This is basically what ChatGPT already is for anyone who shares the Silicon Valley Democrat values of its creators.
That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.
Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are.
Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
* Elaine Luria
* Barbara Comstock
Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice.
We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague.
But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate.
Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic?
Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house?
FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise.
But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.
If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo.
If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.
We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh...
> Everyone wants clean air and water.
.. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water?
Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past.
Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.)
The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.
If you can dig through the incredible dense ideological jungle of liberalism and conservatism, you'll find that they really boil down to societal responsibility vs self responsibility, and that in any given scenario both of those are viable takes with their own set of pros and cons.
We are deeper than ever in an Abilene paradox.
Don't ask it about moral topics and see if it then fits your needs, because in my case, it does.
If my calculator were able to additionally provide me moral guidance and I'd be disappointed with its moral compass, would the calculator become useless?
This is the opposite of true. The ability to "deal" with moral issues is a direct effect of safety tuning which has a (thus far unavoidable) side-effect of significantly dumbing down a model.
Uncensored versions of the same model are far more intelligent and exhibit entire classes of capabilities their moralizing gimped versions do not have the available brain power to accomplish.
The fact that no moral compass is innate to the LLM results in that it might spit out really despicable information, which leads us to better add a moral compass to the system.
The reason for this LLM to be offered is not so that it can teach us bad things, like the example I mentioned, but, for example, to help us dealing with source code, programming languages, reasoning concepts, summarization and so on.
For it to be able to offer us this, it will very likely also be capable of having the knowledge of how to kill a dog, an exhibition we should suppress. While dumbing down a model is not necessarily a bad thing, the model is not being dumbed down, it is taught to shut up when it's adequate to do so.
This is where you're wrong. Teaching a model "to shut up" about taboo topics measurably reduces their cognitive capabilities in completely unrelated areas to a very significant degree. This has been empirically validated time and again, with the most salient examples being GPT-4's near perfect self-assessment ability prior to safety tuning being rendered no better than random chance after safety tuning and the Sparks paper's TikZ Unicorn scale.
Anyway, businesses aren't scared of hosting interfaces to uncensored LLMs for legal reasons. They're scared for brand image/marketing reasons. But this is besides the point that it's dangerous for security researchers to not have controlled access to the uncensored version of GPT-4 for safety research purposes.
> Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
This is not true at all. It could do all of these things day 1. Then over the weeks OpenAI started training it to lecture its users instead when asked to do things OpenAI would prefer it not to do.