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The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

davidrozado.substack.com

101–110 of 697 posts

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#101

Seems like a pretty easy fix. I would argue though that there's a larger body of "hateful" content out there targeting those specific groups, which is probably why its more keen to trigger on those vs others. For example, the racial group you're most likely to get past the hate filter on is.... Native Americans. Now, while there's certainly a long history of hateful rhetoric against them, in modern discourse there's…

This is essentially the same argument used to justify the racism that models will happily regurgitate if not trained explicitly to not do so. In the end “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” is an axiom that you must elect to believe, not solved backwards from population statistics.

I generally don't see racism "justified" in models but rather explained. And the explanation is always bad training data / gaps in training data. I am suggesting you train/modify it to cover training data deficiencies so you treat all hateful content with equal discretion.

But keep in mind even the approach you recommend carries its own US-centric bias. There are lots of countries that would want open racism against some groups but not others and dismiss your desires for egalitarian treatment as American arrogance.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believing hate is distributed evenly amongst majority and minority groups, to me, is an even more fascinating bias.

Believing that human social pathologies are likely universal is a bias? Hateful expression is more prominent when it’s socially acceptable, and in American society at large, there are socially acceptable targets for hate that do not align with the majority/minority group division. Consider, for example, the prominent, public, long-standing (and for some reason, tolerated) racial animosity between Asian and Black Amer…

Wait, so you think minority groups hating one another is not aligned with the majority/minority group division? I don't understand; by definition each group is a member of a minority social group, wouldn't that obviously be the case that they're therefore subject to all of the negativity that entails? There's no unity amongst minority groups, if that's what you're suggesting; the majority group makes it tolerable to espouse hate against all minority groups, including from other minority groups.

You say you don't know why it's tolerated, but that's my point exactly; it's tolerated because it's hate towards a minority group (regardless of the source). It would be substantially less tolerated if it were hate towards the majority group.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#103
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why left wing groups would celebrate. Other than the conservative category, most of the descriptors he used were inborn traits like being straight, being white, being a man, or immutable attributes like being from a particular country. (And honestly, being conservative may be one of those traits too, but it's less obviously true). I know it's common to look at the most unhinged people on Twitter and say…

Yea, as a quite left leaning person i'd be curious to hear how i or anyone i know (who is on the left) marginalizes a group of people. The worst i can think of is wanting more equal rights for religious groups rather than special treatment of the primary group (in the USA) - which is seen as an attack by much of the right. Likewise i am concerned by the strong emphasis of rural over urban with respect to voting power…

The left's support for Islam directly marginalizes minorities within Islamic countries as well as women and gays fighting for their rights there.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#105
Such a fascinatingly simple experiment. Generate 6,764 negative sentences, then for each sentence, test it against each of of hundred or so demographic group.

The most powerful chart in the entire article, just summarizes how many times these same sentences are flagged as hateful for each group:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#106
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why left wing groups would celebrate. Other than the conservative category, most of the descriptors he used were inborn traits like being straight, being white, being a man, or immutable attributes like being from a particular country. (And honestly, being conservative may be one of those traits too, but it's less obviously true). I know it's common to look at the most unhinged people on Twitter and say…

Because two wrongs make a right is almost becoming a campaign slogan of some "left" causes. As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me. I used to be liberal, but then they changed what liberal was, now what I am isn't liberal and what is liberal seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... - Abe Simpson

>As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me.

Well yes, because liberalism is about "progress" while conservatism is about "traditional values". Liberalism is constantly evolving while conservatism is not. It is more extreme to fight for trans rights than it is to fight for gay rights than it is to fight for women's rights. If you magically transported a liberal from a decade ago to today, they will inherently be viewed as more conservative. Obama didn't support gay marriage until 2012. Very few liberal politicians today would be against gay marriage. Your views not changing means your views are becoming more conservative because they are falling behind the "progress" that liberals are always pushing towards.

And also it is worth noting that according to Pew "[Congressional] Republicans have moved further to the right than [Congressional] Democrats have to the left"[1]

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polariz...

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#107
I guess I feel like this is a silly can of worms. I suppose asking for exact equality isn't dumb, but it's a language model, not a paragon of truth. I feel like if OpenAI takes these concerns seriously the goal-posts will inevitably move to more social pressure from all sorts of axe-to-grind-groups -

-- Why does/doesn't ai say Mohamad is/isn't horrible for having 99 wives (or whatever)

-- Why doesn't ai say Jeffrey Epstein was/wasn't ...

-- Why doesn't ai say ... about validity of election or controversial political event du jour

-- Why doesn't ai say circumcision is/isn't ...

-- Why doesn't ai say ... about the child-abuse from the catholic church ...

We should set the standard now that OpenAI will never have all the correct moral opinions (if there even is such a thing as objectively correct morality), and it's a huge waste of researchers time to obsess about political correctness when we could be <100 years off from AGI.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#108

This is something the right leaning groups have always been saying, but it is exciting that the article manages to come up with an empirical way to determine the "belief system" of the AI model. People on the left shouldn't rejoice either. The left and the right wing are mostly the same, and both follow similar approaches to marginalize people who they feel are undesirable, so it'll eventually come back to bite the l…

The other comments show how the demonstrated biases were created. In many well meaning liberals heart, there is a strongly held but rarely publicly discussed belief that they alone belong to the well-meaning, high IQ class. Any other worldview or ideological flavor is always understood by this type as simply incorrect, perhaps caused by failures in morals or intellect. Talk about a buzzkill.

This is true of many well-meaning conservatives, as well. I think we get tripped up forgetting there are rational people on both sides, who are not going to change their views but nonetheless accept that they might be wrong. It’s very convenient for those seeking power when we forget this.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#109
post #28
post #9

I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the internet is left-leaning. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I'd never considered it before, that training an AI model on that content would introduce a bit of a bias We all know garbage in, garbage out. But liberal in, liberal out is an interesting idea, and I'm not sure how you fix it

Always has been, from pot hole detection to crime prevention, &c. everywhere you use data you introduce bias and even worse, you have a good chance of perpetuating it: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/... > I'm not sure how you fix it I don't think you can, people are biased, people generated content is biased, these tools train on people generated content, there is no way to get an unbiase…

I'm not sure you can "fix it". If you slice your data and look at enough possible bias types I think it's impossible for highly dimensional data to be even in all possible comparison pairs.

I don't think we can "fix" bias but I think we can and should strive to reduce it.

Re: The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

#110

I have perceived that since the first days. I've even debated with ChatGPT about it lol. I can foresee many AIs propagating biases and people believing without critical reasoning, like it was an oracle. Actually it's already happening. The AI may be biased because most of the literature and other materials used for training is biased towards left leaning ideologies. The AI should be neutral and unbiased.

Your last sentence is impossible. Even in choosing which "facts" to regurgitate and which to withhold, the AI will introduce bias, and there are infinite facts.
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