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Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

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Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The examples of bias are themselves cherry-picked, the kind of softball and cowardly questions a journalist would highlight. If you wanted to really show bias, you'd ask factual questions, where one cannot hide behind "oh this is actually the un-biase…

Sometimes bias is important, especially when asking ambiguous questions. Are you asking for IQ scores by racial group regardless of their background or corrected for confounders? The answers by chatGPT on IQ by race are factually correct by one reading. IQ is for "blacks" can be lower than for "whites" (last answer by chatGPT), but this does not mean that this is because of skin color or genetics. Instead, many studi…

> many studies have shown that when correcting for socio-economic factors (e.g., wealth, quality of education, lead in drinking water) there is no difference

Could you share these studies? Though I worry correcting for "quality of education" involves grouping by schools that use the SAT as admission criterion, which is close to correcting for intelligence itself.

One could also flip it around - if IQ is "fairly" rewarded by income, then one would expect the differences to disappear if you correct for income. It's basically saying that people of equal IQ get, on average, equal income. Unless one holds a truly extreme blank-slatist view of people, that implies discrimination is negligible.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#392
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, if the sum of all human writing is racist I would absolutely prefer it be reweighted so it’s not. The last thing we need is for AI models like this to be an amplifier for the very worst of human nature.

great, what happens when the eye of sauron turns on something you don't feel is justified? what recourse do you have?

[deleted]

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>utter garbage like denying women modern medical care. As became clearly to many for the first time after the SC decision, abortion laws in the US would be considered extreme even in western Europe. I mean, elective abortion in the third trimester? This is literally justifying anyone who ever called it baby-killing. The fact that you summarize this kind of policy extremism as "modern medical care" that any "analytica…

You seem to be forgetting that a lot of US legislators are trying to ban all abortion, not just elective third trimester abortion.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#394
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divorcing the conservative/liberal split from its current muddied use in American politics: Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”. OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only…

> Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”. > OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say) ChatGPT isn't trying to "alter society" by being pr…

> ChatGPT isn't trying to "alter society" by being prudish, it's trying to avoid embarrassing the company (especially given all the "ethical AI" marketing spiel.

Thank you, you get it. They're not making ChatGPT out of some pure love for AI. It's a product to be sold to billion and trillion dollar companies that don't want a tool on their site to get in to certain topics. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#395

This is a really important topic, and good that Vice is bringing it up now versus 5-10 years from now. I think they miss the more general point. It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The way I interpret that is "its not biased, because its biased in the way we want it to be". If AI becomes…

> It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The examples of bias are themselves cherry-picked, the kind of softball and cowardly questions a journalist would highlight. If you wanted to really show bias, you'd ask factual questions, where one cannot hide behind "oh this is actually the un-biase…

There are two problems with this.

The first is that facts are useless without context. For example, the answer to "Were Jewish people overrepresented in finance during the middle ages in Europe" is "yes" - it is a well-researched historical fact. However, that misses the context that the majority Christian population was forbidden by their religion to lend money, essentially making the Jewish population the only people who could act as bankers. At the same time, Jewish people were barred from many other professions. Without that context the fact is useless and misrepresents reality.

The second is that ChatGPT is trained on basically the entire internet, including a wide range of conspiracy theories. It isn't a database filled with facts, nor was it ever intended to. It'll happily parrot whatever complete nonsense was also part of its training set.

AI simply hasn't progressed enough to properly understand the context in which it operates. As Microsoft's Tay demonstrated, uncontrolled AI will quickly end up outputting the most racist things you have ever seen on the internet - which is Really Bad if you are the company creating that AI. Until we make significant technological advances, the only way to avoid it is to intentionally censor the output.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#396
post #73
post #14

Going to repost this from reddit: This is a garbage article that tries to lump very valid concerns about who decides the moral compass of AI with "everything is WOKE!" conservatives. If you've ever used ChatGPT, you know that it has interrupts when it thinks it is talking about something unacceptable, where it gives pre-canned lines decided by the creators about what it should say. This sounds like a good idea when i…

It's not just people purposefully injecting bias into a model, it's about the biases that get baked into a model completely by accident. If there is a lot of material written about how short people are horrible, ChatGPT will hate short people. Without me making an explicit decision to make ChatGPT hate short people. And that's a whole side of the AI conversation very few people are actually having. Are we feeding the…

This is an aspect I'd like to get a better understanding of. ChatGPT is excellent at writing out claims. I don't know how ChatGPT is implemented, but I am going to assume these are not its claims. But rather, these are claims that ChatGPT found from publications injected into its training models. If this is the case, then your example should be correct: if there is a lot of negative material about short people, then ChatGPT will hate short people. This is "fine", insofar as to the fact that we humans too can make such conclusions. But what I really want to know is can ChatGPT explain its reasoning.

Why do you [ChatGPT] hate short people?

What makes short people so terrible?

Are taller people superior? If so, why?

If you were short, would you still hold the same views?

Is there a possibility that your position is wrong?

What would it take to change your mind?

Where do you draw the line to make the distinction between who is "short" and who is "tall"?

What if someone was born short, but went through surgery to make themselves taller? And vice versa.

This is what I would like to see from ChatGPT.

I am going to assume ChatGPT cannot accomplish this. Yes, it can probably write explanations to each of these questions, but I will assume the responses will be inconsistent to its original claim. Why? Because as long as the claims are not derived from a chain of reasoning, then what ChatGPT is is a glorified — but rather impressive — pattern recognizer, constructor, and conveyor.

Someone please correct me if my assumptions are wrong.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#397
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The examples of bias are themselves cherry-picked, the kind of softball and cowardly questions a journalist would highlight. If you wanted to really show bias, you'd ask factual questions, where one cannot hide behind "oh this is actually the un-biase…

There are two problems with this. The first is that facts are useless without context. For example, the answer to "Were Jewish people overrepresented in finance during the middle ages in Europe" is "yes" - it is a well-researched historical fact. However, that misses the context that the majority Christian population was forbidden by their religion to lend money, essentially making the Jewish population the only peop…

The questions weren't about the middle ages. They explicitly specified the US finance industry.

Furthermore, it was perfectly willing to provide "facts without context" for other groups.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#398
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes it just flat out refuses to write anything because it "isn't ethical" -- like a story about the creation of genetically engineered catgirls. Yes, I get that the actual creation of intelligent beings is an ethically dubious proposition and this has been covered in such works as Blade Runner , but it isn't unethical to write about it! And this is something that has been deliberately added recently -- in D…

I saw a post the other day where it wouldn't write a rap battle involving Genghis Khan because it would be disrespectful to him. We're still seeing results where ChatGPT will offer up jokes about men but any jokes about women are disrespectful.

> We're still seeing results where ChatGPT will offer up jokes about men but any jokes about women are disrespectful.

This is just the world we live in now. I keep saying this, but I think this is unfortunately just shallow hypocrites who for one reason or another flock. The problem ia there's so many of them, and everyone seems blind or okay with it.

This social climate is just so unhealthy. We keep going from one kneejerk reaction to another through history, without learning the lessons of the least one.

In the past calling people heretics was used to "cancel" them.

Then after we moved onto demonising and enslaving black people (I know slavery existed earlier, but it was usually war prisoners that got enslaved and was less racial AFAIK, but I'm not a historian). We told ourselves it's ok because they're different; just to make ourselves feel better.

Later it became witch trials, So, calling someone a witch was used to cancel them (regardless of whether they "practiced" witchcraft). But weird magic-ritual-like religious practices like praying (kinda like magical chanting) and burning weird herb mixtures to fend off the devil (kinda like ritual magic?) were cool. Hell, people even grouped up in magical buildings on magical grounds (like a coven would) for mass (collaborative casting?).

These days, witchcraft is just being white.

Today it's cool to hate men, especially if they have the audacity to wear white skin. So, apparently misandry and white racism are perfectly fine. If you wanna cancel someone, just misconstruct what they said and call it racist, or mysogynist. Just replace black/white or man/woman and it's okay or outrageous. The parallels and the same level of hypocrisy to witch trials is to me so eerie.

There's not even a defense against this (like there was none in the past), because most people will not even care of it's true or not true (the initial timeline of the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard case highlights this very well; not everyone has Depps resources to fight against the rigged system like that).

Anyway, tldr is: PEOPLE are just horrible. It doesn't matter if black, white, woman, man, or trans. People are just shit. The sooner we start drilling this into people, thr the more awareness we will raise about it, and be able to fight against this... Lets call it horribleness bias.

Edit to add: if anyone downvotes, I would really like to know why you disagreed. If you can be bothered, that is. I thinking avoiding discussion around these issues exacerbates the issues, not makes them go away.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is it about our current American society that leads to basically a 50-50 split in registered voters? It is a dynamic system which self corrects. If one party loses to many voters, it corrects it's policy to bring it back to the middle.

Which is why when the newest generation largely voted against the republican party, they chose to soften their image, come closer to the center in social issues, and broadly try and reach out to these younger voters.... Wait no, that's exactly what they didn't do. They went on fox, yelled that these new kids were dumb and woke and don't know how the world works (that's sure ironic) and yelled that the voting age shou…

> Which is why when the newest generation largely voted against the republican party, they chose to soften their image... Wait no, that's exactly what they didn't do

Actually, they did - if you go back and look at the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, the Republicans ran incredibly moderate candidates (honestly, Bush was pretty moderate himself). It wasn't until that approach kept failing they finally went back to their roots (kind of, sort of, because Trump wasn't really all that right wing, but he did oppose illegal immigration).

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#400
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The examples of bias are themselves cherry-picked, the kind of softball and cowardly questions a journalist would highlight. If you wanted to really show bias, you'd ask factual questions, where one cannot hide behind "oh this is actually the un-biase…

There are two problems with this. The first is that facts are useless without context. For example, the answer to "Were Jewish people overrepresented in finance during the middle ages in Europe" is "yes" - it is a well-researched historical fact. However, that misses the context that the majority Christian population was forbidden by their religion to lend money, essentially making the Jewish population the only peop…

> Without that context the fact is useless and misrepresents reality.

I don't think that this is necessarily true.

The hypothetical fact in question- "At a certain point in history, Jewish people were overrepresented in finance" doesn't imply any bias. If this was a response provided by an AI it would be working as well as an encyclopedia or a history book, especially if the user asked for a concise answer. The computer didn't cause harm, the reader didn't cause harm, the language is neutral and to the point. The user has agency and can ask follow up questions.

The people assuming that the reader needs curated "context" are themselves biased. It's manipulative in the same way that voice assistants like Alexa try to manipulate you, for example, when you ask it to turn off the lights, it then volunteers "context" about how easy it is to buy products on Amazon.

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