst the places where the gesture is inappropriate. I always thought it was something used only in the English-speaking world but it seems in reality it is more like a North American plus diving world thing.
If you don't believe the press, I traveled around the world for more than 30 years and I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1992/01/26/hands-off-34/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/18/weekinreview/what-s-a-ok-...*
It's perfectly OK in Greece.
What about the other 7-8 billion people still using it normally?
Quit being overly pedantic. We all knew there was an unironic purpose for the gesture before it became ironic.
I strongly doubt you do that. Whether you like it or not, the Nazis defined what the swastika means now.
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...
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.
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 one is sfw, not all of the comics are)
Even urban dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for skub as a slur.
What about this then: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/skub
Karen Hao interviewed many of them in her latest bestselling book, which explores the human cost behind the OpenAI boom:
