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

Post by KharOfXur » Tue, Jun 18, 2024, 3:22 AM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #219

Fellshard wrote: post #213

Distilling my thoughts on 'debiasing' here, and in a variety of other modern endeavors. It is better to have representations of reality that you can then discuss and grapple with honestly, than to try to distort representations - such as AI - to make them fit some desired reality and then pressure others to conform their perception to your projected fantasy. Representations don't create reality, and trying to use rep…

"Reality" is a tricky concept. For me, I follow Jeff Atwood - if it isn't written down, it doesn't exist. According to this logic, people wasted a lot of time on imaginary, illusory things for most of human history, but now they have phones and most communication is digital so there is the possibility to finally be productive. This definition shows how the concept of distorting reality or honestly representing realit…

Post by mpweiher » Tue, Jun 18, 2024, 11:44 AM UTC

hkt wrote: post #109

mpweiher wrote: post #19

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

Given a biased corpus, de-biasing is the process of ensuring a less biased outcome. We can measure bias fairly well, so it seems absurd to conflate the two by suggesting that unbiased behaviour is simply another form of biased behaviour. For all practical purposes, there is a difference.

Post by SirMaster » Tue, Jun 18, 2024, 2:06 PM UTC

ang_cire wrote: post #206

SirMaster wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if you remove the word "genetically"? I think there are a lot of people who would say "Indian people are better at math" and not even think about why they think that or why it might even be true. In my opinion, most biases have some basis in reality. Otherwise where else did they come from?

Well, the stereotype of Indian people being good at math specifically was itself a consequence of survivorship bias, that emerged from observing Indian visa holders who were hired based on their skills and credentials, and who were not at all representative of the average person in India. There is a BIG difference between biases being based in reality (which they're not), and biases being based in our varying percept…

Post by musicale » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

apantel wrote: post #223

wongarsu wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming we can make an unbiased model (assuming by unbiased we mean something like "has a world model and reasoning that has no systematic deviation from reality"), we couldn't recognize the model as unbiased. I'd even wager that outside of research such a model would be completely unusable for practical applications. Both as individual humans and as collective societies we have a lot of biases. And judging by…

> assuming by unbiased we mean something like "has a world model and reasoning that has no systematic deviation from reality" Yeah that’s a way’s off. An LLM is just a reflection of the text that humans write, and humans seem very far off from having world models and reasoning that accurately reflect reality. We can’t even reason about what the real differences are between men and women (plus countless other issues)…