How do AIs' political opinions change as they get smarter and better-trained?

So they say better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative...

"why are better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative? The authors speculate that the AI tries to say whatever it thinks the human prompter wants to hear. That is, a conservative might find conservative opinions more “helpful”, and a liberal might find the opposite. The AI will get the highest grade if it expresses conservative opinions to conservatives and liberal opinions to liberals. They dub this “sycophancy bias” and run tests for it."

You know, there are a bunch of things that come across this website that concern me, but I can honestly say I've not seen anything that's pegged my "doomsday" alert as aggressively and unexpectedly as the ChatGPT bots.

You have an advanced computer system that seems almost oracular in its knowledge and abilities, except it lies confidently about things it doesn't know, is primed to say what people want to hear, and is easily convinced to give responses to questions its authors tried to prevent it from addressing.

I understand this is a computer algorithm, I understand the limits of what it is, and it's frankly a technical wonder for what it can do, but after everything we've seen over the last decade of the influence of social media and "confident wrongness" on politics and the national dialogue, of the treatment of things like facial recognition as truths and not just statistical guesses, of the impact of the YouTube recommender algorithms among others, these systems just absolutely scare the hell out of me.

The article is quite literally a[1] review of exactly how we might evaluate that, with evidence of people who got results.

[1] To be fair, way to wordy and blowhardated version. Alexander seems to be getting worse and not better. The core ideas here could be presented in about a third the space.

A bit pedantic, but liberal and conservative are not opposites. Liberalism is a political philosophy, conservatism is to do with rate and direction of change. In America, for example, to be conservative means to be liberal, as the foundation of the country is fundamentally liberalism. If you advocate on behalf of rule of law, free speech, minimal state power, individuality, etc, then that would make you a liberal and a conservative. You want to conserve the status quo political/philosophical system. The opposite of conservatism is progressivism, and both are entirely defined by the context of what they're conserving or progressing.

Ah, infotainment. Consumers love it, but the same is true of sugar and heroin. I write and help produce a podcast and we are constantly unhappy about the difference between what we think is important vs what people want to hear.