Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

I am currently writing an article called the "The Fascinating development of AI: From ChatGPT and DALL-E to Deepfakes" The last part is about ChatGPT and will be coming out next Thursday. When the GPT-2 Model came out in 2019 and went viral with the Unicorn story OpenAI said

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.

ChatGPT is based off of GPT-3.5 and contains 100x more parameters than GPT-2. The reason they released ChatGPT is that they feel they have some tools in place to keep the malicious applications down.

> we have developed and deployed a content filter that classifies text as safe, sensitive, or unsafe. We currently have it set to err on the side of caution, which results in a higher rate of false positives.

It's conservative and biased and they acknowledge that. But that was the prerequisite to even have a situation where we could play around with the technology (for free right now I might add) and I'm grateful for that.

Also if anyone remembers Microsoft Tay when things go wrong with Chatbots it's a really bad look for the company

Reason articles are typically well reasoned, even when you don't agree with them

> I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US).

That attitude is likely why ChatGPT has left-leaning answers, given the difficulty some have distinguishing between value judgments and empirical facts.

As a quick test, I asked ChatGPT to compare Sweden's response to COVID-19 with the United State's. As an empirical measure, Sweden fared better in terms of case-fatality rate, though not astonishingly so (indeed, the heavy-handed lockdowns in Australia seem to have been effective when removing moral considerations).

Here's how ChatGPT concluded:

> It is difficult to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches, as both countries have experienced significant levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, Sweden's approach has been controversial, with some critics arguing that it has resulted in a higher number of cases and deaths than would have occurred with a more stringent lockdown.

I would categorize this as a left-wing response: it claims the comparison is "difficult," while hinting that Sweden's response is "controversial" compared to the US's.

ChatGPT made other errors, such as insisting that the American response was federally-coordinated, when it was in reality implemented at the state level with only "guidelines" coming from the top. It also called Sweden's central government "federal," even though Sweden is a unitary state.

Anyway, my experience is that facts are truly stubborn things, often disappointing ideologues of all stripes.

EDIT: my example may be partly worthless given that ChatGPT's training corpus ends in 2021.

In the 90% case, people's "wants" are absolutely not "consistent" for any definition of consistent. Inconsistent/contradictory answers can be easily elided through question framing. Ask someone who responds to a "smaller vs bigger government" question with "smaller" something about concrete services that may or may not be provided by governments, and in most cases you can elicit support for much larger government apparatus than exists now anywhere.

All people are shaped by unique experiences and productions of those experiences can be "consistent" and can hold firm in the face of even contradictory evidence.

But in the absence of deep personal experience, people, like ChatGPT, are argument-producing machines, where the shape of the produced arguments depend more on prompt, social context like the status of other parties in the argument, and personal context like whether someone is hungry or tired, etc.

Thank goodness the for-centuries-incorrect models of people as primarily intellectual creatures are subsiding and the reality of people being storytelling creatures are coming to the fore.

Relatedly, agree completely that Reason lacks informed editing on many topics. Cheers.

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