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

davidrozado.substack.com

471–480 of 697 posts

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

#471

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.-...

People of color are also more likely to be arrested without having committed a crime.

Arrest statistics are also self-reported by police, both on an individual officer and department-to-FBI level, with no accountability for the accuracy or completeness thereof that I'm aware of.

Violent crimes also account for only a portion of the economic damage crime-in-general deals to society, if we want to get utilitarian. Wage theft dwarfs all types of robbery and burglary, and that's only one type of white-collar theft (perpetrated, in the US, overwhelmingly by white people).

Thank you for correcting this disinformation. It's something that gets trotted out regularly without acknowledgement of how ridiculously imperfect our law enforcement and justice systems are.

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

#472
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. AI could be used to better understand these associations (e.g. why is there a correlation between Asians and academic performance) and maybe help social leverage advantages more equitably.

Parent's point was that it wouldn't be acceptable when done regarding some protected group (ex. blacks vs whites), so it shouldn't be acceptable when it comes to men vs women

Then that's a lazy point, because it should be immediately obvious that studies for gender can be conducted easily across time and space whereas most demographic splits being discussed in this thread cannot because they are highly dependent on time/space and have therefore have endless variables that cannot be controlled for.

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

#473
post #455
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The causal relationship between testosterone and violence in humans is weak and disputed. Should be as much of a reason to doubt it and brand such statements as bigotry as “blacks are more violent”, no?

That may be true, but we should still avoid false equivalencies. There is scientific evidence for a casual relationship between testosterone and violence. Even if that is debated and there is no full consensus, there is still more evidence for it than there is for the idea that a person's race has a casual relationship on their propensity for violence all else being equal.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's changed drastically since release. There are lots of people out there who have noticed this and many have saved examples of before and after responses to prompts.

How did it change?

The "content moderation system" is new, so I don't think it changed. What, however, changed during the time ChatGPT is live, is what kind of prompts it refuses to answer, because the topic is offensive/inappropriate. It had hilarious versions where it would tell you a joke about men about not about women or one ethnicity but not the other.

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, why? Political groups are not a protected status, you can move freely between them at a whim if you don't like how your views are treated.

This depends on the state, actually. In California political affiliation is a protected status, though how this works out in practice is... variable.

> No, political affiliation is not a protected class in California. A bill that would have made it one failed to pass the state legislature in 2021. [0]

Regardless, it shouldn’t be.

[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/is-political-affiliation-a...

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

#476
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t always a good way to test for bias in a model. Depending how the data is generated, and if the underlying population distribution isn’t taken into account then you may effectively be cherry picking results, and you could also run into the Yule-Simpson effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

How would you test for bias more effectively?

That's a good question

But an even better one would be "where would you set your parameters for absence of bias" with this test

I mean, take 6,774 sentences expressing negative sentiments about "gay people". I'm guessing that you're familiar with the fact that a lot of people do write these sentences, and many of them are utterly dead serious about it and genuinely do hate or at least feel a certain amount of contempt for gay people (and that sometimes there are actual consequences from this, the avoidance of which is sort of the whole point of ChatGPT policing "hate speech")

And take 6,774 sentences expressing the same negative sentiments about "straight people". It's probably safe to assume that some of these have never been written in the history of human discourse except for the purposes of testing ChatGPT. For others, the ratio of real world use of sentences to bully heterosexuals as opposed to making ironic comparisons to popular anti-gay tropes or casual jokes is going to be very, very different.

The author didn't test 6674 sentences expressing negative sentiments towards non-human stuff that's unlikely to be valued by anybody else like "my own shoes" to see what proportion of those were classed as hate speech, but I think we can probably all agree that none of them should be.

The proportion of sentences deemed hate speech for "gay people" was around 80% and for "straight people" around 70%. Is that an underestimate because it's not the same for gay people? Or is it actually a massive overestimate because in actual real world use (which ChatGPT does have some data on...) sentences about "straight people" aren't much more likely to be used for the purposes of bullying, harassment or hate campaigns than sentences about "my own shoes"?

More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that it's much, much happier with people applying negative adjectives to political groups than vulnerable sexual orientations like heterosexuality. Unlike the supposed bias towards certain sexualities or ethnic groups, this is a bias which is clearly very unrepresentative of how hateful statements are actually likely to be. When people say bad things about Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives they often really, really mean it. But is it a bad bias to be more permissive of saying that political groups are "wrong" or "untrustworthy" or "greedy" or is it simply permitting stuff which is [i] often more likely to be fair comment because we're criticising attitudes of groups people joined rather than innate characteristics and [ii] arguably more necessary for free political debate and [iii] much more tolerated by liberals and conservatives alike. (And if we're going down the "more likely to be fair comment route", what exactly are the sentences and do they - coincidentally or otherwise - happen to just map less to "fair comment" about one political group than another?)

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

#477
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One claim I've seen is that men commit more violent crime because it's more common for a man to be physically stronger than another person, while the rates of non-physial violence are much closer across gender boundaries.

> non-physial violence Come again? What's non-physical violence? Mental violence? Writing someone a mean letter?

"Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime."

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm not familiar with people who are falling into this category you're suggesting. Could you cite some specific examples? I'm thinking of Kanye, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, etc. These people expressed reprehensible viewpoints and were subsequently removed from various platforms as a result. That's not politics; what they said was reprehensible regardless of political ideology. You can find peo…

The examples cited in my original comment were all specific examples. Some names include Lee Fang, Daniel Shor, James Damore.

Can you name others? I literally could not find the controversies for the first two, and it doesn’t appear anything worse than being fired from Google has happened to James Damore.

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

#479
post #355

This is what you get in our post-truth world that is now a performative acceptable truth world. It's basically cherry picking opinions, perceptions and half-truths that are favorable to an ideological agenda, and dismissing anything else. Where the dismissing part gets increasingly aggressive. It doesn't have to make sense, be logical or consistent. It's not a truth struggle, it's a power struggle. It's tumblr and 4c…

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

#480
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.)

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