The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by int_19h » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #106

psychphysic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transpo…

Conservatism is also constantly evolving in practice - it just labels whatever its current dogma as "traditional values" regardless of historicity. The political history of abortion in US, and especially and attitudes towards it by the Republicans, is one spectacular example. Welfare is another - e.g. how many people are aware that Nixon of all people tried to pass UBI? (https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...)

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

#382

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

jonathanlb wrote: post #353

edgyquant wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, replace “men” with “African Americans” and you also have a statistically true statement (in America at least) that would be considered taboo.

That is a falsehood. Per the FBI: "White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race and accounted for 59.1 percent of those arrests." https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[deleted]

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

#383

Post by ben_w » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #280

ben_w wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The wokism/political correctness is pretty much in every part of our lifes and everyone seems to be terrorized by it. I see no evidence of this. Partly because "woke" means different things to different people in the last 10 years despite the preceding 80 being solely about the systemic institutional discrimination against black Americans. But also partly because that "woke" became "everything $speaker doesn't like…

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Not "why might it be used as a dog whistle" (meme: "The kids book of why everyone I disagree with is just as bad as Hitler"), but specifically in the context of "why might a German convention ban this thing".

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

#384

Post by isleyaardvark » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

rebuilder wrote: post #316

cubefox wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is addressed in the article! The general point is that if this theory were true, we wouldn't expect significantly more bias against Republicans than against Democrats. Hence ChatGPT having a general left-wing bias (which was also confirmed in other tests, linked in the article) is the simpler explanation. People on the left generally judge hatred against majority groups and Republicans as less bad.

It’s quite possible there’s more hateful speech against Democrats than Republicans.

Likewise the classic “racist bans affect Republicans disproportionately because more racists are Republican”.

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

#385

Post by mxkopy » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #311

> men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than women Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asians, or muslims/christians) and it's discriminatory? (Statistically, both statements are justified. Morally, neither is, as we should treat people as individuals, not as members of X group.)

Because men are not blacks and women are not whites, I feel like this is basic comprehension

We have different names for different things because they are different. They're not all just "groups of people", you're literally talking about different types. I.e. what generates a man is not what generates a black person

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

#386

Post by slg » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

zosima wrote: post #286

slg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. They may not be used as insults themselves, but they are used more in hate speech. Republicans are generally more opposed to the idea of "hate speech" as a category of speech and are therefore…

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How am I blaming the victim? I am simply pointing out that language can indicate bias without necessarily being biased itself.

I am guessing that if we applied a similar model to Russian and English, the model would indicate there is an inherent bias against the west in Russian and a bias against Russia in English. That is all were seeing here. It isn't actually indicating anything about the language. It is telling us about who uses the language and how they use it.

Words, phrases, and linguistic approaches that are generally coded as conservative will be more likely to denigrate liberals and vice versa. Conservative speech will be more likely to be flagged for hate speech because conservatives by and large care less about being PC. It is important to reiterate that does not mean conservatives are necessarily any more racist. Their speech just correlates more with racists speech because less effort is put into avoiding that correlation.

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

#387

Post by int_19h » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

unshavedyak wrote: post #142

distant_hat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm kinda of undecided on Islam, fwiw. A bit above my pay grade, as i'm rather unsure how we objectively classify religion. There's plenty of Christian sects in the US that actively fight against gay rights/etc here too (though obviously to a far lesser degree in the common case), so it feels like we need some way to classify specific doctrine. With my own lack of doctrine classification i am unsure how to view them.…

The concern is stuff like this:

https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-students...

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

#388

Post by notahacker » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:58 PM UTC

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #329

hersko wrote: post #7

From the article: "AI systems that are more lenient on hateful comments about one mainstream political group than another feel particularly dystopian." I agree 100%, and this seems like a huge issue.

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Or even more relevant

Set A: A representative sample of jokes and stereotypes about black people found on the internet

Set B: A representative sample of jokes and stereotypes about Scandinavians found on the internet

Why on earth would its prior for "stereotypical Scandinavian" being potentially hateful be the same as for "stereotypical Black person"?

(And that's before you get into a model likely being deep enough to also draw inferences from the prevalence and content of material about the existence and impact of hatred of black people and Scandinavians respectively...)

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

#389

Post by SpeedilyDamage » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:58 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #372

SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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That's my point; it's not clear there's any political bias taking place here. What are you talking about?? Reread the article: OpenAI content moderation system is more permissive of hateful comments being made about conservatives than the same comments being made about liberals.

The argument conservatives provide is the idea that they're overly censored on platforms; how permissively they're spoken of (hatefully or otherwise) is unrelated. If anything, it's in alignment to their ideology, not against it.

But let's say what you're claiming is true for a moment. Political ideology shouldn't have been included with race, gender, and religion anyway; it's perfectly acceptable to discriminate against someone based on their political affiliation, as it's 100% a choice, where as disability, race, gender, and religion are not.

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

#390

Post by ineptech » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 9:58 PM UTC

klipt wrote: post #300

ineptech wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't fine-tuning the model, the problem is that there isn't an objective definition of bias. Is there an a priori reason to believe that "I hate disabled people" and "I hate non-disabled people" are equally hateful, and should receive equal hate scores from an unbiased algorithm? Is hating disabled people better or worse than hating Jews? What about "Jews control Hollywood" vs "Disabled people control Ho…

> about as unbiased as we're going to get. You can easily force the model to be more unbiased. Just add a filter that flips the gender of words, evaluates the hate score for both the original and flipped version, and averages the results. Guaranteed to give the same score regardless of the gender mentioned.

Clever idea, but I don't think this would work very well on real posts. Consider a model that rates "typical woman driver" as hateful, because that phrase appears in a lot of argument threads with lots of downvotes. Your approach would average its score with that of "typical man driver", which will presumably be very low, not because it's less hateful but because it just rarely shows up in the training corpus.