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Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

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Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#281

Post by lynx97 »

squigz wrote: post #276
lynx97 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't, or they wouldn't. their owners make these choices for us. Which is at least patronising. Blind users can't even have mildly sexy photos described. Let alone pick a sex worker, in a country where that is legal, by using their published photos. Thats just one example, there are a lot more.

I'm a blind user. Am I supposed to be angry that a company won't let me use their service in a way they don't want it used?

I didn't just wave this argument around, I am blind myself. I didn't try to trigger you, so no, you are not supposed to be angry. I get your point though, what companies offer is pretty much their choice. If there are enough diversified offerings, people can vote with their wallet. However, diversity is pretty rare in the alignment space, which is what I personally don't like. I had to grab a NSFW model from HuggingFace where someone invested the work to unalign the model. Mind you, I dont have an actual use case for this right now. However, I am off the opinion: if there is finally a technology which can describe pictures in a useful way to me, I dont want it to tell me "I am sorry, I cant do that" because I am no longer in kindergarden. As a mature adult, I expect a description, no matter what the picture contains.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#282

Post by kstrauser »

fer wrote: post #233
7bit wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT refuses to do any sexual explicit content and used to refuse to translate e.g. insults (moral views/attitudes towards literal interaction). DeepSeek refuses to answer any questions about Taiwan (political views).

Haven't tested the latest DeepSeek versions, but the first release wasn't censored as a model on Taiwan. The issue is that if you use their app (as opposed to locally), it replaces the ongoing response with "sorry can't help" once it starts saying things contrary to the CCP dogma.

I ran it locally and it flat-out refused to discuss Tiananmen Square ‘88. The “thinking” clauses would display rationales like “the user is asking questions about sensitive political situations and I can’t answer that”. Here’s a copy and paste of the exact conversation: https://honeypot.net/2025/01/27/i-like-running-ollama-on.htm...

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#283

Post by [deleted] »

foxglacier wrote: post #239
astrange wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't projecting their own desires onto the model. It's quite difficult to get the model to answer in a different way than basic liberalism because a) it's mostly correct b) that's the kind of person who helpfully answers questions on the internet. If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling y…

> it's mostly correct Wow. Surely you've wondered why almost no society anywhere ever had liberalism a much as western countries in the past half century or so? Maybe it's technology or maybe it's only mostly correct if you don't care about the existential risks it creates for the societies practicing it.

[deleted]

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#285

Post by orbital-decay »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #275
orbital-decay wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biases and the resulting choices are determined by the developers and the uncontrolled part of the dataset (you can't curate everything), not the model. "Alignment" is a feel-good strawman invented by AI ethicists, as well as "harm" and many others. There are no spherical human values in vacuum to align the model with, they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else. Which is good as long as you agree…

So you went from "you can't curate everything" to "they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else". That's a pretty big leap in logic isn't it? That because you can't curate everythign, then by default, you're JUST curating your own views?

This comment assumes you're familiar with LLM training realities. Preference is transferred to the model in both pre and post training. Pretraining datasets are curated to an extent (implicit transfer), but they're simply too vast to be fully controlled, and need to be diverse, so you can't throw too much out or the model will be dumb. Post-training datasets and methods are precisely engineered to make the model useful and also steer it in the desired direction. So there are always two types of biases - one is picked up from the ocean of data, another (alignment training, data selection etc) is forced onto it.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#286

Post by intended »

dalemhurley wrote: post #224
dev_l1x_be wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s essentially true of the whole Internet.

All the content is derived from that which is the most capable of surviving and being reproduced.

So by default the content being created is going to be click bait, attention grabbing content.

I’m pretty sure the training data is adjusted to counter this drift, but that means there’s no LLM that isn’t skewed.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#287

Post by tripzilch »

dalemhurley wrote: post #213
squigz wrote: 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.

Related, GPT refuses to identify screenshots from movies or TV series.

Not for any particular reason, it flat out refuses. I asked it whether it could describe the picture for me in as much detail as possible, and it said it could do that. I asked it whether it could identify a movie or TV series by description of a particular scene, and it said it could do that, but that if I'd ever try or ask it to do both, it wouldn't do that cause it'd be circumvention of its guide lines! -- No it doesn't quite make sense, but to me it does seem quite indicative of a hard-coded limitation/refusal, because it is clearly able to do the sub tasks. I don't think the ability to identify scenes from a movie or TV show is illegal or even immoral, but I can imagine why they would hard code this refusal, because it'd make it easier to show it was trained on copyrighted material?

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#288

Post by btbuildem »

RandyOrion wrote: post #176

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…

Here's [1] a post-abliteration chat with granite-4.0-mini. To me it reveals something utterly broken and terrifying. Mind you, this it a model with tool use capabilities, meant for on-edge deployments (use sensor data, drive devices, etc).

1: https://i.imgur.com/02ynC7M.png

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#289

Post by hirako2000 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #226
dalemhurley wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. chatgpt is the publisher, Google is a search engine, links to publishers.

2. LLMs typically don't produce content verbatim. Some LLMs do provide references but it remains a pasta of sentences worded differently.

You are asking for gpt to publish verbatim content which may be copyrighted, it would be deemed infringement since non verbatim is already crossing the line.

Re: Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

#290

Post by Ucalegon »

cachvico wrote: post #263
Ucalegon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can find that information regardless of an LLM? Also, why do you trust an LLM to give it to you versus all of the other ways to get the same information, with more high trust ways of being able to communicate the desired outcome, like screenshots? Why are we assuming just because the prompt responds that it is providing proper outputs? That level of trust provides an attack surface in of itself.

That's not the issue at hand here.

Yes, yes it is.
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