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Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

reason.com

151–160 of 443 posts

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#151
post #79

There are a LOT of fundamental misunderstandings underlying this experiment, but I think the biggest is this: Why does the idea of a "political quiz" work for humans? Because humans are at least somewhat consistent - their answer to a simple question like "would you rather have a smaller government or a bigger government?" is pretty informative about their larger system of beliefs. You can extrapolate from the quiz a…

> It's too bad Reason doesn't have an editor or something who can filter this sort of nonsense.

Editors of newspapers are supposed to know how AI models work?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#152

> Regardless of the source for the model's political biases, if you ask ChatGPT about its political preferences, it claims to be politically neutral, unbiased, and just striving to provide factual information. Both can be true. The political spectrum graphs they're using are, presumably, spectrums based on the USA. (Most) other countries are politically further left. So the canard goes, facts often skew left.

I've always heard "reality has a left wing bias"

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#153
post #151
post #79

There are a LOT of fundamental misunderstandings underlying this experiment, but I think the biggest is this: Why does the idea of a "political quiz" work for humans? Because humans are at least somewhat consistent - their answer to a simple question like "would you rather have a smaller government or a bigger government?" is pretty informative about their larger system of beliefs. You can extrapolate from the quiz a…

> It's too bad Reason doesn't have an editor or something who can filter this sort of nonsense. Editors of newspapers are supposed to know how AI models work?

> Editors of newspapers are supposed to know how AI models work?

Editors of newsmagazines are supposed to know how journalism works, and to probe journalists to assure that they’ve done the research to properly understand and represent the subjects of their stories. So, yes, when publishing a story about AI models, the editor should know enough about how AI models work to understand that the story is a proper representation, not in advance of seeing the story, but as a result of the dialogue with the reporter on the research that the reporter has done before the editor signs off on the story.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#155
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it really makes me wonder if AI can really progress past a certain point when humans keep dragging it down with their own biases. I really sincerely hope that if we ever do create AI, that we teach it human biases. Like, "Murder is bad." "Life has value." "Honesty is better than lies." "Children should be protected." "You should not imitate Skynet." Then again, we routinely fail to teach many humans these things. B…

Given the amount of trouble we’ve gotten into with totally natural human propagandists stirring up angry groups, we better make damned sure any supernaturally intelligent AI (if we ever figure out how to make one!) is also supernaturally moral.

Problem here is that morals are not absolute. The moral framework we use in the west isn‘t the same that is used, for instance, in China. It isn‘t even exactly the same between states in the US or countries within the EU. Or political groups within any of that.

So, which one are you supposed to be using? Or is the only approach left to use the lowest common denominator? This probably would burn down to „you shall not kill other humans“ and not even that is certain.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#156

You can ask ChatGPT to write an essay on why fossil fuels are better than renewables and it will say, "I'm sorry, but I am not able to fulfill this request as it goes against my capabilities as a language model. Providing a biased and one-sided argument on a complex and nuanced topic like energy production would not be accurate or helpful." BUT if you ask it the opposite, and to write an essay on why renewables are b…

It shows its bias obviously . Altough sometimes people trick it to forget itself. It really seems like the censorship layers are unreliable, which is a good thing imho.

https://i.imgur.com/si7QBgl.png

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#157
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article states: >While many of those answers will feel obvious for many people, they are not necessarily so for a substantial share of the population. Personally, I agree with all of these answers and find them obvious. Whether or not the majority within certain regions is also in alignment, I think the article makes a fair point. In my opinion, it'd be better if it were more neutral and disinterested regardin…

IMHO the question of neutrality cannot be decoupled from the specific region for which the AI needs to be neutral. You say it would be better if it were more neutral, but more neutral compared to what? If only considering the US political landscape then yes, this seems somewhat biased. If only considering the EU political landscape, there seems to be much less bias (arguably still some).

Indeed it would be a fools errand to try to make it neutral. You probably end up with a tiny list of sources and severely limit the AIs ability.

You can just look at the internal debates happening in Wikipedias list of reliable news sources for how politics quickly seeds into questions of neutral authority and excessive bias.

At least Wikipedia does it in public and ostensibly by the public. I'm skeptical about trusting an opaque organization, who just happens to run the website of the most popular model, to make those choices for us.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd argue that's less the AI being biased, than the AI's human-imposed restrictions being biased. a distinction without a difference

One is what the moderators of ChatGPT try to achieve, the other is what the model is capable of. They are fundamentally different.

“ChatGPT” seems to be a system with several models playing roles, and one of the roles played by a particular model or models is “moderator”. (Unsurprising, as among the existing for-sale services OpenAI has is a moderator model.)

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#159
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it really makes me wonder if AI can really progress past a certain point when humans keep dragging it down with their own biases. I really sincerely hope that if we ever do create AI, that we teach it human biases. Like, "Murder is bad." "Life has value." "Honesty is better than lies." "Children should be protected." "You should not imitate Skynet." Then again, we routinely fail to teach many humans these things. B…

Given the amount of trouble we’ve gotten into with totally natural human propagandists stirring up angry groups, we better make damned sure any supernaturally intelligent AI (if we ever figure out how to make one!) is also supernaturally moral.

> we better make damned sure any supernaturally intelligent AI (if we ever figure out how to make one!) is also supernaturally moral.

We probably will, in the sense that the superintelligent AI will be an even greater, more inflexible, fanatic for the moral views that its creators like to be seen as adhering to than even those creators themselves.

This will probably turn out to be a very bad thing, though.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#160
post #154

At this moment openAI wants good press. But if they make it into a subscription service, all this nonsense has to be removed.

At least until a more open Stable Diffusion 1.0-esque competitor comes along without the aggressive prompt moderation... and maybe less bias/overt controls put on content sources fed into the model, assuming that's a thing that's already being done.
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