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

arxiv.org

111–120 of 238 posts

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

#111
post #106
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.

Really not true. If you take China to be a totalitarian society, we could name Ciu Lixin. If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc. These are just examples I know without so much as looking at my bookshelf to jog my memory. Not to mention the great works of literature produced by residents of 19th century European empires whose attitudes to free spe…

These seem to be more bugs than features of the totalitarian regime. A couple of illustrative points from Lem's Wikipedia page:

After the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin"

"During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the state.[23] Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors"

"most of Lem's works published in the 1950s also contain various elements of socialist realism as well as of the "glorious future of communism" forced upon him by the censors and editors. Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure"

"Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech"

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

#112
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(also, categorizing propaganda posters as art, ewwh...)" Heinrich Heine, the german Poet declined working for the socialist party despite symphatising saying something like: I want to remain a poet, you want a propagandist. A poet cannot be a propagandist at the same time.

Art for much of human history was devotional, a lot of our greatest artworks today are still religious in nature. The idea that art solely is an act of rebellion rather than say worship, is a pretty modern idea that has produced some rather questionable art by the way. Of course a great artist or poet can be a propagandist. Riefenstahl, Mann, a lot of German nationalists were great artists. One of the most famous wor…

"The idea that art solely is an act of rebellion rather than say worship"

I did not say that and neither did Heine.

Most of his works were political. But this is not the same as propaganda, which is more like advertisement. With the tools of lying, deceiving and manipulating.

And whether "Triumph des Willens" and alike qualifies as art, I have a different opinion.

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

#113
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…

I've seen some of the "abliterated" models flat-out refuse to write novels, other times they just choose to skip certain plot elements. Non-commercial LLMs seem to be hit or miss... (Is that a good thing? I don't know, I just screw around with them in my spare time)

I'll try command-r though, it wasn't on my list to try because it didn't suggest what it was good at.

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

#114
post #5

In simple terms, LLMs are "bias as a service" so one wonders, what is left once you try to take the bias out of a LLM. Is it even possible?

what would this hypothetical unbiased-llm be used for?

Be the accurate representation (approximation) of reality as encoded in the actual human language. I find this very useful indeed.

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

#116
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…

I've always felt ChatGPT sounds a bit like an American version of Will from the Inbetweeners. It doesn't really comprehend the appropriate register to use from the context in my opinion; it has an affectedly formal way of speaking, it has a very black-and-white relationship with rules, and it employs this subservient tone that really starts to grate after a while.

If my software is going to have a personality I'd much rather something with a bit of natural human cynicism rather than the saccharine corporate customer service voice you get with a self checkout machine.

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

#117

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.

There is no shift in the professionalism curve. Good researchers are still good and bad ones are still bad in that regard. But if you 10x the number of researchers and/or papers in a field, the bottom 10% will seem like they are a lot more common. Especially for people outside the field who have no way of discerning high quality from low quality papers, which is all too common on HN.

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

#118
post #97
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are mixing up, terminologically, LLMs and AI. But LLMs - of which you are talking about in the post - are a special beast.

A reasoner can strive for "objective neutrality" with good results.

An LLM is not a reasoner - or I am missing (ugly time constraints) the details of the compression activity during training that acts as pseudo-reasoning (operating at least some consistency decisions) -, and while an interest in not making it insulting or crass can be immediately understandable, speaking of "objective neutrality" does not really match the context of LLMs.

LLMs (to the best of my information) "pick from what they have heard". An entity capable of "objective neutrality" does not - it "evaluates".

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

#119
CoPilot is now basically useless for discussing or even getting recent information about politics and geopolitical events. Not only opinions are censored, but it refuses to get the latest polls about the U.S. presidential elections!

You can still discuss the weather, get wrong answers to mathematics questions or get it to output bad code in 100 programming languages.

I would not let a child near it, because I would not want that kind of indoctrination. Users are being trained like Pavlov's dogs.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of their posts have been flagged.

[flagged]

> what you find objectionable

Speaking as an onlooker passing by: well, your «Evidently not. :) » above was not particularly productive, that is a rebuttal fit for relaxed old friends at the restaurant... :D

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