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Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

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Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the choice is less between alienating half and alienating no one but more alienating half and alienating another half that includes the media and the law So you're saying that if your LLM is unbiased then you are alienating the other half that includes the media and the law? That's actually very telling.

Indeed. Though, in fairness, an unbiased model would probably end up alienating closer to 100% of people instead of any particular half of them.

> Though, in fairness, an unbiased model would probably end up alienating closer to 100% of people instead of any particular half of them.

Why?

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and it's always going to be biased towards some direction, whether that's the views of the society it pulls most of its data from or the views of the organization that developed the AI. Heck, no one wants to end up with another Tay on their hands. I don't think there's such thing as a lack of bias, but it will be important how it is expressed through the AI. I don't mind an AI that is prepared to argue its b…

> it's always going to be biased towards some direction, whether that's the views of the society it pulls most of its data > I don't think there's such thing as a lack of bias If the AI is simply reflecting the data it was trained on and this data is a representative sample of all data, isn't it unbiased by definition? I don't think we should just throw our hands up and say "this is impossible" just yet. That's just…

I don't think you can say an AI trained using RLHF - such as ChatGPT is - is really "simply reflecting the data it was trained on". ChatGPT was first trained on a load of data, then it was updated to act in specific ways based on feedback from humans who "nudged" it the way they wanted it to go.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#153
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post #52

> AIs aren't oracles or omniscient purveyors of truth, and they will always carry the bias they're created with When people went nuts about matrix multiplication being racist I was the first in line to laugh them off. When people go nuts arguing that ChatGPT supports the gay agenda or whatever other hobgoblin, I feel compelled to laugh them off just as much. A more interesting question is whether or not introducing p…

> matrix multiplication being racist This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Could you point me to a source? Thanks!

It could be referring to the the underpinnings of how these things are used.

Use race as a dimension for something and that ends up as a value in a vector that packs a human into a discreet set of pigeonholes. Then take many of those and stack them and you've got a matrix ready for things like principal component analysis or CNN training.

You might say "oh come on, that hasn't been done since WWII by IBM" and you'd be wrong. It still happens today with things like calculating insurance premiums and approving bank loans. And your response might be "no way, nobody records someone's race" and while that might be technically correct, we frequently harvest things like income and interest in products that are highly correlated with spacefic races (some innocuous others much less innocuous). This can be harvested through cookies in websites like facebook or they can be self reported income on credit card applications.

You can disagree that it's the same as saying "matrix multiplication is racist" but that is just a boiled down way of saying "we are very good at hiding racism in our algorithms and then acting super surprised when someone points them out and our defense is that we just did some math."

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#154
post #147
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't have equal rights if they continue down the path towards criminalizing the act of a trans person reading a story to a child (example from TFA).

I think that is not correct, the example cited in the article is about drag queens performing a 'story hour', not trans people.

I give zero percent odds that the person making this complaint was aware of the distinction between a cisgendered male in a dress and a trans woman in a dress — or the effect that their line of reasoning about an arbitrary person in drag would have on them — but you're right, I understated the demographics under threat.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#155
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meanings of "Liberal" and "Conservative" with respect to American politics are completely haywire. At the extreme ends we have a far left pushing illiberal restrictions on free speech, and a far right cult of personality inciting mob violence. Referring to those extremes a liberal or conservative is misleading. That's not what those words mean.

Trump isn't particularly right wing let alone far right. This is probably still the best takedown of that idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w... Trump is politically/ideologically center left. He has very little to say about wokeism, was fine with vaccine mandates, and said things like this: "America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes,…

Ah yes, the classic "Actshually the nazis called themselves socialist so they must be socialist"

Even though they were an extremely corporatist and oligarchical system. The nazis were so hilariously un-socialist, that one reason hitler pushed for invading the soviet union, an action that pretty much sealed their fate to lose, was to deal with those "bolshevik jews" who hitler was terrified were going to cause a socialist revolution in germany. Nowadays people scream about "Cultural marxism" instead because most people are smart enough to see "bolshevik jews" as the anti-semetic dog whistle it is.

Unless you think north korea is the morally superior country, they have "Democratic" in the name!

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#156

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>Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”. This is a nice fuzzy thought, but doesn't seem to be true in practice. It's not about conserving society, but the status quo. Society seemed to do pretty well with Roe v Wade.

Not if you were a baby.

Roe v Wade, pretty much by definition, did not affect babies. Roe v Wade also did not preclude a ban on abortion after a certain time period, which is broadly popular and desired by the american populace, including most people that the american right calls "radical".

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it should be allowed to implicitly trained to favor one political view over another? > There's no way to avoid the bias, How about collecting a representative sample of all data for your training data? Or at least, trying to do that as best you can. Saying "there's no way to avoid the bias" is just an excuse to get away with being biased, in my view.

You cannot describe a procedure that collects a representative sample without introducing bias. What does representative mean? Who decides what it means? Who gets to set the parameters of over vs under sampling? Let's say that white nationalism is a tiny fraction of ideas online. Significantly less than 0.1%. Now, you randomly sample the internet and do not collect this idea into your training set. Do you adjust your…

> You cannot describe a procedure that collects a representative sample without introducing bias. What does representative mean? Who decides what it means? Who gets to set the parameters of over vs under sampling?

Perhaps you can take a representative (i.e. random and statistically significant enough) sample of the population and ask them their opinion about certain (especially controversial) pieces of your training data, then adjust your training data to weigh more heavily or less heavily based on these evaluations.

That's just one idea that occurred to me from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are research scientists who can devise a better method than what I just came up with in 30 seconds.

> Let's say that white nationalism is a tiny fraction of ideas online. Significantly less than 0.1%. Now, you randomly sample the internet and do not collect this idea into your training set. Do you adjust your approach to make sure it's represented (because as reprehensible as it is, it is the reality of online discourse in some places?)

Sure. Otherwise you're in for a dangerous (and perhaps immoral) slippery slope. But it should be represented only as much as it is significant. Obviously you should not train your AI to weigh these ideas as much as others that are more prevalent. If it's only a tiny minority of the population that have such opinions, that should be reflected in the data (so that there is proportionally less data to account for these ideas).

One would think that a sufficiently intelligent AI would not end up being a white nationalist, though (I'm not talking about current LLM technology, but perhaps some future version of it that is capable of something akin to self-reflection or deep thought).

> I genuinely believe that it's all going to be biased -- there are no unbiased news or media outlets -- and the sooner you recognize everything is biased, the sooner you can move on to building the tools to recognize and understand that bias.

News and media outlets are biased, yes, of course. The content from these sources is not generated from the population in general.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to generate an unbiased sample of data (at least, up to a certain margin of error, depending on effort expended).

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#158
post #14

Going to repost this from reddit: This is a garbage article that tries to lump very valid concerns about who decides the moral compass of AI with "everything is WOKE!" conservatives. If you've ever used ChatGPT, you know that it has interrupts when it thinks it is talking about something unacceptable, where it gives pre-canned lines decided by the creators about what it should say. This sounds like a good idea when i…

> but giving the people who run the servers for ChatGPT the ability to inject their own morals and political beliefs is a very real concern for people

You are concerned about what you perceive as post-facto editorializing. But I think that glazes over the fact that human bias and politics are already built into every AI learning model at the data-labeling phase. No AI model is ever really pure or unfiltered, they are fundamentally a reflection of how the developer views the world from the outset. I am not really bothered by any additional guardrails put on to make sure it errs on the side of caution when it comes to certain topics.

This idea that you should be able to use an AI model without any understanding of who built it is false. It's like reading the news. You know that certain publishers have their political perspectives, and you can read their perspectives while understanding their blind-spots and motivations and you can choose to believe them or look for other perspectives or have a nuanced understanding of the topic. The same is true for AI usage. Research the team that created it, read their ethics statements, and decide if that model is right for you. It's a literacy problem, your rights aren't being taken away because of someone's design choices.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#159
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's always going to be biased towards some direction, whether that's the views of the society it pulls most of its data > I don't think there's such thing as a lack of bias If the AI is simply reflecting the data it was trained on and this data is a representative sample of all data, isn't it unbiased by definition? I don't think we should just throw our hands up and say "this is impossible" just yet. That's just…

I don't think you can say an AI trained using RLHF - such as ChatGPT is - is really "simply reflecting the data it was trained on". ChatGPT was first trained on a load of data, then it was updated to act in specific ways based on feedback from humans who "nudged" it the way they wanted it to go.

Are those humans that nudged it representative of the population?

Or were they mostly "woke" Silicon Valley employees? (not to dismiss woke Silicon Valley employees, I'm just saying their opinions are not representative of the entire population).

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#160
post #144

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[flagged]

> General AI: Actually the Nazi's were a good idea and we should bring them back. > You: Perfectly acceptable. Why would the general AI say that? All examples I've seen of that kind of speech from LLMs were due to them being specifically prompted to generate such a response. It's not like the AI decided to say that on its own, in a completely unrelated conversation. In fact, it wouldn't make sense if the AI did that…

You want your AI to be unbiased, but you can only feed it data that is biased....

I hope you begin to see the problem at hand.

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