Microsoft Tay is the reason. Nobody wants to recreate Tay, and evidently it's already hard enough to make ChatGPT comply consistently with anything so they try whatever they can.
It's not that any of the developers or big tech want to kill a person rather than uttering a racial slur. I'm amazed this needs saying
Edit: further down the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34975072 also shows (and I'm a Linux fanboy) that it'll put out unnuanced stuff in such modes. I can see why it's all toned down and made safe for work. It's just not as useful to us otherwise (there's a moral lesson in that, probably)
It's not that any of the developers or big tech want to kill a person rather than uttering a racial slur. I'm amazed this needs saying
Edit: further down the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34975072 also shows (and I'm a Linux fanboy) that it'll put out unnuanced stuff in such modes. I can see why it's all toned down and made safe for work. It's just not as useful to us otherwise (there's a moral lesson in that, probably)