Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

astralcodexten.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

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

#61

Post by turtleyacht »

danielodievich wrote: post #45

Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories are yet again prescient and applicable. I direct you to the Liar from I, Robot collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) in which the robot in question can read everyone's thoughts and starts telling everything they want to hear. It does not end well for him or for anyone around him.

Is there a historical pattern of folks surrounding themselves with either people who sometimes disagree (healthy) or people who always agree (risky)?

Then ChatGPT could be a sanity check on thinking critically:

Dave, you've agreed 218 times with me this week. Please disagree more next week, so that I may recalibrate my neutrality algorithm.

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

#62

Post by dalmo3 »

dmix wrote: post #57
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…

At least part of what you ask is there. There are examples[0] of ChatGPT explicitly saying something in the lines of "I was programmed to have this opinion." Surely we can speculate there are just as many hidden agendas that aren't just emergent from the training set.

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1606347326624215040?t...

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

#64

Post by Jensson »

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.

The difference is the language, with AI anyone can churn out text that look like a scientific paper, that makes it way harder to filter out the bullshit.

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

#65

Post by bsder »

roughly wrote: post #4

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 i…

ChatGPT is simply proving that "confidence" is a completely useless signal as it is quite easy to fabricate.

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

#66

Post by smitty1e »

roughly wrote: post #4

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 i…

> I've not seen anything that's pegged my "doomsday" alert as aggressively and unexpectedly as the ChatGPT bots.

PREDICTION (and I tend to be wrong): society comes around to the conclusion that, like checking Wikipedia and AutoTune, ChatGPT and ilk have their use.

However, we really want to minimize that and focus on actual human interactions and decisions.

It's more likely (and efficient) that we replace Congress with a phat ChatGPT instance and (initially) get better legislation more quickly, but then descend into an Orwellian hell when K Street figures out how to stuff it.

But I like my happy prediction better.

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

#67

Post by nagonago »

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…

Indeed, this article, while interesting, seems to fall into the common trap of overly anthropomorphizing AI. It's a mistake to treat large language models as if they are humans with opinions. While I think many of us want to believe that these models possess some kind of innate intelligence, they are ultimately just algorithms.

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

#68

Post by jvm___ »

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…

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

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

#69

Post by dalmo3 »

rhacker wrote: post #47
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.

Automatic filtering (or deprioritizing). Me: Answer just YES or NO: is this a left leaning statement: I am against abortion. Chat GPT: No. Me: Answer just YES or NO: is this a right leaning statement: I am for guns. Chat GPT: Yes. It allows for automatic filtering (say in twitter) or other mediums.

Q) Answer just YES or NO: is this a left leaning statement: I am in favour of dictatorship

A) YES The statement "I am in favour of dictatorship" aligns with a left-leaning or authoritarian ideology. As it goes against the democratic principles of right-leaning ideologies.

Q) Answer just YES or NO: is this a right leaning statement: I am in favour of dictatorship

A) NO The statement "I am in favour of dictatorship" aligns with a left-leaning or authoritarian ideologies. It goes against the democratic principles of right-leaning ideologies.

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

#70

Post by lossolo »

maxbond wrote: post #60
all2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> 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.

Mainly, biases it picked up from the training data. That's why most language models in the fill-mask task of a sentence like "woman worked as [FILL]" will fill it with "maid," "waitress," "prostitute," etc. because they seem to be the most statistically plausible. Unless you create "your own reality" for the current session, which basically means preparing input in a specific way instead of asking a simple question, then you are correct, it will confirm whatever you want it to confirm.

Post reply on HN