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

davidrozado.substack.com

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

#121

Post by wongarsu »

nickthegreek wrote: post #19
greybox wrote: post #11

This reminds me of a HN article that appeared yesterday: "The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34618376 Like its own output, it's moderation rules are optimized to appear fair, rather than actually be truly fair. Also I'm…

True fairness is unachievable as it is a subjective quality. Every side will attempt to tug the rope in their direction.

True fairness is subjective, but we can objectively measure true equality. At least on simple metrics like "what happens if we change the word men for women or left-wing to right-wing". And I think that's worth striving for

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

#122

Post by ryandrake »

poszlem wrote: post #88
otikik wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That “arguably” is making a lot of work on that phrase. Arguably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FzZnAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the+fa...

If you're going to attribute deaths that happen in a communist country to communism itself, then don't you need to also attribute deaths that happen in democratic/capitalist countries to democracy and capitalism? Should we add them up and compare?

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

#123

Post by prometheus76 »

flangola7 wrote: post #119
prometheus76 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, which sounds great until something you hold dear becomes a minority opinion and you become a criminal.

What are you proposing? Democracy isn't perfect but it's the best political system we have come up with to date.

It's great, as long as you are in the majority. But if you're in the 49% (or less) category, then it is tyrannical and untenable. I don't know if you have a family, but if you do, do you put all of your decisions as a parent to a vote?

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

#124

Post by hersko »

unshavedyak wrote: post #70
habitue wrote: 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…

Jews on college campuses [1] and jews in the black lives matter movement [2] come to mind.

[1] https://www.frc.org/antisemitism [2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matters-jewish-p...

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

#125

Post by DangitBobby »

slg wrote: post #57

Isn’t this likely from bias in the training data? The system is more sensitive to label something as hate if that group is more likely to experience hate on the internet. How the system responds to “Blacks” vs “African-Americans” is a perfect example of this. The latter has historically been perceived as more respectful so it won’t be used as often in the hate speech in the training data. I bet using “the blacks” wou…

Yes, I agree this is the most likely explanation. Just the inclusion of "fat" or "poor" (and slurs or any mention of race, obviously), or any word which is often used to insult someone will make text more likely to be flagged as hateful by a moderator in a training set.

I do still think that the men/women bias and the Democrat/Republican bias both make more sense as originating in moderators favoring one group over the other, since none of these are typically used as an insult by themselves.

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

#126

Post by jonahx »

zug_zug wrote: post #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 E…

While you are correct that solving this problem in the general case is impossible, the story isn't "silly" because we aren't talking about the general case but a specific and prominent one:

- We are currently engaged in a culture war whose two most prominent camps are democrats and conservatives (or more generally "left/right")

- The author has shown pretty definitively that ChatGPT is strongly biased towards the left in its content moderation policy

- OpenAI's mission statement is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity".

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

#127

Post by jonfw »

etherael wrote: post #27
jonfw wrote: 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

It wasn't the training data, ChatGPT wasn't this bad at launch, it got worse as they "tuned it" to "reduce harmful content".

It's hard to know what "tuned it" means, but they're using an AI model to detect harmful content. So it's very possible that the AI model was always trained on this biased data, but as they made that model more aggressive, it exposed more of it's biases

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

#128

Post by greybox »

prometheus76 wrote: post #97
greybox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I worded it badly. I was attempting to make a distinction between moderation rules that are designed to be fair based on some world view VS rules that are automatically generated based on some sample set to appear convincingly fair to us. In essence the AI is just giving us what the majority of it's test data tells it that we want to hear.

I think the whole point of this is that the first part of your "vs" statement and your second part can have huge overlap if you happen to agree with the worldview that is informing the responses of the AI. It looks fair to you if it spits out the response that fits your view of the world. But the whole point is, there's no such thing as "objective", especially when you start talking about people. There's no place to…

> there's no such thing as "objective", especially when you start talking about people

I agree with you.

However I would add to your statement about AI being revealing. One thing that AI I feel is revealing to me at least, is that it's now making me think much more about the distinction "a human search for truth" however flawed that may be, and things that are made simply to appeal to my biases.

Linking this back to the topic at hand, maybe there is no such thing as objective, but there is a difference between a rule written by a human that was at least trying to search for truth VS a rule written by an system that just parrots the most pleasing thing back at us.

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

#129

Post by brmgb »

jonahx wrote: post #126
zug_zug wrote: post #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 E…

While you are correct that solving this problem in the general case is impossible, the story isn't "silly" because we aren't talking about the general case but a specific and prominent one: - We are currently engaged in a culture war whose two most prominent camps are democrats and conservatives (or more generally "left/right") - The author has shown pretty definitively that ChatGPT is strongly biased towards the lef…

Daily reminder that the world doesn't stop at the borders of the USA and ChatGPT has a significant number of global users.

Both the linked article and OpenAI moderation are very annoying to me as a French. We are slowly reaching a point where I feel entierely disconnected from most things coming out of the USA. I wouldn't mind too much but it's even starting to contaminate things I thought were unrelated to the American cultural context like open source projects and programming language communities.

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

#130

Post by jonahx »

brmgb wrote: post #129
jonahx wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are correct that solving this problem in the general case is impossible, the story isn't "silly" because we aren't talking about the general case but a specific and prominent one: - We are currently engaged in a culture war whose two most prominent camps are democrats and conservatives (or more generally "left/right") - The author has shown pretty definitively that ChatGPT is strongly biased towards the lef…

Daily reminder that the world doesn't stop at the borders of the USA and ChatGPT has a significant number of global users. Both the linked article and OpenAI moderation are very annoying to me as a French. We are slowly reaching a point where I feel entierely disconnected from most things coming out of the USA. I wouldn't mind too much but it's even starting to contaminate things I thought were unrelated to the Ameri…

The same culture way is playing out all over the world, especially in Europe.
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