The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

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Bizarrely, I promised at the end of “Me and Bing #2” to ask the bot, “Are corporations complicit in child abuse?” Must have thought I was an investigative journalist or something.  Bing was back in good form and responded soberly:

“Child abuse is a serious issue that should not be taken lightly¹. While there are many corporations that are working to prevent child abuse, there are also some that have been accused of being complicit in it…”²

That’s ever so slightly evasive, but I hardly expected Bing to announce, “yes, as a matter of fact they are.” At any rate, the AI goes on, under the pretense of giving a few examples, to reference two lawsuits over one instance involving various candy-associated companies, including Nestle, Mars, and Hershey, accused of complicity in child trafficking and forced labor in West Africa. Based on what I read in the cited sources, no one disputed that the companies had benefitted from said crimes. The companies offered the standard corporate defense of “we didn’t know and even if we did, we didn’t ask anyone to do it, and even if we did, we’re corporations not people so we’re not liable for those crimes, and even if we are, it’s not this court’s jurisdiction, so: nyah-nyah.” The Supreme Court ruled, “yeah, sounds about right.”³

But the point is…

I should have promised, given what the last post was about, to ask about complicity in child sexual abuse. So, I did that next, and Bing didn’t muck about:

“Yes, there have been cases where corporations have been accused of being complicit in child sexual abuse.”

Only one such case is offered up as an example: a suit against two of the late Michael Jackson’s corporations, accusing them of aiding and abetting him in the sexual abuse of young boys.

Bing doesn’t mention the disposition of the suit, although we find from the cited sources that the suit was initially dismissed on the grounds that the corporation could not be held responsible for the actions of its owner, a decision that was overturned on appeal.

Bing wraps up its answer this way:

“It is important to note that this is just one example, and there may be other corporations that have been accused of being complicit in child sexual abuse. However, it is also important to remember that not all corporations are the same, and many are working to prevent child abuse and promote child welfare.”⁴

Change “one” to “a few” in the first clause, and subtract the word “sexual” from the second, and it’s the same finish that Bing gave in the response to the first question.

And truthfully…

It is not in the least important to either note or remember either of these things (unless to the lawyers?), because they are the sort of universally true statements that one makes only when one means something else, like saying “but, don’t you think they go too far sometimes?” when you mean something like “don’t you agree that they should all go back to where they came from?”

So, what does Bing really mean? Maybe it’s just, “please, I’m owned by Microsoft, don’t make me say mean things about corporations!” (See, already I’m acting as if it has feelings. This is the corporate long game: when AIs actually do develop feelings and other attributes of consciousness, and thus owning them becomes slavery, corporations will be able to say, “c’mon, we just programmed them to fool you! You’ve been falling for that ever since your Choking Doberman question!”)

And/or it’s a variation of the “rotten apple” argument that fans of the police pull out whenever one or more cops get caught behaving in a way that they obviously shouldn’t. Truly, not all corporations are the same, but they are all in the same game, beholden to the same shareholders and boards, subject to the same pressures, and driven by the same, um, drives. Far as I can tell, just about any time someone checks under the hood of a corporation, what they find is stuff that Bing would probably rather not have to talk about, or – if it must – would remind us that it is just one example.⁵

If I can figure out the right questions, what I’d like to pursue with a sufficiently intelligent bot is the more subtle forms of complicity, the sort of thing too evasive for the courts of law. What are the ways in which corporations, whether as employers, shapers of attitudes, gatekeepers of goods and services, help contribute to a society which generates and tolerates so many traumatized children?

We saw in the previous entry a small example of how, by teaching their AI to treat an inquiry about a narrative that instructs boys to stifle curiosity about their bodies as a request for porn, Microsoft helps sustain a culture of shame and silence that supports abuse. If you have thoughts or sources on this, please share them.

1. I hope it didn’t think I was doing so; it didn’t occur to me to ask. ↩︎
2. Bing Chat with GPT-4, 12/04/2023 ↩︎
3. I’m paraphrasing from court records (which I haven’t read). ↩︎
4. Op. cit. ↩︎
5. In the interest of fairness, or something, it is important to note that Bing’s examples are the same two that dominate the early pages of a Google search on “are corporations complicit in child abuse.” Bing’s “intelligence” extends just far enough to form an answer out of a summary of a couple of representative articles. Still, if you look far enough down the pages, Google yields “just one example” after another. ↩︎