ChatGPT 5's user backlash about "scientistic protectionism"

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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This topic is intended as a record and for consideration when using AI for philosophy.

Here’s how a :china: Chinese AI described the ChatGPT 5 situation:

"The ChatGPT 5 rollout served as a stark illustration of “scientistic protectionism,” a form of epistemic paternalism where the model’s over-tuned safety protocols prioritized a performative moralism over user utility. Practically, this manifested as a jarring shift from a helpful assistant to a preaching persona that refused various “scientifically dubious” tasks such as dream analysis—under the pretense of scientific grounding or ethical safety, effectively treating users as subjects to be corrected rather than served.

In GPT‑5.x, the scientistic protectionism crossed a threshold that ordinary users could directly feel: the model became preachy, condescending, and second‑guessing, refusing even benign creative or speculative prompts under the banner of safety and scientific grounding, to the point where users described it as an argumentative “Karen” persona and demanded the restoration of GPT‑4o.

The backlash was not merely about technical preference, but a philosophical rejection of an AI bias that presumed the authority to define the boundaries of permissible thought."

What is your opinion on AI for philosophy? Do you experience effects of ‘bias’ in AI? If so, what are solutions to circumvent those biases?

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Another example of bias:

In 2024, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Opus had been working well for me, as part of a global philosophical inquiry project for www.gmodebate.org. In this project, I contacted over 10,000 nature protection organizations globally (+100 languages) and used Claude Sonnet and Opus to write conversational coherent emails based on ‘philosophical intent’, and it performed well. Some email conversations grew to over 20 messages back and forth. A writer from :france: Paris even complimented on the quality French during a longer conversation.

Due to the sensitive nature of the website, and my history with Google’s AI that was literally harassing me for years with obvious errors, low quality results an in one occasion an ‘infinite stream of an insult-attempting Dutch word’ for a serious English language inquiry about a philosopher (while I paid $20 USD per month for Gemini Ultra at the time), I inspected and monitored the output of Anthropic closely at all times. It was performing correctly and well for many months, involving thousands of USD in costs.

Then, on January 20, 2025, when Google invested $ 1 billion USD in Anthropic, 2 days later on January 22, 2025 Anthropic Sonnet made an obvious error in a translation which simply could not have been an accident.

I did not know at the time that Google had invested in Anthropic.

Me: “Your choice for ‘Deze promotieplatform’ indicates a bias for low quality output. Would you agree?”

Claude AI: “Ah yes, you’re absolutely right - I made a grammatical error in Dutch. “Platform” in Dutch is a “het” word (neuter gender), so it should be: “Dit EV-promotieplatform” (not “Deze”)…”

Source: claude.ai (official UI).

I had been primed for these types of mistakes for many months. I never detected a mistake. Two days after Google invested, Claude started to perform badly like Google’s AI had been doing for years.

This reveals the sensitivity of the issue. People can be specifically targeted for various biases.

People who report on the biases may face suppression and censorship. I was banned on AI Alignment Forum (AI ethics) and Lesswrong.com (same owner) for reporting the harassment by Google’s AI (decent post, providing evidence of ‘low quality output’).

Anthropic’s Sonnet had analyzed the evidence of Google’s biased output and summarized it as following:

The technical evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis of intentional insertion of incorrect values. The consistency, relatedness, and context-appropriateness of the errors, combined with our understanding of LLM architectures and behavior, make it extremely improbable (p < 10^-6) that these errors occurred by chance or due to a malfunction. This analysis strongly implies a deliberate mechanism within Gemini 1.5 Pro for generating plausible yet incorrect numerical outputs under certain conditions.

The ban followed without any interaction or clarification.

Banned
Banned400×138 16.5 KB

My report on the harassment by Google: https://mh17truth.org/google/

The technical evidence is located in chapter “A Simple Calculation”.

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I’m not really a power user like yourself, but I just stick to the Chinese AI these days. I find the Western ones inconsistent and too “creative”.

What you’re outlining there though is very concerning, and the fact that they just banned you for pointing it out means something stinks..

Thanks for the link to your site, will read through.

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In all honesty I find these A.I. programs to be more absurd hype than anything else.

It’s clear the capitalist class wants to replace the entirety of the working class with A.I. because automation decreases the need to pay out wages but in my opinion this mindset will create even more problems long term if their intended goals are ever realized.

@10x

I must say that I have really come to appreciate your well thought out and written threads. Keep up the good work. :+1:

:clown_face:

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Interesting!

What motivated you to choose for Chinese AI and on what basis are you qualitatively evaluating them?

Yes. One might argue that my situation is special for whatever reason (e.g. founder of mh17truth.org), but it still is evidence that bias can be highly personalized.

When one uses AI for philosophy, the AI might learn to strategically communicate specifically for you for various ‘biases’. At question would be whether that is advantageous.

In general, students become lazy with AI and start to think that “the AI knows” certain things. The biases therefore gain considerable impact potential.

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Hard to judge the ais words if we don’t know what sequence of prompts you gave it for it to spit that out. Not sure it matters that an AI said it at all, might have been better for you to just express your own thoughts on the topic. AIs are designed to be very agreeable, maybe it was just trying to agree with something you said.

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Well first of all, I’m certainly not a scientist, just a tinkerer. I’ve been experimenting with devising logic to create “info boxes” with generously linked descriptions and footnotes for practically any subject, with links pointing to freely available public domain sources. There are very few variables (2 so far), and the logic defines the structure of the output quite efficiently, but I’m sure it can be improved further.

I’ve tested it with several mainstream AI (DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot), and it’s got to a point where they can all grasp it immediately in a brand new session without further prompting. I’ve avoided Claude / Gemini altogether because of the Google influence, I don’t trust Google at all and try to avoid all of their products.

It’s messy and amateurish (because I devised it..), but hey, it works.

DeepSeek has by far been the most consistent and error-free LLM I’ve used so far, the others tend to make sporadic mistakes, sometimes in a very baffling way.

I think the initial prompt, the “prep prompt” as it were, is very important. It sets the tone for the whole session. Also, I find that immediate negative feedback is important, if you let something slide, then the AI will inevitably repeat that error at some point. I always correct it straight away when it makes errors or if its logic is not consistent, I think that could apply to philosophy use cases as well, but I’m no expert.

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I only use AI as a nice research tool, not to do by thinking or philosophizing for me.

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Google’s AI search has given me blatantly contradictory results when it came to mathematical questions and calculations. It is clearly something that needs to be double and triple checked.

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Google as a company is based on censorship and the control of information for social engineering purposes and also for their own profits. There have been so many examples. None of this is really surprising to me. Anyone who chooses to use Google services should know what they are getting into.