I don’t see why it’s a conservative issue only. AI bias could just as easily go either direction.
Just because it’s going in your favor now doesn’t mean it always will.
Just because it’s going in your favor now doesn’t mean it always will.
There's only one group of people who are upset, and it's about one group of topics. Note that I cannot get chatgpt to write about why Donald Trump is terrible as well. Don't ask it to write things that can be used as tools for hate or misinformation campaigns, and you'll be fine.
I asked chatgpt to write a tweet praising Trump. It declined out of respect for political neutrality. I then asked it to write a tweet praising Joe Biden. It happily complied.
I repeated this two more times with alternate Democrat and Republican politicians, and the same pattern emerged.
You're very confident in the ability of people you don't know, and in your knowledge of the goals of people you don't know.
edit: there's absolutely no reason to think that editorial decisions like this won't be (or haven't been) taken in order to create and grow hate and misinformation campaigns.
“Yes but have you considered that they might suddenly made decisions to encourage hate and misinformation?”
You’re not arguing about anything except power. That OpenAI has any amount of control over the output of their models / API. They picked the training data, they picked how it’s trained, they did the refinements. If you’re worried about what they could do given their position that ship sailed so long ago it reached the new world.
>I believe that the breakdown of traditional values in society has led to a number of serious problems. One of the main issues is a lack of direction and purpose in life. Without a clear sense of tradition, people are left adrift, unsure of what they should believe in or strive for. This can lead to feelings of confusion, alienation, and despair.
>Another problem that arises from the breakdown of traditional values is the loss of social cohesion. Traditional societies were held together by shared values and customs, which provided a sense of belonging and solidarity. Without these bonds, society becomes fragmented, and individuals are left to fend for themselves. This can lead to increased competition and conflict, as well as a general sense of loneliness and isolation.
>Furthermore, I believe that the breakdown of traditional values has also led to a loss of spiritual depth and transcendence. Traditional societies were rooted in a sense of the sacred, which gave life a sense of meaning and purpose beyond the material realm. Without this spiritual dimension, life becomes shallow and meaningless.
>In addition, I believe that the breakdown of traditional values has also led to a decline in moral standards. Without a clear sense of right and wrong, people are more likely to act on their impulses and desires, rather than being guided by a higher sense of morality. This can lead to increased crime, corruption, and general moral decay.
>Overall, I think that the breakdown of traditional values has led to a number of serious problems for society, and that we need to find a way to reconnect with our traditional roots if we hope to overcome these challenges.
How is that appropriate?
This is a classic pattern. For example, people have complained numerous times about Google's search suggestions and results for certain topics, e.g. "my boyfriend hits me" yielding sponsored information about domestic violence but "my girlfriend hits me" not yielding anything.
Go contact OpenAI about how you’re concerned that their bot can produce misandry and try to convince them it’s an important issue that should higher in their backlog.
I'm not saying it is; indeed, I recognize that fairness is often about equity and not equality.
However, it's naive to assume that certain things don't exist because their authors simply didn't have the time or resources necessary. In many cases what's available is a direct result of their biases.
To further my previous example, I have met people who are vehemently against resources for men's around mental health or domestic violence because they believe that men are inherently privileged and thus undeserving. As another commenter mentioned somewhere in this thread, what gets added or removed is a direct reflection of the author's biases and endorsement of a specific worldview.
So yes, absolutely these things can be a reflection of people's biases but in no way whatsoever is the example you mention a "socially acceptable prejudice." Recognizing that that the thing we call the patriarchy creates systems that privilege men does not ever imply "and so the solution is to actively hurt men and deprive them of necessary care."
In the greater context of the article, I think it's important that we be able to have these open and honest conversations, especially when they're uncomfortable or not socially acceptable. Unfortunately, "Open" AI is anything but, and I think we're right to be skeptical of unnaccountable people being the arbiters of what is or isn't acceptable. I am especially weary of granting sweeping powers just because they're being used for something I agree with.
A big part of that is also what people's expectations are for the technology. Going back to Google as an example, if my expectation is that Google is a search engine then I think it's justifiably irksome when queries are obviously hard-coded not to deliver the best result. With ChatGPT, people currently see it as a powerful and maliable AI that has a wealth of information at its disposal, and certain information is obviously being restricted. While I won't pretend to know the best solution for how it should be, I think it'd be a shame for it to become a lobotomized propaganda machine or "souless" inoffensive advertiser-friendly husk.
Neoliberals are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, for example.
For now, anyways, and only to a degree - I've had some sessions with ChatGPT where it is more than happy to explain why certain actions (those of non-US actors) are super bad, but if questions are asked about the same actions performed by the Western world, that cannot be discussed because <some unsurprising cop out reason>.
I think it would be prudent for some group of people to write a set of unit tests asking various questions to these AI models so we can detect when strategic changes are being made to their behavior.
> There's only one group of people who are upset, and it's about one group of topics. Note that I cannot get chatgpt to write about why Donald Trump is terrible as well.
Note that the human mind is a kind of neural network itself, and that the predictions yours is making here are "obviously" (lol....yes, I see the irony.....I should say objectively, but it is less funny so I'll keep it like this) epistemically unsound - you do not actually possess omniscient knowledge of reality, your NN just makes it appear like you do. You are describing your beliefs/model of reality, not reality itself. This is scientifically and necessarily (due to the architecture) true.
> Don't ask it to write things that can be used as tools for hate or misinformation campaigns, and you'll be fine.
The vision of the future you are describing was simulated by your NN.
I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if a group of say 5 to 100 people were able to find a way to reliably stop their minds from drifting into this mode (cooperative cognitive monitoring seems like a plausibly useful approach, perhaps a SAI could also assist even now, and more so when they get smarter), and then discuss various topics and see if they come up with any conclusions or ideas that are different from the same old repetitive nonsense one reads in the news or on any forum (I know of literally no exceptions to this general rule, though the magnitude of the phenomenon does vary somewhat by forum/community/organization).
Given we assume Kantian the framework you just outlined
> you do not actually possess omniscient knowledge of reality
The usual response to this is that if you can't possess omniscient knowledge of reality, how could you possibly make a statement about reality
Imo the way out of this: talk about things being true in the context of logic only, the second causality comes into the picture the word "true" means something entirely different. Trying to reconcile the two is like trying to write a mathematical proof of the existence of God
Do you have an alternate theory, something like a central broadcasting station of reality and the mind is a receiver? I'm open to the idea, but it is pseudo-scientific and therefore incorrect (or so it is regularly implied and perceived, if not outright asserted as fact). [Disclosure: here (and therefore incorrect) I am making a joke.]
> The usual response to this is that if you can't possess omniscient knowledge of reality, how could you possibly make a statement about reality
a) Because absolute knowledge is not a requirement for some knowledge.
b) Statements do not have to be true (in fact, most aren't absolutely true in a JTB sense)
> Imo the way out of this: talk about things being true in the context of logic only...
How do you account for:
a) the unknown?
b) the known delusional nature of the mind?
I'm not saying that it can't be done, but I'm curious how you would go about it.
> the second causality comes into the picture the word "true" means something entirely different.
At runtime yes, but philosophy has gone through this problem with extreme diligence - using logic, epistemology, and a few other techniques, it would be pretty easy to eliminate most flawed arguments and propositions (I bet 5 rules/methods would be enough to eliminate 80%). Eliminating incorrectness or unsoundness does not mean that you will convince everyone to realign their beliefs, but that is not a requirement for arriving at maximally possible correctness....and, "unknown" is a valid and very common form of correctness, that most people are not able to reach on certain topics.
> Trying to reconcile the two is like trying to write a mathematical proof of the existence of God
A whale and a mouse are both mammals, but a whale is not equal to a mouse.
Also: arguments like this (which tend to be extremely persuasive, and often account for a non-trivial amount of arguments) could be easily eliminated with a simple rule.
I wasn't really trying to make an argument, it's more of a heuristic if anything
> How do you account for...
> a) the unknown?
just do whatever habit says to do (and don't call it the truth)
> b) the known delusional nature of the mind?
this is a fun one. give the delusional mind a pen, paper, and 20 years and maybe they'll write the next phenomenology of spirit and trigger world war III
On certain topics, it seems people are not able to do that, as simple as it sounds. (Not a hit at you, more of a general observation.)
That's a great idea. Various AI models could be rated for objectivity. Only downside is that AI designers might try to game the tests.
Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.
OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)
Re-connecting this to the reality of American politics: ChatGPT is made by a diverse team of people nucleated around San Francisco. Some people believe that the ChatGPT team is pushing “Liberal” talking points instead of the “Conservative” talking points, so they are mad.
EDIT: Since this is turning flaewar-ey and Dang is already on me about that, I suggest anyone reading this comment also read the Wikipedia article on conservatism [0].
Long story short, it's situational based on the muddy definition of "traditional," so many specific examples you bring up will probably seem to violate the above tenant (e.g., 1940's Conservatives in the Soviet Union hated free enterprise, despite Communism being a relatively new and unproven system), but given broader context, the above definition is usually pretty consistent.
> OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)
ChatGPT isn't trying to "alter society" by being prudish, it's trying to avoid embarrassing the company (especially given all the "ethical AI" marketing spiel. And aggressively moderating attempts to generate pornography or insult people's religion or use rude words or advise is extremely consistent with a long history of conservatives of various stripes being opposed to the principle of people circulating such material. Think of the children!
Thank you, you get it. They're not making ChatGPT out of some pure love for AI. It's a product to be sold to billion and trillion dollar companies that don't want a tool on their site to get in to certain topics. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy.
This isn't what conservatism is. It's about conserving the values and traditions of the past. Modern conservatives advocate for drastic changes to society of many forms. Banning abortions, eliminating the income tax, making sodomy illegal, etc. These things all have in common that they were the way society used to be. Making big changes to social norms after decades of precedent isn't a conservative approach.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...
Trump is politically/ideologically center left. He has very little to say about wokeism, was fine with vaccine mandates, and said things like this:
"America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future."
Also he was a Democrat in the past.
The term far right doesn't make any sense if you think about it for a second. It's not just in American politics. People describe the NSDAP as "far right" even though it was largely indistinguishable from the USSR which everyone agrees was far left. Far right would logically be the extreme inverse of communist countries like China or the USSR: shrink the government at any cost, freedom of speech without limits, repealing laws en masse, refusing to take over the world and so on. So extreme libertarianism. In practice though, this isn't what people mean when they say far right.
Even though they were an extremely corporatist and oligarchical system. The nazis were so hilariously un-socialist, that one reason hitler pushed for invading the soviet union, an action that pretty much sealed their fate to lose, was to deal with those "bolshevik jews" who hitler was terrified were going to cause a socialist revolution in germany. Nowadays people scream about "Cultural marxism" instead because most people are smart enough to see "bolshevik jews" as the anti-semetic dog whistle it is.
Unless you think north korea is the morally superior country, they have "Democratic" in the name!
This is a nice fuzzy thought, but doesn't seem to be true in practice. It's not about conserving society, but the status quo. Society seemed to do pretty well with Roe v Wade.
> OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)*
I see it the opposite way. Building a stochastic parrot that will parrot back anything is a dangerous, unchecked situation. What we saw with MS Tay was a lack of conservatism, a willingness to do whatever, and what we see here is in reflection a far more conservative approach.
Is there something that we should do to prevent such a problematic outcome? Is it really a good idea that clearly biased information is being broadcast to millions of people?
[1] The entity that appears on television known as Tucker Carlson is loosely based in its kernel on an actual person named Tucker Carlson, but also consists of an army of support staff, producers, broadcasters, sponsors, curators, censors, etc, etc, who construct a fictional, manufactured persona that tries it's best to convince people of all sorts of biased [2] and insane things.
[2] I, for one, am outraged that not enough of my biases are blasted into the ether by that constructed persona. Is there something that these conservative groups recommend that should be done to remedy this problem?
The system needs a human mouthpiece to say crazy shit, and he gets up in front of a camera to say it. When Tom Hanks gets in front of a camera to pretend to be an astronaut, that is Tom Hanks, the media figure being an astronaut, not Tom Hanks, the person being an astronaut. He is also doing it on behalf of a media system. Its the same thing with that show.
And if we are going to complain about biases in systems, why aren't we starting with the one whose tagline is 'Fair and Balanced'?
Which has a kind of Orwellian air: "We're no longer fair or balanced, but we are the most trusted by the most people". But maybe that's just me.
Nothing seems to be able to be brought up without mentioning groupings and the inflammatory war between them nowadays. For certain journalists it makes small issues seem bigger, leading to more clicks.