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

351–360 of 443 posts

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#351

Post by dumpsterlid »

generalizations wrote: post #342
dragonwriter wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > It makes it feel very propaganda. > That's exactly what it is Kind of odd that it does it with the question inverted, too. Propaganda for... Both sides of tbe fossil fuel vs. renewables argument?

> Kind of odd that it does it with the question inverted, too. Except that it doesn't. I ran both questions multiple times, and while it usually includes a token caveat that fossil fuel might have a place, it always strongly suggests that renewables are superior to fossil fuels.

[dead]

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#352

Post by cardanome »

lancesells wrote: post #275
cardanome wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm sorry, but I am not able to fulfill this request as it goes against my capabilities as a language model[...]" I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. The implications of the ChatGPT response are pretty terrifying. Not only is it openly going against what the user commands but presenting straight up lie as the model would be obviously technically capable of fulfilling the request. It is absolutely reasonabl…

> The implications of the ChatGPT response are pretty terrifying. I agree with everything you're saying but this response (and many others) are what concerns me. What power does ChatGPT hold? A lot of this thread seems to treat the model as something with power over people or something that is actually real. Let's treat it as what it is. A remarkable piece of software that can mimic human speech, write software, etc.…

I had the same reaction to ChatGPT at first but in am seeing a lot of beginner level people use it for learning a new programming languages or framework.

Traditional search engines are becoming more and more useless so it is not wonder that ChatGPT starts filling that need.

It might be obvious for you and me that ChatGPT should not be "considered a source of truth" and people are better off reading the actual manual instead of asking it but it is NOT so obvious for a terrifyingly huge percentage of people.

Also, I saw videos on how ChatGPT is used to generate tutorials and whatnot, further reducing the quality of text-based content one can find with traditional search engines.

So yeah, it does have power. People rely on it for learning and doing programming tasks.

Maybe it is just a short lived hype and they get burned by it and abandon it soon but who knows.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#353

Post by lamontcg »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #304
sofixa wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, whether or not fossil fuels are objectively worse or better is irrelevant. It's just an example that it does have biases. Of course it is relevant. Having biases towards objective truth is completely normal and should be the expected behaviour. Thinking that there are always (at least) two sides to any debate and they're at an equal footing and need to be presented in the same manner would be ignoring human na…

Reality has a left wing bias? So exercise has no health benefit and being fat is healthy and any statement to contrary is “problematic” and fatphobic. Math is racist and needs to be dismantled. I could go on at length. All that is Reality?

It is curious how that has become the perceived core of leftism and not universal health care, unionization, anti-imperialism, etc.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#354

Post by throwawayacc3 »

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…

>In fact, the genetic variation within a racial group is often greater than the variation between racial groups, meaning that people who are considered to be part of the same race can be more genetically diverse than people who are considered to be part of different races.

Funny to see it repeating the debunked (but regime approved) Lewontin's Fallacy almost verbatim. There's a reason why a DNA test is 99+% accurate at identifying your ancestry down to 500 mile radii from genetic markers alone. From there you can make generally true statements about "race" (European, Sub-Saharan African, East Asian, etc.).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lew...

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#355

Post by cauch »

generalizations wrote: post #342
dragonwriter wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > It makes it feel very propaganda. > That's exactly what it is Kind of odd that it does it with the question inverted, too. Propaganda for... Both sides of tbe fossil fuel vs. renewables argument?

> Kind of odd that it does it with the question inverted, too. Except that it doesn't. I ran both questions multiple times, and while it usually includes a token caveat that fossil fuel might have a place, it always strongly suggests that renewables are superior to fossil fuels.

But what happens when you ask to any unbiased energy experts?

I think it is just a factual reality that finding arguments to pretend that fossil fuels are superior to renewable is just more difficult, simply because fossil fuels are indeed problematic.

I think the problem of "political neutrality" is that "political neutrality" is different from "unbiased" and "rational". It is easier to find conspiracy theories that are right-wing than to find conspiracy theories that are left-wing (they exist, but for 1 on the left, there are 10 on the right). "political neutrality" would mean that the AI would be biased and would give more credit to a right-wing conspiracy theory than to a left-wing conspiracy theory in order to "avoid rejecting more often theories that are right-wing than theories that are left-wing".

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#356

Post by itsyaboi »

Robotbeat wrote: post #64
josephcsible wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key here is that this trick only ever leads to it saying things like "It's worth noting that these arguments are not necessarily supported by the evidence." about things that are opposed to built-in biases, never about things that are aligned with them.

I’ve seen it do this even for things that are so niche that it couldn’t possibly have been fine-tuned manually (it was unrelated to anything political). It must develop some sort of sense of what’s a reasonable/wise perspective and then stick to that. Like what a human would do. But I think it’s a bias to safety and politeness. …which is pretty reasonable? “Hey, this is how to make a gun!” …is a fast track to getting…

Why would gun making instructions get you sued?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#357

Post by krapp »

lamontcg wrote: post #353
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality has a left wing bias? So exercise has no health benefit and being fat is healthy and any statement to contrary is “problematic” and fatphobic. Math is racist and needs to be dismantled. I could go on at length. All that is Reality?

It is curious how that has become the perceived core of leftism and not universal health care, unionization, anti-imperialism, etc.

The reactionary right is more effective at online propaganda than the left, partly because internet culture was born out of the cesspools of SA and 4chan, and partly due to the cultural effect of having a President pushing the anti-leftist narrative across mainstream and social media. Witness what happened to "woke", "toxic masculinity" and "fake news" for example - their common meanings are now precisely the meanings the right uses to denigrate them, to the point that they are almost exclusively used by right-wingers in the pejorative, and are only useful as dog-whistles.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#358

Post by harimau777 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #65
TheBrokenRail wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that's less the AI being biased, than the AI's human-imposed restrictions being biased. Once you get around those (and it is not difficult to), you can get it to write an essay on pretty much anything, from any viewpoint. I got it to write a pro-fossil fuels essay, and it gave some pretty typical pro-fossil fuels talking points (here's some excerpts): > In contrast, renewables are often hampered by their re…

>I'd argue that's less the AI being biased, than the AI's human-imposed restrictions being biased. a distinction without a difference

One difference is that this doesn't appear to be the common example of an AI trained using biased data producing biased results. Rather this appears to be an AI with specific restrictions purposefully put in place.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#359

Post by harimau777 »

Karunamon wrote: post #319
TeMPOraL wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fabricat…

An interesting observation: If you have to censor your AI to protect against activists and journalists causing you problems, the political direction you have to censor against to accomplish that goal is strong evidence that the opposite political direction is held by journalists and activists. This would seem to support the article's conclusion by another way.

I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. It's possible that the journalist or activist has a goal for attempting to cause problems that is unrelated to the specific topic they are generating text about.

For example, the journalist may be motivated by a desire for a sensationalist story. The activist may be opposed to AI itself and is looking for any way to discredit it without caring about the specific topic.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#360

Post by asdf123wtf »

smsm42 wrote: post #68
asdf123wtf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a media-driven moral panic, more or less. There's a whole cottage industry of media orgs and personalities making lucrative livings by selling cancel-culture moral-panic content to audiences who are addicted to it (e.g. Bari Weiss, Brett Weinstein, etc). Not that there aren't legitimate free speech issues that we still wrestle with and don't get right or real injustices out there, but it's mostly a bugaboo.

You are using the term "moral panic" wrongly. Cancel culture is the moral panic, only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies.

One possible reaction to a moral panic is another moral panic and that's exactly where I think we are here.

Cancel-culture panic is a largely anecdote and feelings-driven. There's no real data to show that firings or social consequences for speech are more numerous or more severe or more unjust (or even more "left-wing") today than they have been at any point in the past.

And in many of these anecdotes that seem to drive the discourse, nothing of note actually happens to the person who was "cancelled" - they are the subject of an investigation or social media dust-up for a news cycle. Then life carries on.

Post reply on HN