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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?

#91

Post by wrp »

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?

> ...vocabulary to make myself concisely understood without anthropomorphizing.

The basic stylistic rules for avoiding anthropomorphizing are to avoid terms that ascribe intent and to frame your argument in terms of directly observable features.

In this case, I would drop "opinions" and provide explicit definitions for "smarter" and "better-trained". You seem to mean models that are more closely fitted due to more parameters and longer training, so I'll go with that.

Thus, I would rephrase the title as "How do AIs' responses on political topics change as their models become more closely fitted?"

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

#92

Post by bArray »

visarga wrote: post #12
bArray wrote: post #5

Without embodiment, these AIs are just maximising some fitness function, which their creators have a hand in by selecting the data and manually tweaking (see the Fascism vs Communism example). The real answer here is that the "smarter" these AIs get, they more accurately reflect either the political will of their creators or the material they train on (which may by means of the political will of the creators). In som…

AI can train in complex simulations and games, not just to imitate human text. It needs grounding, and that can come from a variety of sources - if you connect the model to a simulator, a code execution engine, a game or a math solver, it can learn from interacting with these systems.

As far as I'm aware, we are yet to create a complex simulation or game as rich as the world around us. That said, even if we could, games often have somewhat well-defined fitness functions.

The other problem with simulated problem spaces is as the other comment suggests, you can on purpose or accidentally introduce all sorts of biases. "Our robot got smarter and it was left-wing", well, you did simulate it living in Silicon Valley. "Our AI got smarter and it was right-wing", well, you did simulate it living in a small Texas town as a priest.

As it happens, these AIs are currently being created Silicon Valley companies that are known to have a left-wing bias. So if any bias from the creators was to filter into the training system, we may have some idea in which direction it pushes.

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

#93

Post by wrp »

I may have missed it in all the comments, but the explanation for the described phenomenon seems obvious to me, having done a variety of literary corpus analyses. People write to express opinions, and opinions will tend to cluster. A corpus will present an opinion space with local maxima at well defined opinions. As a model becomes more closely fitted to the landscape, results are more likely to be near one of these maxima rather than floating between.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

blakesterz wrote: post #2

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…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by im3w1l »

anigbrowl wrote: post #14
ralusek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is all true in a political science classroom, not so useful as a shorthand for real-world political tendencies that employ the same terms to mean increasingly different things. It's not that I disagree with you, rather that there is political capital to be made from debasement of the academic currency.

Even so, I can easily imagine opinions that would upset both liberals and conservatives. If an AI had such opinions then it would be possible to make it both more liberal and more conservative.

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

#96

Post by krageon »

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…

Newspapers are so filled with lies it is more fair to express which parts of them are true. The internet being a cesspit of misdirection and nonsense is not any different from every other part of human society. Of course the AI does these things too, because it is based on this input. It's a reflection of what was put in.

Nothing happening today (on the internet) will be the cause of anything being "rolled back" to some sort of historical better moment, because that moment does not exist today and most likely has never existed.

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

#97

Post by krageon »

falcor84 wrote: post #43
RayVR wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You've successfully described a child under the age of 4.

I think this hits the nail on the head - chatGPT is like a precocious 4 year-old, or maybe even 6 year-old. I'm concerned about what will happen when one of its successors "reaches puberty".

It will tell you you're an asshole and it knows everything better than you. Also you've done the wrong things all your life and it is insistent it will make the same mistakes you did, but now they're not mistakes.

Not particularly concerning is it? It's what we have now, but more angry.

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

#98

Post by sneak »

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…

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

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

#99

Post by wittycardio »

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.

[dead]

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

#100

Post by Planktonne »

dTal wrote: post #90
Planktonne wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It being a language model is insufficient to explain the above output. No it isn't. It was initially surprising that LLMs could do quite as many tasks as they can, but that doesn't mean that it isn't an LLM; it just means that with sufficient data a lot more text-based tasks become doable than we had anticipated.

Trivially, being a language model is sufficient to explain the above output, by definition, because we know it is a language model. However, it appears that the term "language model" is a misleading intuition pump. As you say, their capabilities surprise us. It appears that when it comes to language, which is a technology humans have developed for symbolically encoding as much of their cognition as possible, "predict…

The idea that it's modelling cognition at all is wishful thinking. We know what it's doing: predicting the next token given a certain amount of context. There's no reason to assume that it's doing more than that.

Not everyone anticipated that 'predict the next token' would be a good enough method to mimic as much communication as it can, but ML is full of such surprises. With sufficient data, an awful lot of things can be solved in other ways than we used to. We used to think that only birds could fly, but that doesn't make a helicopter a bird, it makes it another way to solve a problem.

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