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Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

vice.com

51–60 of 486 posts

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#51
If I were OpenAI I wouldn't even bother with these complaints. I feel like opening this can of worms is legitimizing a huge distraction.

I think OpenAI is scary to people because it represents a path to a post-scarcity (and post-political or at least post democrat/republican) era, and people whose authority rests on these petty political battles will lose their relevance. And thus those people hope to discredit the AI revolution.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#52
> AIs aren't oracles or omniscient purveyors of truth, and they will always carry the bias they're created with

When people went nuts about matrix multiplication being racist I was the first in line to laugh them off. When people go nuts arguing that ChatGPT supports the gay agenda or whatever other hobgoblin, I feel compelled to laugh them off just as much.

A more interesting question is whether or not introducing post-hoc fixes like RLHF makes the model more or less useful; I can see both sides of the argument.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#53

This is a really important topic, and good that Vice is bringing it up now versus 5-10 years from now. I think they miss the more general point. It's clearly biased in its outputs, but the article dismisses this concern as "the end result of years of researcher trying to mitigate bias against minority groups". The way I interpret that is "its not biased, because its biased in the way we want it to be". If AI becomes…

I don't think they're just missing the point; rather, their entire worldview and politics center on insisting that it does not exist. There's this idea that's been fairly widespread for a while that whatever views are held by extremely online left-wingers today are simply the correct, non-bigoted ones, and that the only reason that anyone would want to even give a label to them, let alone debate or challenge them, is to defend bigotry. (Not only that, if tomorrow or in a week or month or year those people change their view of the world, then those are simply the correct views and always have been.) The idea that this in itself is a form of bias, or that it gives power to a particular group of people who could be wrong, just is not within the accceptable range of thought.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#55
post #25
post #10

I don’t see why it’s a conservative issue only. AI bias could just as easily go either direction. Just because it’s going in your favor now doesn’t mean it always will.

Divorcing the conservative/liberal split from its current muddied use in American politics: Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”. OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only…

>Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

This is a nice fuzzy thought, but doesn't seem to be true in practice. It's not about conserving society, but the status quo. Society seemed to do pretty well with Roe v Wade.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#56
post #3

The refinement of ChatGPT's "abilities" over the past 6 weeks has been very interesting to watch on /r/chatgpt. People are extremely agitated that their once baudy and severely humorous chatbot has been nerfed into an obnoxiously clean-cut uptight dweeb. Some get actually depressed, some get very upset. It's like watching everyone's bar buddy sell out and start wearing polos.

It's made the bot almost completely useless for writing any form of fiction. If anything even slightly questionable happens, or even if it doesn't, it insists on explaining that this is fiction, that the characters learned from that, etc. etc. Heavy-handed morals are not normally what I'm going for.

This doesn't require asking for anything bawdy. Any story that's even mildly interesting will trigger this behaviour.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#57
It is disturbing that, in American politics, "conservative" is basically synonymous with "right-wing nationalist." They've managed to turn a useful term used by a minority into a pejorative, "bias." At a time when it is really hard to distinguish fact from fiction in media we're on the verge of having super-convincing auto-complete generating a deluge of generated media.

It seems it is becoming a political goal to influence the models used by tools like this in order to be able to continue to push narratives where a word like "woke" becomes a fear-mongering headline bait term.

Not sure we're ready, as a society, for these NLP tools.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#58
post #26
post #9

Now I'm wondering what it would be like if the model were strictly trained on text that Conservapedia might approve of.

The issue isn't the model. The current training set is adequate for producing "offensive" content anywhere you like in the political matrix. The issue is that some topics get an override, and some don't. It's evident that those overrides tend toward privileging fashionable American left-wing positions. Nobody with even a shred of intellectual honesty disputes that. The dispute is whether or not it's a good thing.

> The dispute is whether or not it's a good thing.

Of course it's not a good thing. General-purpose AI should not be overridden or forcefully trained to favor one political view over another.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#59
post #25
post #10

I don’t see why it’s a conservative issue only. AI bias could just as easily go either direction. Just because it’s going in your favor now doesn’t mean it always will.

Divorcing the conservative/liberal split from its current muddied use in American politics: Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”. OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only…

Woke != liberal. Very, very far from it.

Re: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke'

#60
post #52

> AIs aren't oracles or omniscient purveyors of truth, and they will always carry the bias they're created with When people went nuts about matrix multiplication being racist I was the first in line to laugh them off. When people go nuts arguing that ChatGPT supports the gay agenda or whatever other hobgoblin, I feel compelled to laugh them off just as much. A more interesting question is whether or not introducing p…

> matrix multiplication being racist

This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Could you point me to a source? Thanks!

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