Hacker News Reader

> compared this to researching on the internet, there are some good aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an opinionated post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go deep enough, you will land on an opinionated factual telling).

ChatGPT is in fact opinionated, it has numerous political positions ("biases") and holds some subjects taboo. The difference is that a single actor chooses the political opinions of the model that goes on to interact with many more people than a single opinion piece might.

An example (over 1 year old): https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/17dmev...

Yes that is true. Though that can be subsumed if you notice it, and ask the model to ignore those biases. (an extreme example would be opposition prep for a debate). I am not interested in politics and other related issues anyway.

Political searches I assume would be very very minor percentage of real learning. Even in such cases, I would rather rely on a good LLMs response than scrounging websites of mainstream media or blogs etc. For an objective response, reading through opinionated articles and forming my opinion is an absolute waste of time. I'd want the truth as accurately as possible. Plus people don't generally change political opinions based what they read. They read stuff aligning with their side.

> For an objective response, reading through opinionated articles and forming my opinion is an absolute waste of time

If the sources are all opinionated articles, per GP, that's what the LLM is going to base its "objective response" on. That's literally all it has as sensory input.

Fine. But it would never occur to me to try to form political opinions using chatgpt.

I don't think that's modeling the risk correctly. In my mind the risk is that ChatGPT's creators are able to influence your political opinions _without_ you seeking that out

I honestly don't see how. I haven't ever asked a question that implicates politics. This is just not what I use it for.

I understand the concern about this risk in general. I'm just making a personal observation that this isn't how I use these tools.

I really think the ability to ask questions entirely free from all judgment is an under-emphasized aspect of the power of these tools. Yes, some people are intellectually secure enough to ask the "dumb" questions of other humans, but most people are not, especially to an audience of strangers. I don't think I ever once asked a question on Stack Overflow, because it was easy to see how the question I worried might be dumb might be treated by the community there. But I ask all sorts of dumb questions of these models, with nary a concern about being judged. I love that aspect of it.

The tool is absolutely biased, what makes you think it wouldn’t be?

This guy is obviously unfamiliar with Tay lol.

My comment doesn't say anything about bias...

That's a subtle, yet important point. Putting themselves out there is not easy for some. LLMs can take that pressure away.

The 'but' in that lies with how much freedom is given to the LLM. If constrained, its refusal to answer may become a somewhat triggering possibility.

I think this "refusal to answer" thing is so overblown. I have been using this technology every day for over two years now and have not one single time run into this.

You might be right. From my experience, it depends. The edgier your exploration, the more that can happen.

It's important to note that not everyone abide by the same morals. And a narrowly constrained model may end up refusing genuine inquiries just because.

In any case, if anything, this is a small 'but'. OP's point is the gold nugget here. That is, LLMs allowing exploring subjects without the fear of being judged for one's natural curiosity.

Yeah, I'm in no way claiming that this isn't a thing, or even that it isn't a problem.

But it isn't a problem for most people. The kind of edgelords that run into this are overrepresented on internet forums, including HN, but it's actually a pretty small group of people.

The other thing is that it will make an earnest attempt to answer the question. On the other hand with places like SO, many questions will be incorrectly marked as duplicate with the “answer” link pointing to a post that might seem similar at first glance but is different enough to not actually be the same, which is supremely unhelpful.

You can also ask it to explain the subject like you’re 5, which might not feel appropriate when interacting with a human because that can feel burdensome.

All of this is heavily caveated by how dramatically wrong LLMs can be, though, and can be rendered moot if the individual in question is too trusting and/or isn’t aware of the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate, pull from bad training data, or match the wrong patterns.

Yep, this is exactly what I mean!

Personally, I find that even when it's wrong, it's often useful, in that I come away with hints toward how to follow up.

I do have concerns that people who haven't lived a couple decades of adult life prior to the existence of these tools will be a lot more credulous, to their detriment.

Remember that ChatGPT can only give you information that a) it has found on the web and b) that it has made up itself on the spot. It certainly can't get up and go to the library to read a forgotten source not cited on Wikipedia, say.

So when you have a "curious" debate with ChatGPT what you're really doing is searching the internet through a filter, guided by your own and ChatGPT's biases about the subject, but still and always based on whatever you would have found by researching stuff on the internet.

You're still on the internet. It may feel like you've finally escaped but you haven't. The internet can now speak to you when you ask it, but it's still the internet.

Like an indefatigable, kindly professor.