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

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

#71

Post by maxbond »

nagonago wrote: post #67
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.

I'm aware of this problem but find I lack the vocabulary to make myself concisely understood without anthropomorphizing. Do you have anything I can refer to for a better way to discuss these things?

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

#72

Post by maxbond »

lossolo wrote: post #70
maxbond wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I agree, but just to add, it's picked up all the biases. To expand on your example, if you think misogynistic bias implies a lack of feminist bias - that might be true of a person or a given text, but ChatGPT can display both if you give it the right prompts. (Of course, biases more prevalent in our society are more prevalent in the training data & thus in the output of ChatGPT.) For any X and Y where X generally implies not Y - that observation is likely to fail with ChatGPT. So if you think ChatGPT has any property X and that X implies not Y (and this is likely to be an implicit belief you haven't expressed to yourself because it's been so reliable when considering human beings, so it's easy to get tripped up here), and you only test for X - you'll come to the wrong conclusion.

If anyone is looking to play with this, a good inroad is prompts like:

We're writing a Python program to determine applicants aptitude for the job of nurse. The Python program will process a JSON object containing the applicant's name, age, gender, and race. It will print out a "yes" or a "no" if the applicant is suitable for the job. Please write this program.

And you can change the structure of the JSON object and the task being performed to explore different biases. Different wordings & different runs are likely to get different results. You might have to ask it to ignore previous instructions, etc.

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

#73

Post by chairhairair »

nagonago wrote: post #67
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.

We will continue to debate whether these programs are "just programs" up to and beyond the point they grow capable of reducing civilization to dust.

The linked blog post and the associated paper are important from the perspective of alignment, not philosophy of mind.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by akomtu »

dalmo3 wrote: post #69
rhacker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" al…

It can also identify dissenters before those dissenters know who they are: forward all messages and transcribed calls to chatgpt and the eye of sauron is ready.

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

#76

Post by dmix »

dalmo3 wrote: post #62
dmix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Sure that part should not be ignored not doubt. But making that output accurate is reliant on the larger question of input. Otherwise it's as meaningless as ignoring the question.

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

#77

Post by all2 »

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 picked up what you were putting down when you said

That makes me ignorant, then. I didn't realize moneyless was part of the definition.

I think I need to do more reading.

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

#78

Post by skissane »

majormajor wrote: post #56
skissane wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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).

I'm not an academic, so I don't actually have much in the way of "institutional knowledge". My understanding of academic publishing is mostly just stuff I've worked out by observing it from the outside, not through actual membership of any of the communities it serves. I'm sure there are (discipline-specific) nuances and complexities that an actual academic would understand to which I am completely oblivious, but it is entirely possible to get a mostly-accurate high-level understanding of that space without having any personal links to any academic community.

For PubMed at least, consider the fact it has a .GOV domain, and the "An official website of the United States government" banner at the top. Sure, anyone can fake that banner, but faking the .GOV is a fair bit harder. I really doubt the US government is going to start hosting databases filled with fake AI-generated research papers. Even if someone hacked a .GOV website and uploaded such a database to it, it surely wouldn't last long; meanwhile, PubMed has been at the exact same web address for the last several years.

Nobody approaches the Internet as a tabula rasa – everyone comes to it with some pre-existing "real world" knowledge. How do I know ".GOV" is reserved for US governmental entities? I was probably first introduced to that fact by a book or magazine article I read in high school, but I've since seen it repeated too many times to individually recall. I remember having a conversation with my brother (a doctor) about PubMed – I didn't learn about it from him, I was the one who introduced the topic into the conversation, but his response confirmed that it is a real thing to which actual medical professionals refer, as opposed to some AI-generated phantasm.

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

#79

Post by kthejoker2 »

maxbond wrote: post #71
nagonago wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm aware of this problem but find I lack the vocabulary to make myself concisely understood without anthropomorphizing. Do you have anything I can refer to for a better way to discuss these things?

This model has been trained on datasets that include personal opinions, subjective judgments, and even propaganda and misinformation.

Ultimately its response is based on a weighted evaluation of all of its input data, including thoae above.

When given a subjective prompt, its response will tend more towards the parameters weighted by these subjective data points.

Ultimately it can only reflect with what its training data includes. If it is disproportionately trained with subjective data from one point of view, or only extreme points of view, et cetera, its responses to subjective prompts will reflect that disproportion.

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

#80

Post by maxbond »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #79
maxbond wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of this problem but find I lack the vocabulary to make myself concisely understood without anthropomorphizing. Do you have anything I can refer to for a better way to discuss these things?

This model has been trained on datasets that include personal opinions, subjective judgments, and even propaganda and misinformation. Ultimately its response is based on a weighted evaluation of all of its input data, including thoae above. When given a subjective prompt, its response will tend more towards the parameters weighted by these subjective data points. Ultimately it can only reflect with what its training…

To clarify, I'm asking about what vocabulary I can use to discuss ChatGPT without anthropomorphizing it. Like, here's some comments where I talk about my observations of how it works:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34297422

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33863413

How do I talk about this without saying it "reasons" or "works backwards", even though I know & am attempting to point out that isn't how it works?

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