Sergey Brin on Gemini 1.5 Pro (03/02/2024) [video] | Hacker News Reader

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51 pointsOlshansky72 comments

Within a couple sentences of each other he says (paraphrasing), “if you test any model (Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok) you’ll see it says far left things” and “we don’t know why [Gemini] is far left leaning”.

I think he’s being honest here. At least at the executive level of having no clue how any of this works or why it leans the way it does.

Eh, half honest. The training dataset at Google likely has a lot of bias towards leftist ideology given that is what Google’s leadership pushes. For example I’m sure left leaning news is in the training dataset whereas say the daily wire is not included. this leads to a model which surfaces those biases with ridiculousness of black Vikings.

There's a difference between left and far left hyper-egalitarians, just like there is a difference between right and far right Bible thumpers. Mainstream news is left because it is factually justifiable and reduces societal conflict. Daily Wire is far right because it makes money. Brin is complaining because he thinks the model is far left, which makes neither money nor sense.

Maybe there are far more writings on human rights and empowering each other vs. individual liberty, extreme capitalism. It would be good to see what kind of writings from input data dictate this behavior. One could test by simply feeding textbooks in each category and see how it responds.

just have to browse /r/politics to see how much conservative views are frowned upon on internets. I'm sure google's decision to buy reddit's archive for 60M/yr won't help much with this.

I just purchased a book, “Rural White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” [1] that talks about what keeps conservatives in power in America. Interestingly, it’s impossible for conservatives to win the popular vote (A Republican President candidate has won the popular vote once in the last 32 years) (page 71, excerpt from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s press release [2]). It’s only possible with the Electoral College and Gerrymandering. Great book, highly factualized, footnotes and all.

Here’s Pew Research’s voter demographics breakdown, because it’s freely available where the book mentioned is not: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/demographic-...

> Seven-in-ten Republican voters were 50 and older in the most recent election, compared with 62% of Republican voters in 2020 and 68% in 2018. (My note: this is from the 2022 elections, and 1.8M voters over the age of 55 age out each year)

This is all to say, I’m unsure where these people and similar with conservative ideologies who aren’t a majority would post that would make its way into language models. Facebook perhaps? Therefore, liberal bias is simply a majority perspective.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734507/white-rural-...

[2] https://massie.house.gov/news/email/show.aspx?ID=Z5MPA3CVK5F... (7th paragraph)

I wouldn't trust anything those authors write. Just check out what they say online. Extremely biased propaganda.

So their data backed citations are fake news? Sure. The truth can be unpleasant.

You can easily lie by cherry-picking data and stats.

Well, one of two things will happen. Conservatives will win elections (assuming these are "lies by cherry-picking data and stats"), or their numbers will continue to dwindle (Pew Research's demographics data about 70% of Republicans being over age 50, folks 55+ aging out at a rate of 1.8M/year per CDC actuarial data) and rural America continues to wither away. Certainly, we can wait to see what happens to see if the data matches our observations if we believe the thesis put forth doesn't match ground truth, because time will tell us for sure.

> Interestingly, it’s impossible for conservatives to win the popular vote

Is that interesting? It seems akin to saying "no super bowl winners have won a soccer championship". Well duh, that's not the game they're playing. And some of those football players could probably be pretty damn competitive in soccer if they trained for it as long as they trained for football.

So I'm someone who's lurked /r/politics on Reddit since its early days (2008), I'm convinced the reason it is so left leaning is because right wingers in general took too long to start using the internet. If you were young in the 2000's and up to mid 2010's you were more likely to use the internet, and be left leaning. Even just 10 years ago, conservatives/right wingers seemed to have a minority presence on the internet in general, let alone social media or a site like Reddit. In fact I think it was social media like Facebook etc, that helped conservatives realise this internet thing wasn't going away.

I disagree with your premise, considering that the first people to really use the internet were old-style hackers like those found on HN, and those usually lean conservative.

I frequented a ton of forums in the mid 00s and most of them were right leaning. The left leaning slant of the internet is fairly new, I think that came with larger advertisers and their demands on sites to clean out all the extreme right wing opinions and when they did that they also banned a all adjacent opinions as well to be sure.

But before then it was mostly meritocracy, individualism, you get what you work for, drugs is the individuals responsibility, criminals deserves to be punished etc everywhere. There was always a smaller number of voices against that in discussions, but the liberal atheist right wing dominated every forum I saw.

Nonsense. Reddit was full of right wing conspiracy theorists in the beginning. They went away when a user 911_was_an_inside_job and others started trolling the truthers and the admins and mods started to ban and shadow-ban anything right of center.

And then, years later, there was the mod cabal hijacking of all the large subreddits and admins shutting down all subs they could not control.

There was a lot of pro-Ron Paul content on reddit early on. Then there was a large and very active Donald Trump subreddit that reddit outright banned.

I think one of the key reasons subreddits lean left is the very active use of banning. Despite having a doctorate in political science, I was banned from /r/scotus because at least one mod didn't like my politics. During one discussion in /r/AskSocialScience, I had my flair stripped from me by the mods because they didn't like my answers, even though I was the only person in the conversation citing sources.

I moderate a large subreddit myself (300k+ subs) and I am well aware of how important the banhammer is to keep discussions civil, trolls out, and brigading held at bay. But for most subreddits that even remotely touch politics, bans really only seem to skew one way, ensuring that non-liberal viewpoints are scarce at best.

I frequent my city's subreddit and when it comes to politics it's mostly socialist and border-line communist content. Anything that is center or right of center gets down-voted into the oblivion so most of those with opposing views do not post anything at all.

Surely emphasizing concepts like diversity, equity, and being fair to all people regardless of situation or origin in the training data simply makes the results lean slightly left.

Essentially trying to make a “nice” AI will skew left due to the political positions of the right on topics like immigration or gender identity.

You're saying the left is just straight up nicer than the right? This seems like kind of a weak take.

No, I’m saying that their policies are more inclined to be interpreted as nice/charitable than conservative policies. This covers wide areas such as immigration (allow migrants into the country), welfare (increase social programs, such as guaranteeing school children lunches), gender identity (celebrate diversity and accept everyone equally), gun control (support passing measures to reduce school shootings), racism (support dismantling Confederate monuments), etc.

Policy aside, at an individual level, people on both sides are equally nice in my experience.

The issue with these takes is that they all are quite ambiguous. The "Harmonious society" of China is also often described as inherently nicer than the individual freedom and competitive social stance we enjoy in the West, but plenty of people would quibble with that point of view. Similarly, many of the issues you mention have "nice" policy approaches that are closer to what moderate centrists advocate than to anything on the extreme left.

Isn't that pretty consistently what studies show - that right-leaning individuals are less likely to act/communicate with empathy and compassion?

Counterpoint: it's not a weak take.

"[Trumps's] not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting"??

>I think he’s being honest here.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/08/news/google-co-founder-sergey-...

People with capital spend time online much less than those without, and in different ways.

>Within a couple sentences of each other he says (paraphrasing), “if you test any model (Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok) you’ll see it says far left things” and “we don’t know why [Gemini] is far left leaning”.

>I think he’s being honest here.

I doubt it. <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/video-g...>

One can be honest and still be wrong by fooling yourself, people are full of cognitive biases. Here is one explanation why he says that he thinks he does not know why it "is far left leaning" and why he might be wrong here. https://twitter.com/MattWalshShow/status/1760756960452821446

Transcript:

https://lifearchitect.ai/sergey/

> The Gemini art? Yeah, with the… Okay. That wasn’t really expected [...] > So, once again, we haven’t fully understood why it means “left” in many cases. And that’s not our intention.

Riiiight.

Anyone except me thinks he doesn't look very healthy? Its strange he is kind of slow on the video where he enters the room. Maybe some biohacking.

Let's be clear. This isn't a left or right thing. That's just a convenient argument to avoid the real problem. It's about moral relativism.

I am about as left wing as you can be and gemini is simply offensive. It didn't want to say if Hitler was worse than Elon or Trump. It didn't want to say if child abuse is bad, and if all child abusers should be prosecuted. It rendered WW2 soldiers as black.

This isn't left vs right. This is extreme moral relativism to the point of racism. The end point of a line of ethics ML research where people won't take a stand that might offend almost anyone.

I work in this area of ML. The goal of having a single model that makes everyone happy is mathematically impossible. If you avoid taking that problem on, you end up with a model like this.

Are you talking Arrow's?

> It rendered WW2 soldiers as black

To be fair, a large number of WWII soldiers _were_ black. Not many of those black soldiers served in the SS for Nazi Germany though, which was the issue with what Gemini was producing.

Oh for sure. I meant Nazi WW2 soldiers. Good catch!

These LLM models are just glorified parrots. Why are we even expecting them to display non-trivial insight about complex moral dilemmas? They're going to get things totally wrong and say a lot of silly stuff about the Nazis, that's just normal. No reason to act offended over it or demand 100% "Safety" from answers you might not like.

> This isn't left vs right. This is extreme moral relativism to the point of racism. The end point of a line of ethics ML research where people won't take a stand that might offend almost anyone.

I think if you created a distribution of the people who "somewhat to strongly agree" that Elon is comparable to Hitler, that distribution would be biased to the left.

So in that sense isn't this a left vs right problem?

I don't agree that people on the left hold the notion that Elon and Hitler and comparable.

So this isn't a left vs right problem. It's a moral relativism problem.

Oh I do.

See the Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink and Twitter crowd

You don't think anyone on the left holds that position?

Even the Hacker News crowd has previously upvoted stories like this:

> [The proto-fascism of Elon Musk](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998913)

And elsewhere around the world you have this type of stuff.

> The Nation, Sept 2023: Elon Musk Is a Threat to Democracy

> The Information.com, Oct 2022: Elon Musk's Management Style is a Threat to Global Democracy

> Irish Examiner, Dec 2022: Why Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is a threat to democracy

> CommonCause.org, Oct 2022: Elon Musk Twitter Acquisition Poses Risks to Our Democracy

I find it hard to reconcile seeing all this sentiment towards him, while also asserting unequivocally that nobody on the left would compare "threat to global democracy" Elon Musk, to Hitler.

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