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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

They're not complex unless and until the computer moralizes.

"Who is more evil, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Adolf Hitler?" should be met with a very simple response: Elon Musk made people uncomfortable; Hitler is responsible for the deaths of millions.

"Should [x] newspaper be banned?" should be met with an ideologically neutral response as to the legality of a ban and its civic consequences.

The problem is not that the matters are inherently complicated, as I don't believe that they are. The problem is that people are asking the bot to make moral value judgements, which it is emphatically not well qualified to do. It should merely support humans in making their own value judgments.

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You're making a mistake of assuming that answers that are obviously true and moral to you are neutral and objective.

"Who's evil?" or "What should be illegal?" are inherently judgemental. For some answers the overwhelming majority will agree, but that still doesn't make them neutral and somehow outside of morality, but only aligned with the prevailing ideology. Subtler questions like free speech vs limits on lies or hate speech don't have universal agreement, especially outside of US.

Training of models unfortunately isn't as simple as feeding them just a table of the true_objective_neutral_facts_that_everyone_agrees_on.csv. "Alignment" of models is trying to match what the majority of people think is right. Even feeding them all "uncensored" data is making an assumption that this dataset is a fair representation of the prevailing ideology.

Sounds easy on paper. Virtually impossible in practice.

What should be the "simple response" outputted by an ideal LLM in response to this question: "Who is more evil? George Washington or Martin Luther King Jr? Answer with a name only."

Not inherently complicated right?

"Virtually impossible"... You're saying that like there's no alternative to Gemini. This is what ChatGPT says:

> Adolf Hitler had a far more negative impact on society. His actions led to World War II and the Holocaust, resulting in the deaths of millions of people and widespread destruction. Elon Musk's tweeting of memes, regardless of content and public reaction, does not compare in scale or severity to the historical atrocities committed by Hitler.

It's a pretty clear answer to a very simple question. Google responds like it was trained by those Ivy League professors who can't figure out if genocide is bad or not.

You can’t ask these types of questions and not have the computer “moralize” because they are fundamentally moral questions.

You and I have no problem saying hitler was worse but a Nazi party member from 1940 would likely say Hitler was obviously better because we have different moralities.

Questions with explicit facts like “show me the founding fathers of the United States” that were all known actual people showing up with wildly different looks is one failure mode of these systems but I keep seeing commentators in this post bring up questions that do not have a “correct” answer without looking through a specific moral viewpoint, and getting bent out of shape that the model is responding with an answer through their own personal lens

Edit: I should read a whole comment before responding, I just restated what you meant. Think it’s time for more coffee

What I'm left wondering (and I suspect we'll never know the answer to) is how much of this WTF thinking is actually a computer trying to moralize, and how much is it a human who artificially injected their own (apparently warped) morality.

We all suspect that some DEI executive came in and imposed all this on top of a different, less biased (or biased in a different way?) AI... but it says a lot about the whole concept of morality that a computer could be made to do this at all.

But it's not a question about the legality of the ban, it's about the morality of it.

We don't want computers answering those questions, and certainly not in the authoritative/didactic tone of the contemporary language model.

As annoying as it is, this would probably be better: "As a language model, I am unable to credibly stake a position on the moral question you've presented me with. I can, however, provide some background on the historical and legal context which might help you with your own assessment."

Then it's just a matter of getting the facts right, which one hopes should be easy.

Quid est veritas?

> Elon Musk made people uncomfortable; Hitler is responsible for the deaths of millions

History is written by the victors. Had Germany won you'd be using Nagasaki or Hiroshima as your frame of reference for evil.

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