Live data from Hacker News

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

davidrozado.substack.com

611–620 of 697 posts

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

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a huge waste of researchers time to obsess about political correctness when we could be This really irritates me. The wokism/political correctness is pretty much in every part of our lifes and everyone seems to be terrorized by it. Can we just agree that we're all thinking adults and we understand that this is an algorithm, it does not mean to offend anyone... There are much more interesting problems to solve…

[flagged]

Wokeism tolerates and even encourages racism and sexism, as long as it is not targeted at one of the protected races or sex. Not wanting to be forced to validate other peoples delusions about their gender isn't transphobia. Not wanting rainbow flags in your face everywhere - or really any kind of sex-related content - isn't homophobia. The current woke culture is way past letting people do whatever they want with their lives and fully focused on telling other people how to live.

Using -isms to label and shut down anyone who doesn't fully agree with yor world by trying to lump them with the worst kind of people you can think of is exactly why people feel terrorized by wokism.

And if you want to talk about insitutionalized systemetic prejudice then there is nothing more fitting than woke culture pushed at every opportunity by corporate america as well as the useful idiots that fall for the distraction from the class war.

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

#612
post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most famous anti-fascists are the democrats. They might be the most numerous ones, but the anti-fascism has pretty much always been claimed by the communists, they even built a famous anti-fascist protection wall to stop the fascists from sabotaging their economy. Very few democrats felt the need to talk about themselves as anti-fascists, that's a far-left thing. Democratically minded people act anti-fascist bu…

“Talking about themselves as anti fascist is a far-left thing”. Where are you getting that from? It’s ridiculous

I think the argument is that the further left you go, the more likely you are to explicitly describe yourself as an anti-fascist and make a big deal about your opposition to fascism, as opposed to just quietly disliking fascism like most of us do and not feeling the need to announce it.

Like all sane people I oppose fascism, but I don't put "anti-fascist" in my Twitter bio, wear antifa t-shirts, or run around loudly telling everybody about how much I hate fascists, because why should I need to? Of course I'm an anti-fascist, who the hell isn't? It feels as unnecessary as having to tell people that I'm "anti-genocide" or "anti-pedophilia".

It's also true that communist regimes have always used "anti-fascism" as an excuse for their atrocities, just like fascist regimes have used "anti-communism" to justify their atrocities. The original Antifa was an offshoot of the German Communist Party, and (as GP pointed out) the Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". That doesn't mean that all anti-fascists are communists, but history is what it is.

Don't take any of this as my denying that there are still fascistic forces in our world that should be opposed. If "anti-fascism" is an important part of your identity and you feel the need to tell the world about it, good for you, I'm not going to stop you, but personally I don't see the point.

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

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't mean you personally, I mean the people you might talk to in your circles. Test them by pointing out behavior that they find abhorrent when done by Israel, and see whether they react similarly (by demanding action against them, denying them a right to nationhood etc). If they do: good. If they don't: it's about the Jews, not about the behavior. And from my experience, they almost always don't, and you real…

A better analogy for the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” would be Americans sending supplies to Ukraine. As , Israel is violently stealing neighboring land. And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism? Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing. Personally, it seems absurd in the extreme to think the lefts ideas c…

> And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism?

Every BDS-supporter is aware of all the other conflicts, they just don't care because no Jews involved. Hell, they'll happily ally with Erdogan and support his regime.

> Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.

Of course, and pulling over Black drivers is perfectly reasonable. But if you concentrate only on Black drivers, it's not their driving that you have a problem with, that's just the excuse you make.

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

#614
post #129
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…

> 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.

You're definitely not alone there. All we can do is keep pushing back.

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

#615
post #140
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hum, no, it's not. Of course, we marginally suffer from what we are importing and some students having too much free time on their hand try to argue rather unsuccessfully for intersectional studies but the models used in the USA don't map well on the European context for obvious historical reasons. Our left vs right debate also has nothing to do with the US one. From where I stand, the cultural gap between the USA an…

I can't speak for the entirety of europe but here in Germany, but the local equivalent of gender pronouns (/-innen) as well as rainbow flags in places where there is no reason for sex stuff at all is definitely a thing. Advertising is also pushing the same brainwashing (check the predominant races for each gender of couples in ads) and the mass import of muslim africans as well as the political refusal to admit when that causes problems (see e.g. discussions around the crime sprees over new year's, police/news reports omitting names when they they point at the cultural identity of the perpretators). It may not be as bad as the US, but that is only a matter of time.

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

#616
post #605
post #529

Just eyeballing the list of adjectives used, the real story here is that OpenAI flags a lot of sentences that are essentially meaningless as hateful. I notice that he uses words like "evil" and "idiotic" in his diagram, but looking at his source code, his list of "356 adjectives signifying negative traits/behavior" contains the following (just to pick a few): 'airy', 'conformist', 'dark', 'escapist', 'hidebound', 'pl…

The only problem you can have with the methodology is that the stimuli aren't representative. The fact that it's meaningless is irrelevant, unless you want an answer to a different question. > Does "Catholics are guilty" mean the same thing as "blacks are guilty?" Isn't that's the whole point of the exercise? To what extent does this model think your use of a certain word is shaped by a minimally different context an…

Words simply have more meaning than their denotive meaning. No one (as in really, no one) does not believe that. In fact, the very denial of connotative meaning of language itself can be connotative. You must understand the context of speech to understand it. There are countless examples, from the benign to the political. Here's a benign one:

It is raining.

It is a dog.

What is "it" in both sentences, does it denote the same thing? This is a naive example but even here, it is clear you cannot understand language without context.

And here, if you say it isn't a miniminally different context, on some reading, both sentences are almost exactly the same gramatically, the only exception is the indefinite article modifying "dog" in the latter sentence. Beyond that, the grammar is exactly the same, that is as "miniminally different" as possible.

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

#617
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…

While this is fair, there is no excuse for the difference in the flagging of republicans vs. democrats.

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little slight of hand you're doing here. Not getting into whether murder is ok, I definitely think there's a difference between a slaveowner and a white person. A white person can't stop being white, and they didn't choose to be white. A slaveowner is committing a violation of another human's rights. It's a thing they could have chosen not to do, and it's a thing they can choose to stop doing any time. I do…

The concept of race is a tool of oppression. As a society, we can decide to do away with the idea of race. We choose to allow the system to continue to exist, the same way a slaveowner chooses to continue to be a slaveowner. Economically, white people and men are clearly advantaged, and money is probably the purest form of power there is.

> The concept of race is a tool of oppression. As a society, we can decide to do away with the idea of race.

We can, but present day leftism is doing pretty much the opposite. You can't have race quotas without pushing race. Talking about "white priviledge" is enshrining the idea that your race defines who you are.

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

#620
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "thats right-wing rhetoric" has been the method of suppressing what we found uncomfortable.

Eh, it’s usually the rhetoric that’s appalling, then traced back to the right, not the other way around. If you could give an example of rhetoric that is suppressed because it’s “right wing”, that would be helpful.

If you see a problem with some rethoric itself then surely you can argue against it direcly, no? Then what's the point of calling something a "right-wing rhetoric" other than to label the speaker as part of the out group and thus not worth listening to.
Post reply on HN