Live data from Hacker News

AI behavior guardrails should be public

twitter.com

221–230 of 350 posts

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#221

Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said. I 100% agree with Carmack that guardrails should be public and that the bias correction on display is poor. But I'm disturbed by the choice of examples some people are choosing…

>Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said. It does this now, as a direct result of these "guardrails". Go ask GPT-4 for a picture of a white male scientist, and it'll refuse to produce one. Ask it for any other color/g…

That's not the case. ChatGPT 4 will happily draw a white male scientist. I just tried it and it worked fine. A very handsome scientist it made too!

You might be thinking of a previous generation of OpenAI systems that did things like randomly stuffing the word "black" onto the end of any prompt involving people, detected by giving it a prompt of "A woman holding a sign that says".

OpenAI has improved dramatically in this regard. When ChatGPT/DALL-E were new they had similar problems to Gemini. But to their credit (and Sam Altman's), they listened. It's getting harder and harder to find examples where OpenAI models express obvious political bias, or refuse requests for Californian reasons. Surely there still are some examples, but there's no longer much worry about normal people encountering refusals or egregious ideological bias in the course of regular usage. I would expect there are still refusals for queries like "how do I build a bomb" and they've been trying to block other stuff like regurgitation of copyrighted materials, but that's perceived as much more reasonable and doesn't stir up the same feelings.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Nevermind.

It’s quite non-deterministic and it’s been patched since the middle of the day, as per a Google director https://x.com/jackk/status/1760334258722250785?s=46 Fwiw, it seems to have gone deeper than outright historical replacement: https://x.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1760350903511449717?s=46

It's half-patched. It will randomly insert words into your prompts still. As a test I just asked for a samurai, it enhanced it to "a diverse samurai" and gave me half outputs that look more like some fantasy Native Americans.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#223
post #3

Curious to see if this thread gets flagged and shut down like the others. Shame, too, since I feel like all the Gemini stuff that’s gone down today is so important to talk about when we consider AI safety. This has convinced me more and more that the only possible way forward that’s not a dystopian hellscape is total freedom of all AI for anyone to do with as they wish. Anything else is forcing values on other people…

[flagged]

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#224

Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said. I 100% agree with Carmack that guardrails should be public and that the bias correction on display is poor. But I'm disturbed by the choice of examples some people are choosing…

Imagine being able to configure the image generator with your own preferences for its output.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#225
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that anyone who uses the term "wokeness" seriously is likely arguing from a place of bad faith. It's origins are as a derogatory term, which people wanting to speak seriously on the topic should know.

Its origin was as a proud self-assigned term. It became derogatory entirely due to the behavior of said people. People wanting to speak seriously on the topic should avoid tone-policing and arguing about labels rather than the object referenced, despite knowing full well what is meant (otherwise, one wouldn't take offence)

While the terms "woke," "stay woke," and similar are used to self describe by traditionally marginalized groups, the forms "wokeness" and "woke agenda" are predominately used outside these communities as a pejorative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/woke-bill-maher-olympics-re...

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there is a middle ground. "Generate a scene of a group of friends enjoying lunch in the park." -> Totally expect racial and gender diversity in the output. "Generate a scene of 17th century kings of Scotland playing golf." -> The result should not be a bunch of black men and Asian women dressed up as Scottish kings, it should be a bunch of white guys.

> Surely there is a middle ground. "Generate a scene of a group of friends enjoying lunch in the park." -> Totally expect racial and gender diversity in the output. Do we expect this because diverse groups are realistically most common or because we wish that they were? For example only some 10% of marriages are interracial, but commercials on TV would lead you to believe it’s 30% or higher. The goal for commercials…

Also, these tools are used world-wide and "diversity" means different things in different places. Somehow it's always only the US ideal of diversity that gets shipped abroad.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#227

I've never been involved with implementing large-scale moderation or content controls, but it seems pretty standard that underlying automated rules aren't generally public, and I've always assumed this is because there's a kind of necessary "security through obscurity" aspect to them. E.g., publish a word blocklist and people can easily find how to express problematic things using words that aren't on the list. Thing…

Most legal systems operate at the nation-state scale and aren't made of hidden mystery laws. There are lots of reasons for that.

We've already had this argument with cryptocurrency, where we've basically decided that the existing legal system (although external) provides a sufficient toolset to go after bad actors.

Finally, based on the illiberal nature of most AI Safety Sycophants' internet writings, I don't like who they are as people and I don't trust them to implement this.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to implement large scale censorship and moderation in this case. Where is the security concern? That I can generate images of white people in various situations for my five minutes of entertainment? The whole premise of your argument doesn't make sense. I'm talking to a computer, nobody gets hurt. It's like censoring what I write in my notes app vs. what I write on someone's Facebook wall. In one cas…

What if you are engaged in a wrongthink? How would you suggest this to be controlled instead?

Straight to Guantanamo.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG1eyKjXQAA1FxU?format=jpg&name=... https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cjtc1tnd/production/912b6b5aacc... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG1ThfsWUAAp-SO?format=jpg&name=... https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cjtc1tnd/production/e2810c02ff6... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG1MnepXwAAkPL6?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GG0BLVsbMAARZXr?format=jpg&name=...

I don't understand how people could even argue that this is in any way acceptable. Fighting "bias" has become some boogyman and anything "non-white" is now beyond reproach. Shocking.

Fighting bias is a good thing, you'd have to be pretty...er...biased to believe otherwise. Bias is fundamentally a distortion or deviation from objective reality.

This, on the other hand, is just fucking stupid political showboating that's hurting their SV white knight cause. It's just differently flavored bias

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#230
post #220

I've never been involved with implementing large-scale moderation or content controls, but it seems pretty standard that underlying automated rules aren't generally public, and I've always assumed this is because there's a kind of necessary "security through obscurity" aspect to them. E.g., publish a word blocklist and people can easily find how to express problematic things using words that aren't on the list. Thing…

This is simply a bad approach and a bad argument. Security through obscurity is a term whose only usage in security circles is derogatory. People figure out how to get around these auto-censors just fine, and not publishing them creates more problems for legitimate users and more plausible deniability for bad policy hidden in them. Doing the same thing but with public policy would already be better, albeit still bad.…

Is a content moderation policy the same thing as "security"? Do we get to apply the best practices of the one to the other because they overlap to a smaller or larger degree?
Post reply on HN