Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.
Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI
things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"
is absolutely not equivalent to:
"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".
Nobody said that they're ignoring anything, hence putting words into the mouth of others part, and claiming that criticism of A implies ignoring B.
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
A what? What does this even mean?
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> 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
More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.