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Comment by jesse_dot_id | Hacker News Reader

It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.

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Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed

I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.

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.

Show some respect and stab me in the back at least!

That's certainly not a universal preference. There are people and even entire cultures for whom being surreptitiously manipulative is disrespectful.

Maybe so. I am personally intimately familiar with two cultures (Iceland and West Coast USA) and in both of these this preference is predominant.

But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.

Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.

I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.

I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.

When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".

You analogy makes no sense.

"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".

> "I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"

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.

All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.

This stuff is measurable

There is nothing subtle about them being okay with producing child porn. That's a hard no from me. You can't argue your way around that.

> It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it.

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.

its not just one guys opinion though

Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts.

Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions.

Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies.

More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo. If the “entire population” was voting on the shadow prompts of the other models they would look very different. Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.

> More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo.

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.

> Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote"

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 consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions.

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

I mean one of the guys got fired by his own board for lying and is still calling the shots. Another guy sued the Pentagon during a war and we're still letting him act like a nation state.

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."

What war? Also should laws not be followed during wars? I assume suing is a legal action in this case as oppose to something else?

You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?

Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?

It was driven by stupidy

Political driven stupidity.

It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content

How is changing history and making a a group of objectively white people black "removing bias" ˋ? What it is is literally bias. Like thinking Pi could be 4. Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.

Do you think they deliberately trained the model to produce images of diverse Nazis?

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.

> bigoted model

A what? What does this even mean?

It means a model trained on bigoted material.

A model where asking for a math professor results in an image of an asian man, asking for an engineer in an image of a white man, and asking for a criminal results in an image of a black man

If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis

That's what they did.

> 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...

Lol fair enough, I stand corrected.

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.

So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever.

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.

The training data and the end result should reflect the real world. No you don't need to "add bias to fight bias", just keep it truthful. Don't force SF-brained forced diversity/inclusion/whatever, we know well some models do.

> How is changing history

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 legit being truth-seeking even if it is a hard path means "pandering to someones ego" for you, whatever you say should not be taken too seriously.

You're confusing biases (stereotypes, bigotry, racism) with facts (2+2=4 isn't a bias)

No I'm not. Gemini spouting BS about the founding fathers being black is getting facts wrong because of its bias.

That was just reality's famous liberal bias asserting itself.

> at least I know their motives are purely profit driven.

What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.

Sure man. Palantir rings a bell? Ohh not relevant right...

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