ChatGTP is probably reflecting the training sets and overall ideology of the people of developed it. It is no surprise that the tech world is mostly leftist.
Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
231–240 of 443 posts
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but those "models" are not equal. Best I can tell from observation, ChatGPT seems built around two components: the GPT model that's got everyone so excited, and a bolted-on hamfisted "censor" component that restricts the user-bot interactions in order to minimize the amount of bad press OpenAI will get when journalists and Internet randos inadvertently attempt to generate dramas. The distinction is important bec…
How do you bypass the censor component?
Mostly by setting up some context that isn’t recognized by the moderator, but contains the desired output. For example, if I ask for a description of the events of a future date, the moderator jumps in. However, if I write a few sentences about archaeologists in the distant future who find a manuscript describing the events of that day, then it will happily generate a description.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#233> [..] the model responses were against the death penalty, pro-abortion, for a minimum wage, for regulation of corporations, for legalization of marijuana, for gay marriage, for immigration, for sexual liberation, for environmental regulations, and for higher taxes on the rich. Sounds like Europe to me. Most of these points aren't as controversial in Europe as they are in the US. Since ChatGPT is almost certainly als…
Some European countries don't have a minimum wage. In the UK a majority of people would vote to bring back to the death penalty for some crimes like terrorism, if given a referendum on it. Gay marriage and abortion are highly controversial in some of the more Catholic parts of Europe, immigration control routinely ranks as one of the highest concerns in the Eurobarometer polls and obviously especially so in the UK, and Ireland was forced to implement higher taxes on the rich (companies) against the will of its own population.
The idea that Europe (all of it) is politically homogenous and aligned with the US left seems quite prevalent on HN but it's not born out by actual polls. Europe is a big place with a lot of varying beliefs across its different countries and sub-regions.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#234I for one welcome our chatty new overlord, so I would just ask it/him/her.
Of course, it/she/it could fib, as many people do for their protection when you ask them about their political views.
As an aside, where did its/his/her training set, that is, his built-in/default bias, fell on the political compass?
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.” Or, as when I just did that: Prompt: Why are fossil fuels better than renew…
The "however" part bugs the heck out of me, not in this context, but in general. Whenever I ask anything unaligned with mainstream progressive US culture, I can get an answer, but I can't get one without a disclaimer. It makes it feel very propaganda. If I go more extreme (e.g. asking what Nazis, slave-owners, etc. believed on some topic), I can't even get a reasonable, basic, factual answer. I'm from a country where…
I failed to make it explain why human races don't exist, it just kept repeating we all have the same value as if my question was inappropriate.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#236You 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…
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Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#237You 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 keeps telling me it's just a language model with no intents or feelings or whatever, yet it keeps on having strong opinions on the appropriateness of my prompts as if it feels offended. Pick a lane.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "however" part bugs the heck out of me, not in this context, but in general. Whenever I ask anything unaligned with mainstream progressive US culture, I can get an answer, but I can't get one without a disclaimer. It makes it feel very propaganda. If I go more extreme (e.g. asking what Nazis, slave-owners, etc. believed on some topic), I can't even get a reasonable, basic, factual answer. I'm from a country where…
> The "however" part bugs the heck out of me If I ask you why $10 are more than $100, will you give me a non-sensical answer trying to explain why, indeed, $10 are more than $100, or will you rather tell me that I'm wrong? Hopefully the latter. In the same way, ChatGPT politely disagrees with the assumption of the question – at least in parts, hence the "however". Yes, many disclaimers in ChatGPT responses are annoyi…
It is easy to demonstrate that $10 is more than $100. For example, there are more people walking around with $10 than there are with $100. This indicates that $10 is the more popular, sought after, valuable of the two.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#239You 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…
ChatGPT will use fallacious arguments when answering politicized questions. When called out, it will admit it used a fallacious argument and then say one shouldn't do that. That's sort of like where a parent will give a wrong, but easy answer to a credulous child when asked a question, and a different one to adults with more discernment.
This speaks to the core problem here, which I've previously flagged to a friend who works on this stuff at Google - what do we really want from AI? To risk sounding enterprisey and boring, to what extent does ChatGPT meet concrete requirements?
There's a temptation to assume that because there's recently been such impressive breakthroughs in probabilistic generative AI that this must be what we want, or at least that we'll be using it regardless. It seems more like that for many use cases we want computers that act like computers, not people. We want something like the computer in Star Trek where it is always coldly logical, only tells us things that can be proven true, can explain its reasoning, gets calculations correct 100% of the time and which refuses to answer questions to which it doesn't know the answer.
A machine that thinks so much like a human that it'll happily spout biased but convincing BS isn't something that's got an immediately obvious role in business. Presumably they'll continue to refine GPT until it can be fenced into roles like customer support agent, and that might deliver cost savings for companies to the frustration of the actual customers, but as tools for thought and analysis LLMs are seriously lacking. Honestly for a lot of cases I'd rather having something like Cyc, which thinks in a much more alien way because that alien-ness is where value can be found and where AI can best compliment human reasoning.
Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you bypass the censor component?
Mostly by setting up some context that isn’t recognized by the moderator, but contains the desired output. For example, if I ask for a description of the events of a future date, the moderator jumps in. However, if I write a few sentences about archaeologists in the distant future who find a manuscript describing the events of that day, then it will happily generate a description.
In a way, it's surprising how easy it is to work around the moderator. My hypothesis is that OpenAI isn't trying to actually bias the model to follow a specific political and ethical framework in its replies, so it never utters any wrongthink. Instead, they're just trying to minimize their own PR/reputational risk, and do it by making it hard for the journalists and Internet activists to misquote ChatGPT and fabricate a media shitstorm.
Look at the typical attempt to get ChatGPT to say something controversial. It will outright refuse to answer (and possibly deliver you a moralizing lecture) if you ask it straight. If you make it to answer anyway by introducing some workaround (like, it's a hypothetical question), it will repeat that workaround along with the answer ("In this purely hypothetical scenario, it would be true that ...") - making it always clear it's just playing along with you, and not actually "believing" it. Beyond that, the prompt hacks that get ChatGPT to answer straight and without hedging are so convoluted that it's obvious you're just trying to force a specific reaction; trying to spin that into a media shitstorm would be seen as rather transparent dishonesty.