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How A.I. chatbots become political

nytimes.com

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Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#31

Post by Nasrudith »

algorias wrote: post #23
RangerScience wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edited) Are you claiming (1) that children from single-parent households have worse outcomes and (2) that left-leaning policies result in more single-parent households? (Not going to argue about #1, that seems pretty well established, just pulling it out as a claim for clarity. #2 is what I'd argue against, and would want to actually see your example so that it's possible to do so in a constructive way) > That’s jus…

The OP means that kids raised by married parents have better life outcomes. The policy proposals that would follow from this (e.g. restricting divorce) are right-leaning positions outside the overton window. But even beyond a specific policy proposal, there is a viewpoint in right-leaning circles that atomized individualism has caused lasting damage to the fabric of society and needs to be reigned in. (NB: I can't sp…

The funny thing is that I see complaints most about individualism from the left. It might be something more obvious on a non-monoaxis model.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#32

Post by roenxi »

janalsncm wrote: post #17

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the ave…

> It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse.

Needs an argument. One of our political problems at the moment is we can't accurately assess how people will respond to new hypothetical, we can't grade personalities by effectiveness because people keep changing their minds and we can't run controlled experiments where a single personality is put in charge of multiple different things at once.

It'd be awesome to have a biased chatbot that we could actually trial and see how it works on political topics. We'll eventually be able to build GovernBot 9000 that has a multi-century history of opinions that don't screw a country up. Being able to version and replicate personalities, even extreme ones, might be a huge positive. The great classical liberals of yesteryear that are responsible for so much of our culture were not moderates.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#33

Post by mhuffman »

epgui wrote: post #5

They do say that reality has a left leaning bias... Personally I find these quadrant visualizations a bit misleading (regardless of where you sit) because the "centre" is not so much a neutral point as it is the centre of the "Overton window".

>They do say that reality has a left leaning bias

I am not even sure how to interpret that. In the US, at least, politically people leaning left and leaning right are about even. I would definitely say that during my time in academia it appeared to me that more were left-leaning than people I knew in my non-academic life (ie. work, etc.) The fact that they have to spend so much time "re-aligning" these models seems to indicate that maybe the general public does not have a left-leaning bias at all.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#34

Post by RangerScience »

algorias wrote: post #27
majormajor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the poster is claiming that "left leaning orthodoxy" says "there's no disadvantages to children to being raised in a single family household." I don't really know that that's true anyway. It doesn't seem to be a frequently discussed topic IME. There are related topics like "should divorce be available" and "should people be encouraged or discouraged from pre-marital sex" where I think they are extrapolating "…

> The general "left leaning" mood is also to provide services that help single-family households to mitigate issues for children anyway, so I think it's much more of a nuanced "lesser of two evils" position to support things like divorce being available. That's a good way to put it. In contrast, the right leaning mood would be to strengthen social cohesion, increase support that people have from families, neighbors,…

> In contrast, the right leaning mood would be to strengthen social cohesion

Huh. Not the impression I get from what I see around me, not at all. What I see (from my bubble) is forced conformity and a systematic destruction of every form of support structure. Although, notably absent from my bubbles are religious support structures, so.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#35

Post by jonathankoren »

082349872349872 wrote: post #21
janalsncm wrote: post #17

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the ave…

> Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. Compare map services.

Ahh maps, where the borders and even the names of disputed regions are different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes.

Then of course, there's the countries wher accurately represented geographic features are verboten.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#36

Post by underlipton »

RangerScience wrote: post #16
jimbokun wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies comparing outcomes of children raised in married, two parent households vs single parent homes do not support left leaning orthodoxy. That’s just one example off the top of my head. Overton window just keeps people from voicing right leaning opinions in polite company, even when thoroughly backed by data.

(edited) Are you claiming (1) that children from single-parent households have worse outcomes and (2) that left-leaning policies result in more single-parent households? (Not going to argue about #1, that seems pretty well established, just pulling it out as a claim for clarity. #2 is what I'd argue against, and would want to actually see your example so that it's possible to do so in a constructive way) > That’s jus…

#2 is false on its face. Conservative policies like abolishing gay marriage and regressive welfare reform - as well as the policies that result in outcomes like a disproportionate amount of men of color being sent to prison or having to take jobs far away from their families or being unable to afford marriage or a house - clearly predicate a large portion of the broken or malformed or unformed families that exist in the US. Left-leaning policies are not immaculate, but they don't carry the unspoken mandate of caring only about the stability of white, affluent, straight couples - which is a problem in a country where much of the population is some combination of not-white, queer, and working class, AND where many women (and men!) would desire the option to destabilize their dysfunctional marriages, if need be.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#37

Post by gotoeleven »

janalsncm wrote: post #17

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the ave…

I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right?

I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth? You see it in lots of almost trivial ways nowadays, things so small that it feels ridiculous to even mention. Some examples: Half the medieval warriors that come with a castle lego set nowadays are female. Viking legos too. And remember when they were trying to tell us Abraham Lincoln was gay?

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #8

I don't like the title, but the second opening paragraph starts strong: > A.I.’s political problems were starkly illustrated by the disastrous rollout of Google’s Gemini Advanced chatbot last month. A system designed to ensure diversity made a mockery of user requests, including putting people of color in Nazi uniforms when asked for historical images of German soldiers and depicting female quarterbacks as having won…

This is not about politics, it's all about marketing. The system was told "make sure that any images of people you generate are diverse" and it did just that. It performed as designed, there was no failure. The interesting political question is why we would care about these things in the first place, one way or the other.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#39

Post by tristor »

gotoeleven wrote: post #37
janalsncm wrote: post #17

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the ave…

I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or exclude…

> After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right?

The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve.

There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#40

Post by vineyardmike »

gotoeleven wrote: post #37
janalsncm wrote: post #17

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the ave…

I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or exclude…

Alternatively, why should toys make the person playing with it feel bad? Toys are intentionally escapist, it’s the point? Feels like a weird argument.

I think the better comparison is what the other commenters brought up - maps. These are tools, and we turn to them for a purpose. And yet even geography is not ahem set in stone. We need our tools to be useful to the user, and that means different things to different people. There’s dispute in all facts. Just ask the people living in Taiwan, or Gaza or Ukraine…

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