Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 238 posts

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#71

Post by nottorp »

quirino wrote: post #32

Something I notice about text written by LLMs is how painfully obvious they are to identify sometimes. Recently I was watching a very well researched two hour video on Tetris World Records [1], but the sheer amount of text clearly "enhanced" by an LLM really made me uncomfortable. ChatGPT speaks a very specific, novel, dialect of English, which I've come to deeply despise. I'd always guessed it was caused by some kin…

> ChatGPT speaks a very specific, novel, dialect of English, which I've come to deeply despise.

There was this article saying that ChatGPT output is very close to the Nigerian business english dialect, because they hired a lot of people from there.

Might have even been posted on HN.

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#72

Post by [deleted] »

lozenge wrote: post #62
maxbond wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You compared it to an authoritarian regime and locking someone's head in a cage with rats (which is patently torture). If you didn't mean to imply that it was coercive and bad, then I don't know what you meant.

But torture isn't the part of an authoritarian regime that reduces creativity. You've made a lot of leaps here.

[deleted]

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#73

Post by nutrientharvest »

nottorp wrote: post #63
nutrientharvest wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, of all that I've tried, the model by the best at writing porn has been not one of ones uncensored and tuned exactly for that purpose, but stock Command R - whose landing page lists such exciting uses as "suggest example press releases" and "assign a category to a document".

> uncensored and tuned exactly for that purpose Are they tuning too, or just removing all restrictions they can get at? Because my worry isn't that I can't generate porn, but that censorship will mess up all the answers. This study seems to say the latter.

Usually "uncensored" models have been made by instruction tuning a model from scratch (i.e. starting from a pretrained-only model) on a dataset which doesn't contain refusals, so it's hard to compare directly to a "censored" model - it's a whole different thing, not an "uncensored" version of one.

More recently a technique called "orthogonal activation steering" aka "abliteration" has emerged which claims to edit refusals out of a model without affecting it otherwise. But I don't know how well that works, it's only been around for a few weeks.

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#74

Post by andybak »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #59
andybak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the two are synonyms? Unless you think there is such a thing as an objectively neutral position?

Isn't that the point? "Debias" implies there IS an objectively neutral position and that that AI safety can take us there.

I'm simply saying we are being asked to choose the bias we prefer. However one choice might be "more biased" (despite this concept itself throwing up more questions than it answers).

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#75

Post by knallfrosch »

andybak wrote: post #31
mpweiher wrote: post #19

Shouldn't "debiasing" be in scare quotes? What they are clearly doing is biasing .

Surely the two are synonyms? Unless you think there is such a thing as an objectively neutral position?

It's in the same bucket as "Affirmative Action" and "positive discrimination." Euphemisms to express that one likes this particular discrimination. To better describe the action, drop your own point of view and just say "bias" instead of "debias."

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#76

Post by nottorp »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #3
jdthedisciple wrote: post #2

Currently wondering whether I welcome or dislike this recent trend of memeizing research paper titles ...

Recent? This has been going on forever. You probably only notice them more now because due to the explosion in ML research, this stuff bubbles to the top more often in recent years.

I'm sure I read an old article by Dijkstra about connected graphs structure that was titled "wheels within wheels" or used the term inside.

Unfortunately I can't find it by either searching or using the public LLMs, because there are too many results about the shortest path algorithm and anything else about dijkstra is lost.

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#77

Post by nottorp »

nutrientharvest wrote: post #73
nottorp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uncensored and tuned exactly for that purpose Are they tuning too, or just removing all restrictions they can get at? Because my worry isn't that I can't generate porn, but that censorship will mess up all the answers. This study seems to say the latter.

Usually "uncensored" models have been made by instruction tuning a model from scratch (i.e. starting from a pretrained-only model) on a dataset which doesn't contain refusals, so it's hard to compare directly to a "censored" model - it's a whole different thing, not an "uncensored" version of one. More recently a technique called "orthogonal activation steering" aka "abliteration" has emerged which claims to edit ref…

Yeah I read about it on here, but my attempts were before abliteration came up.

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#79

Post by knallfrosch »

jeroenvlek wrote: post #12
lispisok wrote: post #10

Is this why all the coding AI products I've used have gotten worse as the developers fine tune them to eliminate bad output? Before there was bad output and some interesting output, now it's just bland obvious stuff.

Still anecdotal, but I can only confirm this with my own experience. The worst was when I was debugging code, described the problem to GPT-4o, and then got my exact same code back with some blanket statements like "print your output for debugging" etc. This happened a couple of times over separate chats.

gpt-4 has had serious laziness problems for over a year now. It keeps on telling me, what I should and could do, instead of doing it itself.

Re: Creativity has left the chat: The price of debiasing language models

#80

Post by b800h »

simianparrot wrote: post #28
b800h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, now I didn't say LLM.

But the topic is LLM’s not sci-fi AI

My assumption is that models will move beyond just LLMs to modular systems with features like Brodmann regions.
Post reply on HN