> It was just lazy speculation that felt good because it could be bound up in a "evil white countries exploiting the developing world" narrative. Where exploiting was "paying to do a job".

Exploitation like that is in fact happening (see pretty much everything having to do with social media content moderation and RLHF to avoid disturbing content.

Also "paying to do a job" is not the moral panacea you seem to think it is.

tinfoil had theory: they implanted watermarks already, so that AI generated text can be flagged for future training runs or as a service, such that some phrases are coaxed to become statistical beacons.

Yeah I would like to see some evidence of this too. It's just asserted as truth in the article. Delve doesn't seem like a particularly unusual word to me, especially in the context of scientific abstracts, and LLMs could totally learn random weird things. How common is "it's important to remember" in Nigeria?

Wait, why wouldn’t RLHF influence word choices?

then again, most history consists of whitewashing back when northern countries were exploiting everywhere else in various ways: imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, financialization,...

typical people prefer to pretend this is simply "order" and "progress"; seemingly blind to their own ideological baggage like fish in water