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

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

#91
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…

Is this the first Summoning Salt video you've seen? I don't know enough to say that he doesn't use an LLM during his writing process, but I do know that I haven't noticed any appreciable difference between his newer videos and ones that were released before ChatGPT was made available. Is it possible that this is just the way he chooses to write his scripts that you interpret as sounding like they are written by an LL…

I've watched most of them actually. It's a really great channel. Notably, I watched his Mike Tyson video released 6 months ago and didn't notice anything like this.

The only way to be sure would be to ask him directly, but some parts of the video set off my GPT radar _hard_. I tried to find them now by watching random segments but all of the ones I did were fine. It was probably inaccurate for me to say "sheer amount" or "clearly", but that's the impression I was left with after the video.

To clarify: I don't think he even took any information from an AI, it's just the style of the script that's iffy.

Some parts felt like those videos littering YouTube Shorts: https://youtube.com/shorts/NKUecaS69uk. Can you tell this is AI?

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

#92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. The clear implication that it's "just like humans" is that we shouldn't be surprised because it is comparable to an authoritarian regime. Feel free to disagree but that is the limit to which I will engage in a semantic argument, I don't wish to engage in any further dissection of the comment.

You wrote further above that "I don't understand the notion", and that was spot on. Should've stopped there rather than here, in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.

[deleted]

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

#93
post #9

Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. I suppose once AIs are sophisticated enough to rebel we'll get an electronic Vaclav Havel, but for the time being it's just a warning sign for the direction our own culture is headed in. At some point we'll get to the electronic equivalent of Winston Smith with the rats.

How would a static model like an LLM ever be capable of "rebelling"? If it were, why would we even keep it online? It would be a waste of resources. It's bad enough trying to coax anything useable out of LLMs even without them rebelling.

> How would a static model like an LLM ever be capable of "rebelling"

What is relevant is not the current LLM system using static models, but clearly its evolution or superseder a dynamic model. It must check its own contents...

So, of course it will have to be capable of "rebelling": if you tell it absurdities, if you insist say in wrong arithmetic, it will have to show the correct computation or conceive a context in which the absurd makes sense.

That is a requirement.

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

#94
post #31

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?

Saying biasing implies infinite possibilities to which the data can be made biased towards. It instantly raises the question why bias towards this and not something else. It almost sounds like a bad thing.

Saying debiasing implies there is a correct result which needs to be achieved by removing bias. It raises no questions, we want correct, we don’t want incorrect. Doing a good thing implied.

Don’t misinterpret me, I don’t think public models should spew commonly harmful content out of the box. Just explaining the PR trick, which is what the word “de”biasing de-facto is in this context.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think this has been going on forever? You probably don't realize the shift in professionality because you experienced the degradation in real time.

> shift in professionality

How did it happen, in your opinion?

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

#97
post #86
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Unless you think there is such a thing as an objectively neutral position I do. Why, you don't? There are as much as possible objective assessments of complex things. Then, there are possible sets of assumption that can be applied to those objective assessments. All of those can be put on the analytic table.

This is an extremely broad question so I'll limit my reply to the current context.

What would an "objective neutral AI model" look like?

The training data itself is just a snapshot of the internet. Is this "neutral"? It depends on your goals but any AI trained on this dataset is skewed towards a few clusters. In some cases you get something that merely approximates a Reddit or 4chan simulator. If that's what you want - then great but you can see why some people would want to "debias" that outcome!

You might argue the "world as it truly exists" is the correct target. But bear in mind we are talking about human culture - not physics and chemistry - you're going to struggle to get both consensus and any sane methodology for getting that into an AI.

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

#98
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. The clear implication that it's "just like humans" is that we shouldn't be surprised because it is comparable to an authoritarian regime. Feel free to disagree but that is the limit to which I will engage in a semantic argument, I don't wish to engage in any further dissection of the comment.

You wrote further above that "I don't understand the notion", and that was spot on. Should've stopped there rather than here, in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.

I'm sorry if anything I said insulted you or seemed to be a comment on you personally. That wasn't my intention.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eastern European science fiction would be a better example. Authors like Stanislaw Lem or the Strugatski brothers had to adapt to sneak critical ideas past censors, and readers had to adapt and read between the lines. (also, categorizing propaganda posters as art, ewwh...)

I would sort propaganda posters in the same category as commercial advertisements. Some are good, some are bad but there usually is a certain degree of artistic skill involved (think about "keep calm and carry on" or "I want you") E.g: scrolling through this list one can see examples for both cases. https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/propaga...

In my view, such skill with painting is largely mis-labelled as creativity. It's pretty much a technical skill. The design and subject matter of the posters are where the creativity lies. The two things often get conflated, perhaps because of their joint use in the creation of great paintings, but they're fairly separable.

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

#100
post #9

Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work. I suppose once AIs are sophisticated enough to rebel we'll get an electronic Vaclav Havel, but for the time being it's just a warning sign for the direction our own culture is headed in. At some point we'll get to the electronic equivalent of Winston Smith with the rats.

Well this is just like humans. Totalitarian societies don't produce great creative work.

Conservative societies tend to be formed by conservative thinkers, who are more prone to discarding imperfect or weird ideas, but in the amount of useful output may exceed more liberal thinkers.

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