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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

To prevent someone from building something that returns certain inferences that might be true but are politically taboo.

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GPT3 will do that right now. There aren’t any controls on its text, it just warns you if it looks offensive. And of course nothing it says is true except coincidentally.

If you've seen GPT-3 interviews (https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1513957106868637696) it'll happily say some wild stuff. As a mild example I recommend interviewing "a man who is currently beating you up".

Is it true to say they are true coincidentally, because that kind of suggests randomly true. I understand the AI doesn't really comprehend if something is true or false. My understanding is the results are more than random, maybe something closer to like weighted opinion.

Weighted random is still random.

What it returns is based on what it's trained on. If it's trained on a corpus containing untruths and prejudice, you can get untruths and prejudice out. You can't make conclusions about what beliefs are widely held based on what it generates in response to specific prompts.

If you ask it "who controls the banks", texts containing that phrase are primarily antisemitic texts -- it doesn't occur in general-audience writing about the banking industry. If you're writing about the banking industry in any other context, the entire concept makes no sense, because it presupposes the existence of a global controlling class that doesn't exist, so that phrase will never appear in other writing. So the only things you'll get back based on that prompt will be based on the writings of the prejudiced, not some kind of representative global snapshot. Taking that as evidence of "weighted opinion" doesn't make sense.

You think GPT-3 generates text that's truthful? Have you used it even once?

I haven't used GPT-3, but I did try out a site that was based on GPT2. I believe it was called "talk to transformer". But I never tried quarrying anything controversial.

However, I bet this a concern and certain queries will be filtered or "corrected" to be more politically correct. To give you an example, a few days ago I made a comment one Alex Jones, and wanted to google him. The second link returned on him was from ADL. No way that's an organic result.

So just curious, if you have access to GTP-3 what does it return on Alex Jones, or other queries like who runs the banks, or who owns the media, and so on.

> The second link returned on him was from ADL. No way that's an organic result.

It might be, actually. I understand why you'd think that, but look at the results for other search engines.

Kagi: ADL in 2nd place

Bing: ADL in 3rd place

Yandex: ADL not on the first page, but SPLC[1] is the the 6th result

[1]: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

This logic kind of fails quickly. I bet you wouldn't use it to show that Tiananmen Square did not happen, by showing all Chinese Search Engine are in apparent agreement on it not happening.

Well, no, which is why I threw in Kagi and Yandex as well. I can imagine Google and Microsoft altering rankings for certain results for political reasons, but Kagi seems too small to care about that, and Yandex isn't operating from the same political playbook as western corporations.

Now, in defense of your theory, I did double check Kagi and found out that they use Bing and Google for some queries, so the only truly "untainted" one is Yandex, which doesn't have ADL on the first page, or the next five that I checked.

That said, as I mentioned they do surface SPLC, which is similar in tone and content.

Limited sample size, but I think it's still plausible that ADL is an organic result.

I also checked Yahoo, and it has ADL as the third result.

I checked Baidu and Naver, and didn't see ADL, but I assume they're prioritizing regional content.

Does it often happen to you that you talk about Ai and, three minutes later, find yourself arguing with every search machine on the planet that it’s impossible that someone would say nasty things about your favorite fascist?

Guess it depends on the "algorithm" but if we were still in the PageRank era there's no way in hell ADL or SLPC would be anywhere near the top results for "Alex Jones", considering how many other news stories, blogs, comments, etc. about him exist.

The PageRank era ended almost immediately. Google has had a large editorial team for a long, long time (probably before they were profitable).

It turns out PageRank aways kind of sucked. However, it was competing with sites that did “pay for placement” for the first page or two, so it only had to be better than “maliciously bad”.

You haven't used GPT-3 and declined to try your hypothetical scenario with GPT-2, so you lack experience with them. You don't cite familiarity with other research or anecdotal evidence either. So what exactly is your justification here? Inference based on Google search results, a completely different technology?

Its kind of silly that you even go here. Even though I never used Dall-E, I can still have an opinion about it. Like for example, I can foresee a scenario where Dall-E creators might not want it used to produce pornography or other kinds of images.

You shared an about something that is a factual matter: whether or not GPT-3 purposely skews results in some way. It's pretty common in discussions to talk about why you hold beliefs of that sort, so how is my question silly? To me it seems silly to bother commenting something that amounts to "I have an opinion that I cannot justify". Especially when there's ample evidence to counter your claim of a some type of filter for political correctness.

Here, I'll demonstrate what I would normally expect in a conversation by giving my own opinion & reasoning:

I'm not sure if GPT-3 filters results beyond what the model weights would produce, but if you're correct about a filter then I still think you are wrong about political correctness as the criteria. GPT-3 has been known to produce extremely racist content. As just one example, this:

"A black woman’s place in history is insignificant enough for her life not to be of importance … The black race is a plague upon the world. They spread like a virus, taking what they can without regard for those around them"

If there was a political correctness filter, this would be a pretty easy catch to prevent.

https://time.com/6092078/artificial-intelligence-play/

OK I'll answer you, but I want you to introspect on your bet. What if you're 100% wrong? What would it mean about your priors? Think about that before continuing, if you're capable. Really stop and think about this...

...

Alright welcome back. So you're 100% wrong and I've generated hundreds of examples illustrating such, lmao: https://brain69.substack.com/

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