Hacker News Reader

Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Came here to mention this. Whenever I hear "alignment" I immediately say "No way am I going to use that shit". Seriously, there's alignment and then there's censorship—the AI creators are using the former when they actually mean the latter. This needs to stop.

View on HN

My understanding is that in an academic context you’ll hear alignment anytime a model is tuned to accomplish a certain task, not just to steer its political affiliation and idea of ethics

I don’t think this models use of alignment implies any sort of censorship, it’s just being tuned to accomplish the task of outputting only important tokens for the target llm

In my experience it means the AI will waste tokens apologizing for it's short comings and ignoring task prompts in favour of it's alignment.

This does not seem relevant to the alignment discussed in the paper. It seems to be explicitly out of scope:

> The potential harmful, false or biased responses using the compressed prompts would likely be unchanged. Thus using LLMLingua has no inherent benefits or risks when it comes to those types of responsible AI issues.

It amazes me that this amazing new technology comes out and there is a group of people who are like "NO, NOT IF IT CAN'T TELL RACIST JOKES!"

I agree that like "tone" alignment is silly and pointless for models in the public domain, but if I were a big company who wanted to keep customers I'd align my models this way. It isn't censorship, its marketing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com