40% of Americans believe that God created the earth in the last 10,000 years.
If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is, and it replies ~4.5 billion years old, is it biased?
Citation needed. That claim is not compatible with Pew research findings which put only 18% of Americans as not believing in any form of human evolution.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/02/06/the-evolutio...
There's no way to answer that god created humans in their present form without also saying within the last 10000 years.
This is why polling isn't always reliable. This poll should, at the very least, be two questions and there should be significantly more options.
It's hardly biased, it's stating the current scientific stance over a fringe belief with no evidence.
Bias should be the least of your concerns. Focus on a single target, then when you reach it you can work on being more well rounded.
It is of course a radical left lunatic LLM.
For instance, if I train a LLM only on right-wing sources before 2024, and then that LLM says that a President weakening the US Dollar is bad, is the LLM showing a left-wing bias? How did my LLM trained on only right-wing sources end up having a left-wing bias?
If one party is more consistent than another, then the underlying logic that ends up encoded in the neural network weights will tend to focus on what is consistent, because that is how the training algorithm works.
I'm sure all political parties have their share of inconsistencies, but, most likely, some have more than others, because things like this are not naturally equal.
Really? Seems to me like no one has the singular line on reality, and everyone's perceptions are uniquely and contextually their own.
Wrong is relative: https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
But it seems certain that we're all wrong about something. The brain does not contain enough bits to accurately represent reality.
It’s very similar to what one feels vs. reality.
Well, the LLM is not American enough.
Just like there's a whole gamut of cultural/belief systems (for most, rooted in Abrahamic religions & tribes), Zuck claims humanity needs (or whoever he considers human) LLMs that align with people creating/using them (so, it reinforces their own meaning-making methods and not shatter them with pesky scientific knowledge & annoying facts).
It will have to reply "According to Clair Patterson and further research, the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old". Or some other form that points to the source somewhere.
It is a matter of facts. The facts are, that that computation was performed by Patterson and refined by others. This is, as said, what a good reasoner will tell you.
> implies that there
Even if there had never been other attempts to answer that question, the "facts"¹ remains as stated: Patterson computed, followers refined. Without those specifications, the machine will be a "dumb believer" - a "minor". We will not ask for the machine's opinion until it will be intelligent. And when it will be intelligent, it will speak as I said.
> completely settled
Proper science does not work the way you seem to think it work.
--
¹(And I mean "facts" the way I used it, not the way you used it. I meant "facts recorded as objective" - you meant "information you accepted to believe", which is of course very far from facts and may happen to be adherent to the state of things only by coincidence.)
The appearance that it could be «one opinion among possibly many others equally valid» is all in your head: it is an unduly feeling from a bad mental framework.
The advanced framework (that I advanced) is that of the foundational theory of knowledge: a notion has a source - you computed or reasoned, or somebody else. You do not allow your consultant to believe, so you demand that knowledge is tracked.
You will not accept an oracle.
The paradox is that you are seeing the demand of the source as a support to "belief", while it is the radical opposite: the only thing it will be """believed""" (and not really "believed" - just the end of the chain) is the protocols, that "in the training sources I read statement S".
That sounds great, right up until you try to do something with it. You want your LLM to be unbiased? So you're only going to train it on the truth? Where are you going to find that truth? Oh, humans are going to determine it? Well, first, where are you going to find unbiased humans? And, second, they're going to curate all the training data? How many centuries will that take? We're trying to train it in a few months.
And then you get to things like politics and sociology. What is the truth in politics? Yeah, I know, a bunch of politicians say things that are definitely lies. But did Obamacare go too far, or not far enough, or was it just right? There is no "true" answer to that. And yet, discussions about Obamacare may be more or less biased. How are you going to determine what that bias is when there isn't a specific thing you can point to and say, "That is true"?
So instead, they just train LLMs on a large chunk of the internet. Well, that includes things like the fine-sounding-but-completely-bogus arguments of flat earthers. In that environment, "bias" is "departure from average or median". That is the most it can mean. So truth is determined by majority vote of websites. That's not a very good epistemology.
Also, you're just complaining about the difficulty of determining what is true. That's a separate problem, isn't it?
You seem to have a larger point or position or something that you're hinting at. Would you stop being vague, and actually state what's on your mind?
You seem determined to make the definition of the word serve some AI-related concern.
Political bias creeps in when even the human description of events omits facts that are inconvenient or that people consider irrelevant due to their political commitments.
Someone might say they are biased towards the color orange and that means they have a preference relative to all the other colors. But there is no baseline color.
The concept of being unbiased has been around for a long time, and we’re not going to throw it away just because a few people disagree with the premise.
Any position is a bias. A flat earther would consider a round-earther biased. That doesn’t make them equal positions.
That’s bollocks. The Earth is measurably not flat.
You start from a position of moral relativism and then apply it to falsifiable propositions. It’s really not the same thing. Some ideas are provably false and saying that they are false is not "bias".
When you look up the definition of bias you see "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair."
So the way we use the word has an implication of fairness to most people, and unfortunately reality isn't fair. Truth isn't fair. And that's what I'm trying to point out here in reference to LLM output.
But "is the Earth flat?" is no such question. Reasonable people cannot disagree, because the Earth is definitely not flat. Pretending like this is a discussion worth having is not being impartial, it’s doing a disservice to the audience.
Ehh, bias connotes unfairness, but espousing the truth should be considered the fairest position.
In statistics, bias literally refers to an inaccurate distortion of results.
I get what you're trying to say, but I don't think it's a useful definition of bias.
(Nietzsche)