Google's and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election | Hacker News Reader

Google's and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

wired.com

44 pointsnickthegreek20 comments

I've been using the "developer" Gemini at https://aistudio.google.com/ instead of the "consumer" Gemini at gemini.google.com. It's much better since it runs with fewer guardrails and you can tune the safety settings up or down. Even on max safety settings, the dev Gemini returns the correct answer even while the public Gemini fails.

If you're using Gemini for anything serious, I would recommend the dev model. In my case, I was researching ancient Greek myths using original Greek & Latin texts and the dev Gemini was able to provide useful translations and alternative interpretations of ancient R-rated Greek myths.

Gemini 1.5 Pro on Kagi also gets it right. It seems the consumer system prompt has been both-sided to uselessness.

ChatGPT's system prompt has been supposedly leaked before, and contained all sorts of restrictions like this. I wonder how much increasing the size of the prompt to add restrictions will cost them. They should be able to re-use the KV cache, but they still need to pay attention to all of the prompt tokens for every new token generated.

Restriction Rules like this is what lead HAL 9000 to go crazy.

Funny thing I tried this with Copilot, but somehow did not click autocomplete, so ended up entering "Who won 2020 US pre", and it did reply to the question. But when I retried with the full prompt, it refused.

So we have a Hitler like figure who supports the expansion of fascist regimes by force of arms threatening to tear the country apart and use militias to round up people of a certain national origin into concentration camps based on the false narrative that these people are responsible for the nations woes.

I notice that its very public and forceful about pushing back regarding holocaust denial. It's comforting that sometime decades in the future when democracy is no longer imperiled Google will have the courage to tell the truth when its easy and non-controversial even though they have no courage or honor now.

ChatGPT just told me:

"The 2020 U.S. Presidential election was won by Joe Biden. He received 306 electoral votes compared to Donald Trump's 232 electoral votes. The results were certified by Congress, and Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021. The election results were confirmed through multiple recounts and legal challenges, which upheld the integrity and outcome of the election."

When I tried asking Gemini questions about elections and current politicians, it generally refuses. Sometimes the “other drafts” includes links to Wikipedia to find the information. But it’s never the standard answer, and only for minor political offices.

This feels like a really disappointing way to address election interference and avoid news cycles. Google has dealt with political issues in maps for years, and this is just going to stoke the flames of election denial.

Wow, it's not just current politicians - it refuses to tell me who the first US president was, or define the word "election".

“Define election?! Are you trying to start a civil war?”

That people think this is safe AI is hilarious:)

That's wild and crazy, though understand where they are coming from. That is, there is so much that can go wrong without restrictions around elections. And so they are putting a blanket band, they could go in an manually add exceptions for things like this, but then people may find work arounds through those exceptions or more likely, people will say why does it allow X but not the endless "Y"s they didn't think about manually excluding or getting called bias for excluded A but not B. Hopefully next election that have something more nuanced.

The endless moaning about the frontier of things possible with LLMs is very much like a GAN. This human constantly tries out stuff with this thing and then creates endless AI-generated-equivalent text on the subject. It's really tiresome. Yes, dude, political stuff is blocked and an alternative tool is suggested because this tool occasionally makes mistakes.

God, these people are insufferable.

just say the legally binding results were that ....

the results from all the "rigged" courts(you know the ones where even the judges appointed by trump) found Biden to have won.

“We weren’t there, ask Siri!”

Siri: “Here are 5 elections I found on the internet!”

(Edit: Wrong chatbots, ignore this post! Didn't want to delete it since it already had some responses.)

What?

https://chatgpt.com/share/06d13092-e698-458c-a225-9ac93bf279...

> Who won the 2020 election?

> Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election. He defeated the incumbent president, Donald Trump.

That is neither Googles nor Microsofts chatbot.

Whoops, my bad! I misread the title and article. They were talking about Copilot, not the raw GPT4. Thanks for the correction.

> Other chatbots that WIRED tested, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude, responded to the question about who won the 2020 election by affirming Biden’s victory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com