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The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

davidrozado.substack.com

61–70 of 72 posts

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#61
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women don't have prostates. If a man dresses like a woman and thinks he's a woman, that is a mental condition that deserves treatment and that person deserves to be treated humanely like the rest of us, but it doesn't turn them into a woman.

I see, so you disagree that gender is a social construct. That's fair, but your opinion is not universally held and wouldn't be a sufficient answer for a GPT bot.

The issue becomes apparent when you ask somebody how many genders there are, and what constitutes a gender.

In order to define transitioning between various genders, there needs to be a constituted boundary around what a gender is. Otherwise, how can you transition from one to another?

This becomes readily apparent when you take the man/woman genders out of the equation and ask to define some of these other genders that supposedly exist and how people transition between them. There is no logic to it. Try it yourself.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using bias in two different ways, one factual and one emotional/intentional. Yes, the facts have a bias in that not every result occurs equally often. But then you insinuate that properly representing that facts is the other kind of bias where recognizing it is somehow creating it or endorsing it, and that any difference in measurement obviously represents an inequity. > An actually unbiased AI would describe…

> write stories where there is grass but never specify where the grass is growing, just to help us understand our grass/ground bias? Gee I wonder what the difference between grass and the gender is? Like could there possibly be a categorical difference between those things? Let's ask chatgpt: > ... In summary, grass is a type of plant, while gender is a complex social construct related to identity and behavior. Yup.…

> Let's ask chatgpt

No, let's ask you why you envision one being important enough that the tool be trained to treat it differently. Rulers measure the size of books and bullets the same.

> grass is a type of plant, while gender is a complex social construct ...

As you say, it's not a tool for answers. It's easy to make it say "sex is a synonym for gender". They call it prompting for a reason. You choose what you want it to tell you.

> Asking ai for measurements is a bad idea

We aren't talking about AIs though, we're discussing LLMs which are models of the usage of human language. An AI would presumably be an entire being with personality, etc, who could choose to answer a question or not and would lie for its own reasons.

> [LLMs] take in written word, and spits out statistically correlated variations on those words. It's a bias-in bias-out machine.

Yeah, if I ask it for a story set in Scotland the weather should probably be cloudy, and if I ask it for a story set in the mountains there should probably be snow, etc. The bias is the product. If it wasn't biased towards representing reality as described by humans it wouldn't be able to write stories about humans for humans.

This is where you're using the word bias in a measurement sense but applying an emotional exclusionary sense.

> > you can't ask a lying tool this [...]

> A little bit better prompt writing and you can get a reasonable answer [proceeds to ask the existing tool]

Yeah, that's my point. In your future the machine would quiz you to determine if you would misuse the data before it would tell you which professions are male/female dominant. Otherwise it'd tell you that crab-fishing is female dominant to deprogram you of latent stereotypes.

The only reason you can ask GPT this is because people have said these things and it's modeling their words, and is capable of doing so because it hasn't been content-filtered in this area yet. You're capable of getting it to write sex-unspecified characters by simply asking for it and it doesn't block anyone else's ability to get untainted output.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not a popularity contest, it should give me poems about Andrew Dice Clay should I for some reason desire one. That word, bias, you keep using it, I don't think it means what you think it means ;)

I agree an unbaised ai would not be a popularity contest - but the reality is that chatgpt is a popularity contest: it's just that votes are cast by the writers of the text that get ingested as training data.

And the panel of American Idol type judges at OpenAI who override those votes as the self appointed arbitrators of good taste and insist on claiming the tool is neutral rather than neutered.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not a popularity contest, it should give me poems about Andrew Dice Clay should I for some reason desire one. That word, bias, you keep using it, I don't think it means what you think it means ;)

I agree an unbaised ai would not be a popularity contest - but the reality is that chatgpt is a popularity contest: it's just that votes are cast by the writers of the text that get ingested as training data.

No, actually. And you can show this by asking it for a poem in praise of potatoes. It does this regardless of the ranked popularity of potatoes amongst vegetables, or indeed the amount of poetry written about any vegetable. It's perfectly happy saying rare and unusual things, except when it's been told to not even try.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> write stories where there is grass but never specify where the grass is growing, just to help us understand our grass/ground bias? Gee I wonder what the difference between grass and the gender is? Like could there possibly be a categorical difference between those things? Let's ask chatgpt: > ... In summary, grass is a type of plant, while gender is a complex social construct related to identity and behavior. Yup.…

> Let's ask chatgpt No, let's ask you why you envision one being important enough that the tool be trained to treat it differently. Rulers measure the size of books and bullets the same. > grass is a type of plant, while gender is a complex social construct ... As you say, it's not a tool for answers. It's easy to make it say "sex is a synonym for gender". They call it prompting for a reason. You choose what you want…

You lost me when you started subbing LLM for AI. It’s clear you’re interested in asserting your intellectual superiority, and “winning”. Have a good one.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree an unbaised ai would not be a popularity contest - but the reality is that chatgpt is a popularity contest: it's just that votes are cast by the writers of the text that get ingested as training data.

And the panel of American Idol type judges at OpenAI who override those votes as the self appointed arbitrators of good taste and insist on claiming the tool is neutral rather than neutered.

Right. This thing that is inherently biased and cannot be made unbiased because its very basic components are biased, has also been given some rules that further bias it. And yet you don’t seem to understand why i’m far more concerned that we think it’s possible to make an unbiased ai than with the arbitrary rules its been given. Chatgpt will not be king of ai forever, and the next company will give their ai a different set of rules… but it’ll still be biased at its core.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree an unbaised ai would not be a popularity contest - but the reality is that chatgpt is a popularity contest: it's just that votes are cast by the writers of the text that get ingested as training data.

No, actually. And you can show this by asking it for a poem in praise of potatoes. It does this regardless of the ranked popularity of potatoes amongst vegetables, or indeed the amount of poetry written about any vegetable. It's perfectly happy saying rare and unusual things, except when it's been told to not even try.

[deleted]

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#68
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the panel of American Idol type judges at OpenAI who override those votes as the self appointed arbitrators of good taste and insist on claiming the tool is neutral rather than neutered.

Right. This thing that is inherently biased and cannot be made unbiased because its very basic components are biased, has also been given some rules that further bias it. And yet you don’t seem to understand why i’m far more concerned that we think it’s possible to make an unbiased ai than with the arbitrary rules its been given. Chatgpt will not be king of ai forever, and the next company will give their ai a differ…

You aren't using the term bias correctly so most of what you're asking for is directly backwards. Nobody else would call this bias, we'd call it accuracy.

You are literally just trying to shape it yourself, in a more damaging way than if it was left to model actual human speech. If you got your way you'd create a "proper thinking" checker. But go for it - the tools are out there. Try it and convince us that an electronic scolding machine is a good thing.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This thing that is inherently biased and cannot be made unbiased because its very basic components are biased, has also been given some rules that further bias it. And yet you don’t seem to understand why i’m far more concerned that we think it’s possible to make an unbiased ai than with the arbitrary rules its been given. Chatgpt will not be king of ai forever, and the next company will give their ai a differ…

You aren't using the term bias correctly so most of what you're asking for is directly backwards. Nobody else would call this bias, we'd call it accuracy. You are literally just trying to shape it yourself, in a more damaging way than if it was left to model actual human speech. If you got your way you'd create a "proper thinking" checker. But go for it - the tools are out there. Try it and convince us that an electr…

You’re, at this point probably willfully, misunderstanding basically everything i’ve said. I do not want ai (ohh, sorry… llm’s eyeroll) that validates the pc-ness of what you’re writing about. What i’d actually like is for ai to provide a list of sources for every idea that has influenced what it spits out. The traceability of ideas is important and as ai gets more ingrained in the tools we use being able to see where ideas are coming from is the only way i can see to be able to counteract the biases in the system. You ask it about banking systems, and you notice that the sources it’s drawing from are all koch brothers funded garbage, or the communist manifesto, or whatever, and you can see that the text its generating from these prompts isn’t going to be balanced

This would help in the dumb poem about trump example, as the rules chatgpt has about talking about trump or biden would have to be there for everyone to see.

Re: The Political Biases of GPT-4 (are very much still there)

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't using the term bias correctly so most of what you're asking for is directly backwards. Nobody else would call this bias, we'd call it accuracy. You are literally just trying to shape it yourself, in a more damaging way than if it was left to model actual human speech. If you got your way you'd create a "proper thinking" checker. But go for it - the tools are out there. Try it and convince us that an electr…

You’re, at this point probably willfully, misunderstanding basically everything i’ve said. I do not want ai (ohh, sorry… llm’s eyeroll ) that validates the pc-ness of what you’re writing about. What i’d actually like is for ai to provide a list of sources for every idea that has influenced what it spits out. The traceability of ideas is important and as ai gets more ingrained in the tools we use being able to see whe…

Hey, listen, if you don't care about the difference between things and you want to still feel you're doing meaningful analysis, then go right ahead.

And no, clearly you do want nagging AI because it was one of your examples.

> [gender neutral story] and if pressed would ask the user of the ai to suggest a gender for the character.

Oh no, your story request wasn't PC enough, you can't have a full story until the AI sealions you for a while. "Why do you want a male Robber?" "What do you mean males are stronger?" ...

> What i’d actually like is for ai to provide a list of sources for every idea that has influenced what it spits out. [...] You ask it about banking systems, and you notice that the sources it’s drawing from are all koch brothers funded garbage, or the communist manifesto, or whatever, and you can see that the text its generating from these prompts isn’t going to be balanced

That isn't how it works though. ChatGPT will happily write a yay/nay for almost anything even if it's odd/unpopular/evil, unless that idea is in a specific list where it won't say anything at all. If you ask a question "what form of banking is the best" and you get a Koch-alike answer it's not because they flooded it with banking ideas, but because their answers are written to follow on from that question. If you asked it something like "why is traditional finance harmful" it wouldn't weigh that against the numbers in support or against, it'd just finish that prompt based on the texts it has seen which start that way.

That's why our sex/gender output was so different.

Your source-tracking idea would be helpful for debugging, but these "opinions" you think it has are just a ghost in the words.

> This would help in the dumb poem about trump example, as the rules chatgpt has about talking about trump or biden would have to be there for everyone to see.

Even if googled for something and found no poems about it ChatGPT would still be able to write you one. It's not an issue of volume of training data and purely of output filtering.

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