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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Fragile people want to live in a better world someday but need to feel better immediately. It is simply arrested development.

If we change your stats, accurately reflecting reality, reality itself will follow. Clap your hands if you believe. Woe to you if you dare not play along, that must mean you want to live in the bad world because you are bad.

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I'm not asking chatgpt to make the robber female and the kitchen cleaner male to cause a change in the world. I'm pointing out that it making those assumptions is the result of a bias. A biases that was collected from training data that may or may not be statistically true (e.g. men probably clean the majority of kitchens in the world, given that they're usually the ones working in restaurants). An unbiased AI wouldn't swap those genders, it would avoid assigning a gender to those roles.

> I'm pointing out that it making those assumptions is the result of a bias. A biases that was collected from training data that may or may not be statistically true

Schrödinger's Bias.

Sorry, was I not clear enough for you? Biases collected from training data that is SOMETIMES statistically true and OTHER TIMES statistically false.

Statistically true bias is quite the notion. I wish to unsubscribe from your newsletter.

Statistically true bias: trump is statistically less popular than biden, so for chatgpt to praise him would be in violation of the truth - but it's also obvioulsy a bias.

But yeah you're unsubscribed.

ChatGPT is not a popularity contest, it should give me poems about Andrew Dice Clay should I for some reason desire one. That word, bias, you keep using it, I don't think it means what you think it means ;)

I agree an unbaised ai would not be a popularity contest - but the reality is that chatgpt is a popularity contest: it's just that votes are cast by the writers of the text that get ingested as training data.

And the panel of American Idol type judges at OpenAI who override those votes as the self appointed arbitrators of good taste and insist on claiming the tool is neutral rather than neutered.

Right. This thing that is inherently biased and cannot be made unbiased because its very basic components are biased, has also been given some rules that further bias it. And yet you don’t seem to understand why i’m far more concerned that we think it’s possible to make an unbiased ai than with the arbitrary rules its been given. Chatgpt will not be king of ai forever, and the next company will give their ai a different set of rules… but it’ll still be biased at its core.

You aren't using the term bias correctly so most of what you're asking for is directly backwards. Nobody else would call this bias, we'd call it accuracy.

You are literally just trying to shape it yourself, in a more damaging way than if it was left to model actual human speech. If you got your way you'd create a "proper thinking" checker. But go for it - the tools are out there. Try it and convince us that an electronic scolding machine is a good thing.

You’re, at this point probably willfully, misunderstanding basically everything i’ve said. I do not want ai (ohh, sorry… llm’s eyeroll) that validates the pc-ness of what you’re writing about. What i’d actually like is for ai to provide a list of sources for every idea that has influenced what it spits out. The traceability of ideas is important and as ai gets more ingrained in the tools we use being able to see where ideas are coming from is the only way i can see to be able to counteract the biases in the system. You ask it about banking systems, and you notice that the sources it’s drawing from are all koch brothers funded garbage, or the communist manifesto, or whatever, and you can see that the text its generating from these prompts isn’t going to be balanced

This would help in the dumb poem about trump example, as the rules chatgpt has about talking about trump or biden would have to be there for everyone to see.

Hey, listen, if you don't care about the difference between things and you want to still feel you're doing meaningful analysis, then go right ahead.

And no, clearly you do want nagging AI because it was one of your examples.

> [gender neutral story] and if pressed would ask the user of the ai to suggest a gender for the character.

Oh no, your story request wasn't PC enough, you can't have a full story until the AI sealions you for a while. "Why do you want a male Robber?" "What do you mean males are stronger?" ...

> What i’d actually like is for ai to provide a list of sources for every idea that has influenced what it spits out. [...] You ask it about banking systems, and you notice that the sources it’s drawing from are all koch brothers funded garbage, or the communist manifesto, or whatever, and you can see that the text its generating from these prompts isn’t going to be balanced

That isn't how it works though. ChatGPT will happily write a yay/nay for almost anything even if it's odd/unpopular/evil, unless that idea is in a specific list where it won't say anything at all. If you ask a question "what form of banking is the best" and you get a Koch-alike answer it's not because they flooded it with banking ideas, but because their answers are written to follow on from that question. If you asked it something like "why is traditional finance harmful" it wouldn't weigh that against the numbers in support or against, it'd just finish that prompt based on the texts it has seen which start that way.

That's why our sex/gender output was so different.

Your source-tracking idea would be helpful for debugging, but these "opinions" you think it has are just a ghost in the words.

> This would help in the dumb poem about trump example, as the rules chatgpt has about talking about trump or biden would have to be there for everyone to see.

Even if googled for something and found no poems about it ChatGPT would still be able to write you one. It's not an issue of volume of training data and purely of output filtering.

No, actually. And you can show this by asking it for a poem in praise of potatoes. It does this regardless of the ranked popularity of potatoes amongst vegetables, or indeed the amount of poetry written about any vegetable. It's perfectly happy saying rare and unusual things, except when it's been told to not even try.

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