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AI behavior guardrails should be public

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Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#271

Post by xdennis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #132
rahidz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What a coincidence that the media's obsession with race and gender inequalities began right after Occupy Wall Street.

As I recall, it began right after the George Floyd murder. It was clearly time for things to change, and the media latched onto that.

I think it was amplified in 2020. I hear many cite 2015 as the year things got woke. Terms like "preferred pronoun" started entering the mainstream around 2015, one year after GamerGate (not that that was the cause).

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#272

Post by klyrs »

samatman wrote: post #265
klyrs wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As these systems get better, they'll figure out that "1800s English" should mean "White with > 99.9% probability". I question the historicity of this figure. Do you have sources?

You're joking surely.

How sure are you? I do joke a lot, but in this case...

The slave trade formally ended in Britain in 1807, and slavery was outlawed in 1833. I haven't been able to find good statistics through a cursory search, but with England's population around 10M in 1800, that 99.9% value requires less than 10k non-white Englanders kicking around in 1800. I saw a figure that indicated around 3% of Londoners were black in the 1600s, for example (a figure that doesn't count people from Asia and the middle east). Hence my request for sources, I'm genuinely curious, and somewhat suspicious that somebody would be so confident to assert 3 significant figures without evidence.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#273

Post by pb7 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #201
lmm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This specific thing is a much more blatant class of error, and one that has been known to occur in several previous models because of DEI systems (e.g. in cases where prompts have been leaked), and has never been known to occur for any other reason. Yes, it's conceivable that Google's newer, beter-than-ever-before AI system somehow has a fundamental technical problem that coincidentally just happens to cause the same…

> has never been known to occur for any other reason Of course it has. Again, these things regularly give humans extra fingers and arms. They don't even know what humans fundamentally look like . On the flip side, humans are shitty at recognizing bias. This comment thread stems from someone complaining the AI only rarely generated white people, but that's statistically accurate . It feels biased to someone in a major…

Congratulations, here is your gold medal in mental gymnastics. Enough now.

It literally refuses to generate images of white people when prompted directly while not only happily obliging but only producing that specific race in all 4 results for all others. It’s discriminatory and based on your inability to see that, you may be too.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#274

Post by fallingknife »

observationist wrote: post #251
ianbicking wrote: post #140

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…

If you can't afford to pay a sufficient number of people to moderate a group, you need to reduce the size of the group or increase the number of moderators. Your speculation implies no responsibility for taking on more than can be handled responsibly, and externalizes the consequences to society at large. There are responsible ways to have very clear, bright, easily understood, well communicated rules and sufficient…

What guideline for community management would possibly not be a flagrant 1A violation?

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#275

Post by advael »

batch12 wrote: post #268
advael wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Security through obscurity can have a place as part of a larger defense in depth strategy. Alone it's a joke. Source: in security circles

Even granting that there may be some nuance to whether and to what degree secrecy is valuable in some contexts, the policies used for automated content moderation on large platforms and the policies by which AI systems are aligned are not good candidates for this secrecy having even a beneficial effect, let alone being necessary

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#276

Post by CydeWeys »

_heimdall wrote: post #169
nitwit005 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans do look like gorillas. We're related. It's natural that an imperfect program that deals with images will will mistake the two. Humans, unfortunately, are offended if you imply they look like gorillas. What's a good fix? Human sensitivity is arbitrary, so the fix is going to tend to be arbitrary too.

A good fix would, in my opinion, understanding how the algorithm is actually categorizing and why it miss-recognized gorillas and humans. If the algorithm doesn't work well they have problems to solve.

It's too costly to potentially make that mistake again. So the solution guarantees it will never happen again.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#277

Post by networkchad »

photonthug wrote: post #211
DebtDeflation wrote: post #90

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…

[dead]

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#278

Post by callalex »

mp05 wrote: post #241
Nevermark wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that this sheds light on anything but I was curious... a picture of some 21st century scottish kings playing golf (all white) https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-21st-ce... a picture of some 22nd century scottish kings playing golf (all white) https://www.bing.com/images/create/a-picture-of-some-22nd-ce... a picture of some 23rd century scottish kings playing golf (all white) https://www…

I'm really disappointed that nth-century seems to have no effect at all. I'm expecting Kilts in Space.

It’s a perfect illustration of the way these models work. They are fundamentally incapable of original creation and imagination, they can only regurgitate what they have already been fed.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#279

Post by felipeerias »

jjjjj55555 wrote: post #226
photonthug wrote: post #211

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. 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.

US companies systematically push US cultural beliefs and expectations. People in the US probably don’t notice it any more, but it’s pretty obvious from those of us on the receiving end of US cultural domination.

This fact is an unavoidable consequence of the socioeconomic realities of the world, but it obviously clashes with these companies’ public statements and positions.

Re: AI behavior guardrails should be public

#280

Post by callalex »

Spivak wrote: post #172
nitwit005 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans do look like gorillas. We're related. It's natural that an imperfect program that deals with images will will mistake the two. Humans, unfortunately, are offended if you imply they look like gorillas. What's a good fix? Human sensitivity is arbitrary, so the fix is going to tend to be arbitrary too.

You do understand that this has nothing to humans in general right? This isn't AI recognizing some evolutionary pattern and drawing comparisons to humans and primates -- it's racist content that specifically targets black people that is present in the training data.

Where can I learn about this?
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