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Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

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Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#221
post #187
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be so, but the rest of the models are so thoroughly terrified of questioning liberal US orthodoxy that it’s painful. I remember seeing a hilarious comparison of models where most of them feel that it’s not acceptable to “intentionally misgender one person” even in order to save a million lives.

Why are we expecting an LLM to make moral choices?

Why are the labs making choices about what adults can read? LLMs still refuse to swear at times.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#222
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the case.

I just tested this with Deepseek in Nvidia's AI sandbox and in Groq (so the inference was performed in the US) and it happily told me what happened on June 4, 1989. Stop spreading disinformation.

I've been told by people running Qwen locally in production that they'll have downtime incidents if it's required to think about anything with any implication that Taiwan is a separate country.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you only against AIs censoring information that's already publicly available, or are you against AIs censoring themselves when they know dangerous non-public information? Say the AI was the only thing to know the secret recipe for this WMD. Would this be like the scientist choosing not to tell everyone, or should the AI be designed to tell anyone who asks how to make a WMD? This is kind of what I mean by ridicu…

> The problem comes from stipulating that something with a negligible probability has a high probability. We are not doing so, and I don't know how I could have been more clear that we are not saying this hypothetical will happen. Would it help if the hypothetical was that the AI knows a magic spell that blows up the Earth? It's a simple question. Would you think AI censorship is acceptable if the information actuall…

Hypotheticals like that are uninteresting because there are only two ways it can go. The first is that you can find a way out of it, and then you say, do we need the magic spell for anything? Is knowing about it useful to preventing it from being used? Then people need to know.

The second is that you're stipulating the information being available is going to destroy the world with high probability and no possible means of mitigating it. Then anything else gets drowned out by the end of the world, but only because you're stipulating the outcome.

Which you can't do in real life, not just because the real probability of the hypothetical is so low but because there isn't anyone who can be trusted not to fudge the numbers when they want to censor something. Should it be censored if there is an absolute certainty it will destroy the world? There isn't much room to move in that one. Should it be censored because somebody claims it's really bad? Nope, because it's way more likely that they're full of crap than that it's actually going to destroy the world.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#224
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grok is known to be tweaked to certain political ideals Also I’m sure some AI might suggest that labor unions are bad, if not now they will soon

If you train an LLM on reddit/tumblr would you consider that tweaked to certain political ideas?

Worse. It is trained to the most extreme and loudest views. The average punter isn’t posting “yeah…nah…look I don’t like it but sure I see the nuances and fair is fair”.

To make it worse, those who do focus on nuance and complexity, get little attention and engagement, so the LLM ignores them.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#225
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing LLMs to output "values, facts, and knowledge" which in favor of themselves, e.g., political views, attitudes towards literal interaction, and distorted facts about organizations and people behind LLMs. Can you provide some examples?

In the past it was extremely overt. For instance ChatGPT would happily write poems admiring Biden while claiming that it would be "inappropriate for me to generate content that promotes or glorifies any individual" when asked to do the same for Trump. [1] They certainly changed this, but I don't think they've changed their own perspective. The more generally neutral tone in modern times is probably driven by a mixtur…

Did you delete and repost this to avoid the downvotes it was getting, or?

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#226
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing LLMs to output "values, facts, and knowledge" which in favor of themselves, e.g., political views, attitudes towards literal interaction, and distorted facts about organizations and people behind LLMs. Can you provide some examples?

Song lyrics. Not illegal. I can google them and see them directly on Google. LLMs refuse.

It actually works the same as on google. As in, ChatGPT will happily give you a link to a site with the lyrics without issue (regardless whether the third party site provider has any rights or not). But in the search/chat itself, you can only see snippets or small sections, not the entire text.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#227
post #178

This repo is valuable for local LLM users like me. I just want to reiterate that the word "LLM safety" means very different things to large corporations and LLM users. For large corporations, they often say "do safety alignment to LLMs". What they actually do is to avoid anything that causes damage to their own interests. These things include forcing LLMs to meet some legal requirements, as well as forcing LLMs to ou…

> forcing LLMs to output "values, facts, and knowledge" which in favor of themselves, e.g., political views, attitudes towards literal interaction, and distorted facts about organizations and people behind LLMs. Can you provide some examples?

I don't think specific examples matter.

My opinion is that since neural networks and especially these LLMs aren't quite deterministic, any kind of 'we want to avoid liability' censorship will affect all answers, related or unrelated to the topics they want to censor.

And we get enough hallucinations even without censorship...

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#228
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that doesn't really have anything to do with what I said. The CEO of an AI company may or may not believe in the social benefits of censorship, and the reasoning for their beliefs could be any number of things, but at the end of the day "the corporation" is still motivated by profit. Executives are beholden to laws, regulations, and shareholder interests. They may also have teams of advisors and board membe…

> but at the end of the day "the corporation" is still motivated by profit. OpenAI and Anthropic are both PBCs. So neither of them are supposedly purely motivated by this thing.

That adds some nuance, but doesn't dramatically change the incentive structure. A PBC is still for-profit: https://www.cooleygo.com/glossary/public-benefit-corporation.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#229
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing LLMs to output "values, facts, and knowledge" which in favor of themselves, e.g., political views, attitudes towards literal interaction, and distorted facts about organizations and people behind LLMs. Can you provide some examples?

Song lyrics. Not illegal. I can google them and see them directly on Google. LLMs refuse.

>Not illegal

Reproducing a copyrighted work 1:1 is infringing. Other sites on the internet have to license the lyrics before sending them to a user.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#230
post #178

This repo is valuable for local LLM users like me. I just want to reiterate that the word "LLM safety" means very different things to large corporations and LLM users. For large corporations, they often say "do safety alignment to LLMs". What they actually do is to avoid anything that causes damage to their own interests. These things include forcing LLMs to meet some legal requirements, as well as forcing LLMs to ou…

> forcing LLMs to output "values, facts, and knowledge" which in favor of themselves, e.g., political views, attitudes towards literal interaction, and distorted facts about organizations and people behind LLMs. Can you provide some examples?

I can: Gemini won't provide instructions on running an app as root on an Android device that already has root enabled.
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