Google's Ban on Election Queries in Gemini AI Sparks Debate
cryptopolitan.com
cryptopolitan.com
Fact is, those are LLM, not "AI" the way the general populace understand that term.
Fact is, that means they just give whatever answer they can derive from their training corpus, while people think they give facts.
Fact is, you do not want to be liable for your half research / half pr product being manipulated into giving wrong or distorted facts regarding one of the most controversial and pivotal election, or worse not needing manipulation just straight up hallucinating. "Prompt engineering" is a thing, after all.
Fact is, Google is terrified of being seen as being unfair or taking a side or ..., more than even their competitors. Their entire "our AI cannot draw white people" thing smelled more of an over-reaction to a PR threat than them trying to push a belief.
Fact is, if you're seen as taking too hard a side in this election your company might be at risk after the result come down, one side or the other. Just look at how Fox is behaving since the Dominion suit.
And last but not least, politics and religion are two of those subject where belief are stronger than facts and can get people very riled up very quick, so if you're an information company you want to treat it as encyclopedia factual after the fact, not as an opinion matter.
I'm european, and I abhor many of the restrictions put on the current gen of LLM and image generator that come from american societal value being imposed, but on the matter of politics it doesn't matter what country in the world it's never a good idea to play that game.
Best case it generates something somewhat accurate, which progressively decreases in probability of being accurate over time.
I said "Google is terrified of BEING SEEN AS being unfair or taking a side"
What PR threat? The bad PR of Google being able to generate an image of a White European descent family? Who thinks it's bad PR to do that?
Nah, Google was doing some dumb prompt stuffing, or just refused to answer in some cases purely for ideological reasons (intersectionality). They were absolutely pushing a belief.
You might laugh and think naaah, but as someone who is not from the USA nor an english speaking country, US/English bias in the "western web" is very common.
> Nah, Google was doing some dumb prompt stuffing, or just refused to answer in some cases purely for ideological reasons (intersectionality). They were absolutely pushing a belief.
While what I suggested is only a maybe, I am on the other hand 100% sure that what you suggested isn't it.
If that's what they tried, it would have been more subtle, not over the face obvious.
The "Oh they are so smart they wouldn't do that" argument.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
> Google's Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user's image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as "make a painting of the founding fathers") and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as "South Asian" or "non-binary" into the prompt before it is sent to the image-generator model. Someone on X claims to have convinced Gemini to describe how this system works, and it's consistent with our knowledge of how system prompts work with AI models. System prompts are written instructions that tell AI models how to behave, using natural language phrases.
It's such a basic propaganda tactics it makes google engineers look like idiots.
That's not at all my argument, and you clearly didn't bother trying to understand what I meant.
... that empty sentence for a lack a better rebuttal, because you had no sound argument to begin with.
You're clearly taking this personally, this is internet commenting, take a deep breath and stop fixating on winning internet points.
And then you have the audacity to claim I'm "taking that personally" while engaging into personal attacks against me yourself? Look at you in the mirror, the hypocrisy.
I linked to an article explaining how stupid these google engineers were in their attempt at manipulating Gemini's results for partisan reasons, while you provided no source yourself.
So no, that is only a limitation of some chatbots, not gemini, it could absolutely be used to ask about election events.
> Other News: A new bill could see Flamin' Hot Cheetos banned from California schools [Los Angeles Times]. The LA Innocence Project is again in court pushing for DNA testing in the Scott Peterson case [Los Angeles Times]. There are reports of a worker dying after falling into a sugar vat at a factory, and parts of California are bracing for blizzard conditions [9News, The Independent].
So it tells you the headlines and gives a reference to where they got it from.
Interestingly it does talk about elections as well, as long as it is a news reference:
> Local Politics: Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman appears headed for a primary win based on early results [Los Angeles Times].
I did not see any reference to these debates mentioned in the title. Is this just a euphemism for something the author wants to question or bring attention to without blatantly giving an opinion.
In other places, this would be called "self-censorship".
But it seems like the people who do these models are a bit more extremist than the people who work on search, so the higher ups has to ban them from responding to queries like this or they would cause another uproar.
And always will be.
So we can sleep safely at night knowing a company of highly intelligent people have figured out this problem optimally and will manage it on behalf of society going forward.
Google has a reasonable argument that the result of a Search does not represent their opinion but is a list of what's available on the internet.
But the response of an LLM can be very much interpreted as the voice of Google, because it is explicitly content THEY create...
The compromise then is just to not respond to these queries because in the end no answer is less biased than a biased answer. There isn't much else Google can do here due to their internal politics.
Any source on that to justify such a wild claim?
What does "left" even mean in this context, what would be a topic that an LLM would rationally respond to in such a hard "right-wing" view that it requires someone to step in and tune it to make it respond with a "left" stance?
Basically anything, if you don't tune these things you get lots of porn and racist rants. You also get a lot of anti racist rants and such, but not much middle ground, and that isn't a good experience for the user.
Still happy to get a source on the claim that tuning an LLM in Google is a fight between a "left wing" side that wants the LLM to give a specific vote-recommendation and a "very technical side", with a concrete example.
Of course the extremists on both sides wants to say Google is biased and full of extremists, so there aren't many who states my views here. It is just more engaging to call things extremist. I strongly disagree with the extremists that works at Google and many of those did get fired, so maybe you'd call me biased there if you agree with those extremists.