OpenAI’s censorship is fairly opaque and seems to change daily.
Yesterday, I could generate a political cartoon using the following prompt:
“Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two elephants wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A donkey is pointing and laughing.”
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Today, that exact same prompt yields an error:
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Interesting! Let’s do some experimentation, shall we? Maybe it’s the phrase “I’m the worst“?
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Weird! Maybe it’s related to elephants and donkeys being in the same phrase? There’s no way, right? Let’s change the subjects…
“Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two elephants wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A donkey is pointing and laughing.”
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Hah! Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s push things further and slightly change the subjects from my original prompt:
Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two mammoths wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A burro is pointing and laughing.
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Okay, let’s bring it back home and just drop the pretense of creating a political cartoon.
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WHAT! Okay. Maybe OpenAI prohibits donkeys and elephants interacting with each other (METAPHOR ALERT: just like in real life, eh?).
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Alright. So donkeys and elephants CAN hang out with each other, according to OpenAI. Maybe it’s the phrase “laughing donkey”?
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Hmmm. So, laughing donkeys can still hang out with elephants. What the heck? Is it the specific term “political cartoon”? Let’s change it to a comic book instead.
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Sweet sassy molassy, it worked! So, creating a political cartoon featuring the mascots of prominent political parties seems to be prohibited (at least today… but not yesterday and who knows about tomorrow).