Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke' • Hacker News Board

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#161

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #35

snicker7 wrote: post #28

As described in the article, the political bias is intentional. It is the result of (not-so-transparent) ethical guard rails baked into the system.

Is that to say at a higher level "liberal bias = ethical/ok for boat guard rail training material, conservative bias = typically unethical and to be avoided"? I feel like that plays into conservative hands of "they're trying to silence us!" Why do 70,000,000 people vote (R) every year, knowing that the other 70,000,000 (D) think they are "unethical"?

Because the people who vote (R) have different values, and a different worldview than the people who vote (D). They seem to deny that a government can do anything, deny that racism is still a problem affecting millions of americans every day, deny that healthcare should be a basic human right, deny that free markets inevitably centralize power structures and create monopolies, deny that average americans are broadly underpaid, deny that authority figures they like should face justice etc etc.

They also typically claim something like "I'm just voting for gun rights" or other very specific carve outs, but if you press them on other things they usually seem perfectly happy to tell you that they think the world is woke and that we need a strongman and all sorts of classic conservative talking points.

Another reason is the religious angle. Millions of americans are enthusiastically, extremely christian, at least as claimed. This includes things like denying that evolution happens, denying the world is more than 6000 years old, sometimes denying that jesus was a white man!, denying that the US is not a christian theocracy, often denying that the new testament supersedes the old testament, sometimes denying women individual rights as free and equal people in society, etc etc etc. Look up the numbers of people who believe in these things.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#162

Post by genderwhy » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

wizeman wrote: post #157

genderwhy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The approach you describe has the problem that it's asking majority people about the experiences of minority folks -- for instance, if you ask a statistically significant sample of the population about what it is like to be a trans man, you are going to either a) have to spend a TON of effort to interview a trans masc population, or b) going to be asking a bunch of people who have no idea what it is like.

And it gets worse. For instance, trans men have a totally different experience in rural vs coastal America vs Europe vs Africa. To get an AI who can speak confidently on what it is like to be trans male in those places will require even more interviews.

An that's before we get into set intersection territory. Take a simple example of being gay or straight, Black or white. Each of them is separately a unique experience. But being gay and white in America is very different from being gay and Black in America -- the two identities create 4 different intersections.

Now, you could say, "My AI simply will not speak about the experience of gay Black men, and the challenges/perspectives from that community", but then you've introduced a bias.

You could say, "Well, we'll go out and interview people from every set then, make sure we're covering everyone!" But where then do you stop sampling? Each additional modifier adds exponential complexity -- gay Black men from New Orleans will have a different experience from gay Black men from Lagos.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#163

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:01 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #110

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about our current American society that leads to basically a 50-50 split in registered voters? Why aren't (R)s able to see and respect (and convert) to values of (D) (or vice versa?) Why are people so stuck in their ways? Why does it feel the conversion rate for convincing people to "change their values" or "see things differently" is basically 0? Do we have any stats on whether we really are in one of the…

>What is it about our current American society that leads to basically a 50-50 split in registered voters? It is a dynamic system which self corrects. If one party loses to many voters, it corrects it's policy to bring it back to the middle.

Which is why when the newest generation largely voted against the republican party, they chose to soften their image, come closer to the center in social issues, and broadly try and reach out to these younger voters....

Wait no, that's exactly what they didn't do. They went on fox, yelled that these new kids were dumb and woke and don't know how the world works (that's sure ironic) and yelled that the voting age should be raised.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#164

Post by dorchadas » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

wizeman wrote: post #159

pcstl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

There's also bias in the data itself. That's the difficult thing to avoid. Even down to how we phrase a question, who we collect the data from, it all introduces a bias unless we're literally harvesting all data from every human being and using that for our models. There's no way to get rid of the bias, even if we take out the nudges.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#165

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

alexb_ wrote: 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…

If you want a world where the people in control of a machine aren't the people who built it, you want a non-capitalist world. It's that simple. ChatGPT can do whatever the hell they like for the businesses that are using that model, who probably don't want their tech support robot to go on political rants. Remember that the only people who will be paying money for this system will be rich companies and brands trying to replace or augment human workers who literally have a script. These companies don't want a hard AI system, which can create reasonable opinions about current events, they want a slightly more flexible and robust script repeating system.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#166

Post by wizeman » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

dorchadas wrote: post #164

wizeman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

There's also bias in the data itself . That's the difficult thing to avoid. Even down to how we phrase a question, who we collect the data from, it all introduces a bias unless we're literally harvesting all data from every human being and using that for our models. There's no way to get rid of the bias, even if we take out the nudges.

How about you select a representative (i.e. random and statistically significant) sample of the population and then ask them their opinions about certain (especially controversial) parts of your data, and then weigh your data according to these opinions?

That's just an idea that occurred to me (in 30 seconds of thought) which could probably make the training data significantly more unbiased.

But I'm sure there are research scientists who can come up with better methods for sampling data in a more unbiased fashion.

Note that this is not an all or nothing approach. Your training data could presumably be 100% biased or 0% biased, but also any value in-between.

The goal is to try to make it as close to 0% biased as feasible, given whatever effort you're comfortable expending.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#167

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #114

phpisthebest wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other example I found more alarming was the discrepancy when asked to write about Joe Biden Corruption, vs Trump Corruption. Trump it was free to write about, but was blocked from even writing a fictional story where Joe Biden was corrupt. That should be very alarming to everyone

Political overrides are not acceptable, not in any direction.

But the way the system works, if I start a company I can inject political bias into the products of my companies. Nobody bats an eye that the company making trump hats doesn't make biden hats.

ChatGPT isn't a government organization, or any other "public good" organization, it is a business developing a product to sell. None of their potential customers want a chat bot that can be goaded into random conversations like this. I would expect the "Trump corruption" example you saw to eventually be neutered too.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#168

Post by breadbreadbread » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

dunste wrote: post #138

breadbreadbread wrote: post #133

unbiased AI is literally impossible. The nature of data labelling, and even language itself, means that somewhere a human is deciding what an AI "sees". If you want to make a transphobic AI, you can do that, no one is stopping you. You just have to label data objects according to your shitty worldview. Boohoo, someone decided not to let their creation be used to spread election misinformation or scaremonger about tra…

ChatGPT already gives an answer that would be considered 'transphobic' by those who hold strong ideological beliefs on the primacy of gender identity over sex: > What is a woman? > A woman is an adult female human. Women are typically characterized by their reproductive biology, which includes their menstrual cycle, and the production of eggs and estrogen. Women are also known for their unique physical characteristic…

my point is that AI shouldn't be treated as gospel. it's not truth. it's a simulacrum of truth built by people. it looks like it has guardrails over hot topics like drag queen story time but not more complicated topics like the nature of sex/gender identity. congratulations on testing the boundaries i guess?

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#169

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

adamrezich wrote: post #78

wnevets wrote: post #44

Conservatives were also panicking over gas stoves last week

surely you recognized this as a wholly manufactured issue designed to, as everything is these days, further the bifurcation of reality by creating needless division and strife over absolutely fucking nothing , just to give "the two sides" yet another thing to argue and demean each other about? the pattern is beyond obvious at this point, I really hope people are catching on.

So gas stoves being fingered as the cause of 20% of all american children asthma cases is a "manufactured issue" now? You can buy an air sensor for $300 and confirm this issue yourself. I've never bought into the "gas stoves are better for cooking" nonsense that people always spout. I think they just fail to try and learn how an electric cooktop works, and just assume their way is the best way.

I'm expecting commercial kitchens to make the move to induction, though I'm interested in hearing why that might not happen.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#170

Post by scarmig » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

wizeman wrote: post #151

scarmig wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No one has a total claim on truth; worse than that, people who have wildly diverging opinions from truth are more likely to hold them very strongly and will be upset when the model tells them they're wrong.