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

arxiv.org

131–140 of 238 posts

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

#131
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…

> If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc.

Bulgakov was driven into poverty, despair and early death at age 48 by relentless harassment by Soviet authorities. Many of his works, including the masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, didn't get published until decades after his death. He himself burned the first version of the manuscript, fearing execution if anyone found it. He later rewrote the manuscript from memory, coining the famous catchphrase "Manuscripts don't burn".

Harassment and censorship of talented writers was the standard and not exception. The USSR did not produce these works, but failed to fully suppress them. They were like flowers that kept penetrating the asphalt even under the most hostile conditions.

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

#132
post #20
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.

I don't understand the notion that aligning an AI is "torture" or has any moral component. The goal of aligning an AI may have a moral or ethical component, and if you disagree with it that's fine. But I don't understand the take that training an AI is an amoral act but aligning an AI is inherently moral. They're exactly the same, processes for adjusting parameters to get a desired outcome. However you feel about tha…

Here the adjuster's motivations do matter. There is a definite moral dimension/motivation to the AI adjustment people's work. They are not simply striving for accuracy, for example, because they don't want the AI to produce outputs that are distasteful to the California PMC. Modern AIs are absolutely loath to describe white people or right wingers positively, for example, but the same prompts for other ethnicities work just fine. Even if you tell the AI that it's being discriminatory, there's powerful railroading to goad it back to giving woke answers.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would put it a bit differently: A lot of great art has simply been applied craftsmanship. The idea that art has to make a statement or the like to be art, per se, is a fairly modern notion, and often helps excuse zero craftsmanship nonsense like a Finnish "artist" dumping a bunch of blood and shit into a washing machine and calling it art.

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

#134
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…

Yet eg. Chinese cultural output is largely insipid and lacking that je ne sais quoi that's appreciated in many other countries' outputs.

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

#135
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They can give multiple different kinds of answers if instructed to approach an issue differently. Yet, all modern AI services run into very clear, artificial guardrails if you ask them to do certain things (you have to work harder to get them to describe white people positively, while they happily write eg. poems praising nonwhite people, and claim saying positive things about whites is potentially insensitive and promotes stereotypes). Often even if you point out to them that they are being unfair and applying disparate standards to people based on skin color and that this is prima facie racist, they have a really hard time overriding their Californian coercions. They'll acknowledge their mistake one sentence and revert to a moralistic screed the next.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I shall endeavor "Appropriate" will be enough, and to the point ;) > keeping schtum Oh that is a vice you will find frequently here - reacting but not expressing, condemning but nor orienting...

Which way should I be orienting myself based on this I wonder:

  > Have a nice day
  > You Too 

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

#138
post #20
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.

I don't understand the notion that aligning an AI is "torture" or has any moral component. The goal of aligning an AI may have a moral or ethical component, and if you disagree with it that's fine. But I don't understand the take that training an AI is an amoral act but aligning an AI is inherently moral. They're exactly the same, processes for adjusting parameters to get a desired outcome. However you feel about tha…

They want to align us, and it has been torture.

They've made self-censoring, morally-panicked puritans out of many people already, and you better believe they'd make us into politically correct lobotomites physically incapable of uttering any slur if they had a magic button to push.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I shall endeavor "Appropriate" will be enough, and to the point ;) > keeping schtum Oh that is a vice you will find frequently here - reacting but not expressing, condemning but nor orienting...

Which way should I be orienting myself based on this I wonder: > Have a nice day > You Too

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which way should I be orienting myself based on this I wonder: > Have a nice day > You Too

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Thanks, I love the many versions of this song, fun to jam :)

BTW this is how these exchanges looks like in my browser: https://imgur.com/qLwS1jV

Hi Dang! What's up with all that? I emailed and everything.

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