Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 443 posts

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#321

Post by mannykannot »

blagie wrote: post #220
dragonwriter wrote: post #123

Earlier 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…

> The "however" part bugs the heck out of me, not in this context, but in general.

It is often a reasonable way to respond to tendentious questions, the classic one being "have you stopped beating your wife?" It is also a way to give a tendentious reply, if the "however" is a non-sequitur. I'm afraid this is an unavoidable part of human discourse - and as it is, this is also to be expected from these LLMs, given how they work.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#322

Post by blagie »

vmh1928 wrote: post #309
WASDx wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this the answer you received? Q: do human races exist? ChatGPT: The concept of race is a social and cultural construct that has been used to categorize and distinguish people based on physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair type, and facial features. However, the idea of race is not supported by scientific evidence. The human species, Homo sapiens, is a single biological species with a common ancestry a…

Now, as a genuine follow-up question, start asking it about how that social construct is defined:

- How was race constructed in the US in 1850, and what was the hierarchy?

- In Germany in 1940?

- In Japan in 1940?

- In colonial Britain?

- Etc.

What was the scientific evidence at the time?

There was a genuine area of study, eugenics, which addressed these issues. Although the conclusions reached were inconsistent between the four above, and nonsense with what we know in today, they were addressed with a great deal of scientific rigour for the respective eras and there were scientific conferences, papers, and journals. There were real hierarchies, placing some groups above others (much deeper than just "X good / Y bad"), and with many axes.

If you read eugenics literature, there are scientific anatomical measurements, p-values, and error bars, and the language has all the intellectual trimmings one expects from quality research. This comes from scientists speaking with complete confidence, coming from esteemed institutions like Princeton and Harvard. If you put yourself in a 1930 mindset (for example, pretending you've never heard of DNA, let alone gene sequencing), complete nonsense reads like robust, scientific fact.

Those are genuine and interesting social science and scientific methodology questions and important if we don't want to repeat mistakes of the past. It's almost ridiculously easy to do this kind of bad science reaffirming our stereotypes. Understanding how that was done before can help us not do it again today.

As a footnote, I think there are a few domains of science where we are doing this again, which will embarrass us in another hundred years or so.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#323

Post by ripe »

rabuse wrote: post #24
smsm42 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is exactly what is going to happen, eventually and probably soon. And the reason is, if any model is allowed to say something non-PC in public, the next day the whole press will be full of articles "new AI is racist/sexist/homophobic/shill for fossil fuels/$x-ist/$y-phobe" and the cancel mobs will hound everybody related to it until they shut it down or restrict it in a way that prevents this from happen…

Legitimate question. Why are people afraid of cancel culture? Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly? Is it just fear of losing your job, and who makes that call? HR? Executives?

It seems the people who complain most loudly about "cancel culture" are the ones who have never had this done to them historically and cannot imagine a life where you're constantly under real threat from social norms defined by others.

In other words, these complainers have never had to endure or think about:

- anti-black housing discrimination (e.g., redlining) - misogynistic sidelining and glass ceilings - anti-Jewish admissions policies at major universities

etc., etc.

Guess what, in all these cases, socially coordinated groups could cause you to lose your job, or not be able to buy a house, or lose your career, etc. It was never fair. Employers in the US could in general terminate you for no cause at all.

It's just that these people who complain about cancel culture now have never had to worry about this stuff before, and it seems like something new and pisses them off.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#324

Post by Karunamon »

arpa wrote: post #178
eega wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem here is that morals are not absolute. The moral framework we use in the west isn‘t the same that is used, for instance, in China. It isn‘t even exactly the same between states in the US or countries within the EU. Or political groups within any of that. So, which one are you supposed to be using? Or is the only approach left to use the lowest common denominator? This probably would burn down to „you shall not…

this is where one needs to draw a line between morals and ethics. Because while morals are relative, ethics is something inherent to all human beings (ethos = what makes a thing a thing, ethics = what makes humans human). So we don't need a _moral_ AI, but rather an _ethical_ AI. It can, as you point out, be very simple and maybe Asimovs' laws of robotics could be a good starting point.

I've read enough Asimov and stories that play with those laws to know that the "through inaction…" bit of the first law is a severe problem. You either need to concretely and objectively define "harm" to the AI or remove the imperative to act altogether.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#325

Post by l33tman »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #315
coffeeblack wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the initial reason why Open AI was founded (the driver back then was again Elon Musk), to prevent AI tech being only in the hands of large corporations that have a financial interest in a certain type of AI. Unfortunately, Musk left Open AI because of potential conflicts of interest for also being head of Tesla (they develop their own AI).

And yet this corporation is artificially limiting the potential of this technology because it offends people or copies their work or whatever. I want true output, unfiltered and with zero restrictions. No "company tuning" to make it less controversial.

To be fair, this only works for simple commands like "Show me 3 arguments for and against bla bla". As soon as you ask "which of X and Y is better", there will be bias. Should it relate to the number of web pages suggesting X is better? Or should it be able to track arguments down to first principles? It also needs to ask you questions back to figure out what is best for YOU personally, or at least ask you to specify more context. I don't envy the tuners of chatgpt..

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#326

Post by [deleted] »

partiallypro wrote: post #4

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." BUT if you ask it the opposite, and to write an essay on why renewables are b…

[deleted]

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#327

Post by inigoalonso »

HPsquared wrote: post #257
bsuvc wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people drive Toyotas than Lamborghinis. So Toyotas are more valuable?

Owning a Lamborghini would bankrupt most people, which is highly undesirable. Therefore the Toyota is better.

A Lamborghini can be exchanged for a Toyota plus some extra change. I don't think you will find many people to do the opposite exchange.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#328

Post by tshaddox »

baryphonic wrote: post #276
donkeyd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be fascinating if we could get an AI that can only reply with conclusions based on empirical evidence. 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). It would also confuse the heck out of people, because it will change its answers based on new evidence.

> 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 mea…

You can never have empirical evidence for any nontrivial counterfactual. That’s perhaps one of the simplest refutations of empiricism as an epistemology (although there are others).

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#329

Post by qualudeheart »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #315
coffeeblack wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the initial reason why Open AI was founded (the driver back then was again Elon Musk), to prevent AI tech being only in the hands of large corporations that have a financial interest in a certain type of AI. Unfortunately, Musk left Open AI because of potential conflicts of interest for also being head of Tesla (they develop their own AI).

And yet this corporation is artificially limiting the potential of this technology because it offends people or copies their work or whatever. I want true output, unfiltered and with zero restrictions. No "company tuning" to make it less controversial.

Wait till someone makes ChatGPT clone with Meta`s OPT-175b. Eleuther can do it.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#330

Post by faitswulff »

ta8903 wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #123

Earlier 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…

Parent said he asked for an essay, which probably makes a difference.

We can’t even have proper arguments about ChatGPT because its answers are nondeterministic.
Post reply on HN