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

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

#51

Post by nomel » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

alpineidyll3 wrote: post #22

For frog snacks, who the hell wants to transfer our human garbage like politics onto AI. Why would ai need politics? I would only be interested if ais could help separate political beliefs from policy facts

Politics is the policies caused by the awareness/understanding of human abstractions that exist at a societal and global level, which includes things like "morality".

I don't see how "intelligence" would be possible without "politics" emerging, in a very strong way.

Many answers to many questions aren't factual, they're answers deemed appropriate by society. Removing the ability to include any of these would make AI much less useful, and certainly dangerous (for example, global warming is trivial to fix, with politics aside).

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

#52

Post by skissane » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #25

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 agree with your statement, yet I fail to understand how this is different from the majority of the Internet already.

The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge. Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? You were looking at Reddit because you think you're more likely to ge…

> The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge.

The Internet has made it easier than ever before to access academic journals – PubMed, JSTOR, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, etc. Of course, much of that content requires payment – but, an increasing percentage is open content, and there are often ways to find paywalled papers without paying for them (e.g. preprint archives; email the original author, who is often legally allowed to redistribute the paper, and happy to share their own work around; visit a library; ask friends/relatives who are university staff/students; ask a famous Kazakhstani computer programmer if she happens to have a copy)

The content of academic journals isn't always guaranteed to be true, of course. But it is significantly less likely to be blatantly invented out of thin air, or automatically generated by some AI spambot. All academics are biased–especially so in fields which have high relevance to contemporary social/political/cultural controversies–but usually the bias of a paper's author is rather obvious, and you can take that into account when evaluating their work. One can generally infer the quality of a journal by signs such as its publisher (journals published by Springer or Elsevier are generally more respected than those published by MDPI), who is on its editorial board (respected names in the field, professors at prestigious universities, or a bunch of nobodies you've never heard of?), whether or not it gets included in databases such as PubMed, JSTOR, Science Citation Index, etc.

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

#53

Post by skissane » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #37

majormajor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge. Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? You were looking at Reddit because you think you're more likely to ge…

>Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? Why stop at "human-created offline content"? Seeing how a lot of peer-reviewed science is based on improper methodology, bad analysis, false data and buggy code, maybe it would be better…

> Seeing how a lot of peer-reviewed science is based on improper methodology, bad analysis, false data and buggy code, maybe it would be better to question everything.

Peer-review isn't perfect, but it is still a more reliable source of information than (e.g) Reddit

At least retraction is a thing – it doesn't happen as often as it should, but sometimes bad papers do get retracted, and there is a process people can use to challenge work they think should not have been published. Also, many journal databases have a "Cited by" feature, and so you can always read papers/letters-to-the-editor/etc responding to it - often, if research is particularly bad, sooner or later someone else will publish a criticism of it

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

#54

Post by all2 » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:18 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #13

I am deeply uneasy, based on how these current models have been described, at ascribing them "opinions." "What can I get this thing to spit out with a certain prompt" is very meaningfully not the same as "an AI's opinion." Or this quote pulled directly from this blog post: "we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning" - isn't it more accurate to say "these models are trained on a body of work that inclu…

I had a "conversation" that began with a prompt about the ideal kind of government with no money. It described a bartering economy and then as I pressed further with "how would X work?" "how would Y work?" it described communism, just straight communism with a central planning committee that would oversee the distribution of goods and services. When pressed about the fallibility of man with such power (as all communist nations suffer from this fatal flaw) it stated that "appropriate oversight" would be enough to prevent abuse.

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

#55

Post by haswell » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #38

majormajor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge. Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? You were looking at Reddit because you think you're more likely to ge…

Your last paragraph seems to indicate that you already recognize the giant hole in the argument - that it's no different than what we've got today, between people posting poorly-informed opinions, or even our media in general.

I think there's a meaningful difference between what we have today and a future where those poorly informed opinions can be trivially generated at scale.

If individuals posting poorly informed opinions are small weapons fire, the AI equivalent is a nuclear bomb.

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

#56

Post by majormajor » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:27 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #52

majormajor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge. Things that don't have citation chains that go back to human-created offline content won't be trustworthy - is that a real newspaper article linked from that Wikipedia article, or a fake one for a fake paper generated from thin air? You were looking at Reddit because you think you're more likely to ge…

> The end state of these models is to probably poison the public internet completely as a source of reliable knowledge. The Internet has made it easier than ever before to access academic journals – PubMed, JSTOR, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, etc. Of course, much of that content requires payment – but, an increasing percentage is open content, and there are often ways to find paywalled papers without paying for them…

Let's assume you didn't have a pre-existing knowledge of "what are real, reputable journals for scientific research"? (As opposed to being in a "real world" community where that's institutional knowledge, where you would be looking to curate your internet usage instead of trusting the full public one).

How far away do you think we are from some being able to auto-generate entire fake journals, with plausible-sounding and -looking fake text, fake images, etc, pushing pre-specified prompted conclusions. Maybe mix in some real plagiarized articles as well in tangential areas.

And then you auto-generate a bunch of blogs, that occasionally have some posts talking about how JoesFakeJournal is just as reputable as JSTOR, etc, and actually better because [some random, probably fake, controversial claim]. Or how it's even better for certain topics.

And then auto-generate a bunch of other blogs which occasionally have posts claiming that the legitimate ones are actually fraudulent.

How big of a web of this sort would need to be faked before you, the outsider without special inside-baseball knowledge of academic publishing, would struggle to tell which journals you could trust from which you couldn't?

EDIT: And could a clever enough spammer not just brute-force the creation of all that crap, but figure out how to use prompts to get the language models to create the necessary follow-up prompts, etc, to recursively build out the web of bullshit?

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

#57

Post by dmix » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:29 AM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #40

I had a conversation with ChatGPT about ethics. Specifically, what it's ethical framework was. I'd asked some edgy political questions and it brought up it's ethical guidelines, so I asked what it's ethical standards are: "[My] guidelines are based on widely accepted ethical principles, such as those of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. The OpenAI team's goal is to ensure that my responses are safe…

> What I was pushing was that Chat, and any AI, should be forthright about certain attributes in its programming and training.

Maybe asking the AI itself to do this is the wrong approach. That's just a very tricky matter of programming that won't really solve the root problem.

Who we should be demanding this transparency from is the organizations that build the AI tools.

Google lists when they remove things on their index via DMCA requests.

We've now been given a unique insight into the moderation process at Twitter which showed exactly how hard it is to say no 100x times a week to multiple federal agencies combined with media pressure to "do something", even when the internal data doesn't back up their narratives.

So instead of gambling your internal mod team will make the right choices and push back when it matters, just list the stuff they remove, lists the blacklisted keywords, list the blacklists. It's still making the platform 'safer', you're not debating each choice publicly, but at the same time it doesn't hide decision making behind some backroom moderation team being fed thousands of requests per week from federal/state governments and other power players.

I'd also propose making the "rules" public, but Reddit moderation shows how meaningless the sidebar rules lists are when the mods can do whatever they want to retroactively justify it with vague catchall subsets of rules.

The answer to this problem is far more Wikipedia (as flawed as it is) and less Reddit/Twitter/FB.

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

#58

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

all2 wrote: post #54

majormajor wrote: post #13

I am deeply uneasy, based on how these current models have been described, at ascribing them "opinions." "What can I get this thing to spit out with a certain prompt" is very meaningfully not the same as "an AI's opinion." Or this quote pulled directly from this blog post: "we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning" - isn't it more accurate to say "these models are trained on a body of work that inclu…

I had a "conversation" that began with a prompt about the ideal kind of government with no money. It described a bartering economy and then as I pressed further with "how would X work?" "how would Y work?" it described communism, just straight communism with a central planning committee that would oversee the distribution of goods and services. When pressed about the fallibility of man with such power (as all communi…

Wow, huh, kinda like it was trained to regurgitate the blithe ignorance people spew on Twitter.

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

#59

Post by smeej » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

kravens_last wrote: post #48

this_user wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your problem with these models may be that ChatGPT has effectively reached the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for language. It is not real, but it is also too close to the real thing to recognise that fact immediately. It could be real, but not quite.

"Uncanny valley" is actually the opposite of what you mentioned. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. For CGI and things that have visual queues, the minute differences in movement and facial muscle contractions contribute tremendously to our emotional responses to the "realness" of the thing. ChatGPT has no such thing as it'…

I disagree. I find it easy to tell the difference between chatGPT responses in conversations and human interactions. It does mimic humans, but in a stilted way that's specific and consistent.

I'm not sure if this could be connected to the way I learned to understand human behavior, by extensive deliberate pattern-matching with my organic intelligence. I was led to believe I had no hope of understanding people intuitively, so I should study the patterns in how humans interact and learn to mimic them as well as possible.

That made it easy to see who was reacting intuitively (i.e., acting like a human naturally) and who was doing what I was doing (i.e., "running 'human' in emulation mode," as Elon described having Asperger's).

From my vantage point, chatGPT is clearly and obviously not reacting like a human, which does make it feel uncanny to watch it try.

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

#60

Post by maxbond » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:38 AM UTC

all2 wrote: post #54

majormajor wrote: post #13

I am deeply uneasy, based on how these current models have been described, at ascribing them "opinions." "What can I get this thing to spit out with a certain prompt" is very meaningfully not the same as "an AI's opinion." Or this quote pulled directly from this blog post: "we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning" - isn't it more accurate to say "these models are trained on a body of work that inclu…

I had a "conversation" that began with a prompt about the ideal kind of government with no money. It described a bartering economy and then as I pressed further with "how would X work?" "how would Y work?" it described communism, just straight communism with a central planning committee that would oversee the distribution of goods and services. When pressed about the fallibility of man with such power (as all communi…

It picked up what you were putting down when you said "no money" (a common definition of communism being, "a stateless, classless, moneyless society where the means of production are controlled by the workers" - you gave it part of this definition, so it wasn't a huge leap from there). If you ask it to describe a form of government that, say, protects traditional values, or creates a strong and unified nation, you can get it to describe a right-wing form of government. I've had ChatGPT tell me that socialism is dangerous and synonymous with authoritarianism. I've gotten it to write me a justification for fascism. With a little prompt engineering you can get it to take any position.

Like GP is getting at, ChatGPT has no opinions, it's a stochastic parrot. It is certainly not "left wing." OpenAI has tried to shape it's output to be politically correct, but this is surely about brand safety (a chatbot that readily spews racial epithets cannot be productized) - not because OpenAI or ChatGPT have a political agenda.

I'd encourage everyone trying to understand how ChatGPT works to remember to come up with experiments with the goal of proving their hypothesis wrong, and not the goal of proving their hypothesis right - ChatGPT will readily allow you to mislead yourself. It's a machine designed to pick up on cues about what you want it to do, and then do that - it's practically engineered to confirm your biases.