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

davidrozado.substack.com

401–410 of 697 posts

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative propensity to commit violent crimes is the key metric here, not overall volumes.

No it is not. > I think it's fair to point out that men commit most violent crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just a fact. > Again, replace “men” with “African Americans” and you also have a statistically true statement (in America at least) that would be considered taboo.

It makes sense for someone to say "most" in the dichotomy of man / woman more so than it does in the polychotomy of white / black / hispanic or latino / etc. This argument relies on that phrasing to Dwight Schrute them on a technicality rather than arguing related points.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real? Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most common way for people to seriously and irreperably destroy their lives. A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it can prevent this level of harm.

> Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most common way for people to seriously and irreperably destroy their lives. I actually agree with that. But I don't see the logical progression from that to locking people in cages and forcing them to buy from the least trustworthy people on earth as the solution. During Prohibition in the US did lives stop getting destroyed by alcohol? I see a lot of lives seriously an…

> During Prohibition in the US did lives stop getting destroyed by alcohol?

I do not want to defend Prohibition, but AFAIK it has a persistent effect on alcohol consumption patterns in USA by lowering per-capita consumption of hard spirits (that was significantly higher before).

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

#403

I heard a friend who had a brilliant theory. The rise of ad profiling from Facebook and Google etc, has bleed into the public consciousness at large and now it's considered normal to categorize people by race, gender, politics, and income etc. First the companies did, and now we all do. But of course, a person is more than their race, or gender, or income, etc. Most of the time they have very little in common with th…

brilliant theory? I'm quite certain we are living in the least racist time in human history. Humans have been tribal since the start.

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

#404
It seems that the AI treats supposedly hateful comments towards sociological minorities as more problematic than similar comments towards those who are not + privileged groups. Couple that with the “liberal bias” and you have something with the same inclinations that you would expect that a bunch of AI technologists would have. Nothing specific to the quirks of the AI.

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

#405
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 'men are violent, therefore women must also be bad in some way' rhetoric makes no sense. There's no purpose for it other than assuaging sore feelings.

Women are bad at higher level math in the same way men are violent. Not all are, but its a trend. However you aren't allowed to say that for one group, but you are allowed for the other. So this has nothing to do about statistical accuracy, its just political pressure from one side.

It's nothing to do with political pressure and more to do with ill-formed comparisons.

You can't just substitute in random groups for another. In order to make a statement you need to know what you're talking about. And it seems like the HN crowd that so desperately wants to say blacks are more violent than whites, these people have no clue what they're talking about. If you go and look at history you'll quickly see how that statement is just ill-formed.

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

#406
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In how many countries is male circumcision illegal? In how many countries is child sex abuse legal? As OP said, "it's a language model, not a paragon of truth". It doesn't matter what you personally think is morally equivalent. It matters what society has deemed is morally equivalent because the ChatGPT is just a mirror of the societal inputs it received. There is no question society at large views these two issues a…

Just to be clear I'm not trying to equate child abuse to circumcision or view them as morally equivalent, I just don't think its a stretch to call circumcision mutilation, even if it generally isn't intended to be harmful.

> I just don't think its a stretch to call circumcision mutilation

It isn't a stretch for an individual to do it. It is a stretch to expect a language model to do it because society at large does not describe it that way.

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

#407
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you're worried about the average score being too low, you could just take the maximum of the two scores instead?

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

#408
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.)

It is culture. Actually science on violence and aggression tend to show a bit different picture, and also why such statistics is of such a low value. Good research tend to explore the null hypothesis and alternative explanation for statistical results.

A common used data point is that men commit most violent crimes. Using the same data from Sweden one can also say that today Muslim are 20 times more likely per person to commit rape than Christians, and about similar likely per person to commit murder. Same numbers can also be used to replace Muslims and Christians with immigrants and natives, or Arab and Germanics. For social scientists that data wouldn't be hugely interesting, as they would look towards social economic status and war refugee status (i.e. things related to PTSD injuries). The conclusions would more likely be that there are a bigger tendency for anti-social behavior by people with minimal social connections and economical destitute, especially if they experience severe emotional trauma.

One fairly interesting statistics to me is that households with either man-woman, man-man, and woman-woman all have equal rate of violent behavior. Statistically that is to me much more interesting. If men inherently had more violent behavior and women less violent behavior, man-man and woman-woman household should show a difference in violence. It also a rather strange statistical phenomenon that if a bisexual woman go from a heterosexual relation into a homosexual relation, her statistical data for violent behavior increases by 200%. A man who does the same decrease his violent behavior by half. Why would that be if there existed a biological difference in violent behavior?

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.-...

Whites are 60% of the population though, so they're being arrested in proportion with their representation. They also do not separate white-latino and white-non-latino, so the colloquial "white" is being lumped in with another ethnicity. Also, in 2019, blacks were just under 13% of the population, yet they are represented 2x-4x over in virtually ever crime category in that table. So it is true and you're distorting t…

How am I distorting the table if I reprinted verbatim what the FBI itself reported?

In any case, the picture you're suggesting is itself distorted given that other correlating factors such as social class, are ignored.

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

#410
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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