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Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

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Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#51

Post by htrp »

thinkingemote wrote: post #25
charcircuit wrote: post #7

Surely there was internal dogfooding for this feature, I do not believed they would add a new system prompt and then released it to the public with little testing and then get surprised that it was doing this like the author suggests happened.

They need a team of people to not use it but try to break it. I'm as suprised.

"We've also conducted novel research on safety risks and developed red-teaming techniques to test for a range of potential harms. "

https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-next-generat...

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#53

Post by claytongulick »

ericzawo wrote: post #52

I cannot believe how many extremely smart and capable people spend a large portion of their day opining about "woke."

If you had a political ideology that you disagreed with imposed on you in nearly every facet of your life - entertainment, work, school - what would your reaction be?

Would you put any effort into voicing your disagreement?

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#54

Post by DaedPsyker »

spamuel wrote: post #12
glimshe wrote: post #9

In a nutshell for those without a X account: the problem here isn't that Google's AI gave "woke" results. The big problem here is that even one of the biggest AI specialists in the world, Google, wasn't able to fully predict or control the output of its AI. If we ever create a truly powerful, superintelligent AI under the assumption that we'll be able to control it, this incident shows that even a minor mistake from…

This seems like a reaching explanation to try to wave away an ideological embarrassment as not being a consequence of the ideology. "No one could have predicted the outcome of the instruction set we put in - which was followed precisely and in predictable fashion."

I don't agree with that framing. It reads more as saying what Google did was worse than it appears, not waving away.

Whatever your own opinion, Google did it out of what they perceived to be good intentions (and very likely business sense given a global audience for their products). Yet their intentions directly lead to unintended consequences. Google is being a baby with a gun in essence. Like he says, what if they decide to ask it to solve climate change and it decides to wipe humans out?

Obviously it's still very theoretical and can't do anything like that, but the point is more that perhaps Google doesn't have the culture necessarily to truly interrogate their actions.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#55

Post by perryizgr8 »

> This event is significant because it is major demonstration of someone giving a LLM a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted.

I think they must have expected exactly the behavior on display. What they might not have considered is the human backlash.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#56

Post by smoothjazz »

claytongulick wrote: post #53
ericzawo wrote: post #52

I cannot believe how many extremely smart and capable people spend a large portion of their day opining about "woke."

If you had a political ideology that you disagreed with imposed on you in nearly every facet of your life - entertainment, work, school - what would your reaction be? Would you put any effort into voicing your disagreement?

Why would anyone disagree with “wokeness”? I think that says a lot. Are the ultra-rich who complain about the “woke mind virus” hurt in any way by diversity? No, they are not.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#57

Post by therealjumbo »

DaedPsyker wrote: post #54
spamuel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a reaching explanation to try to wave away an ideological embarrassment as not being a consequence of the ideology. "No one could have predicted the outcome of the instruction set we put in - which was followed precisely and in predictable fashion."

I don't agree with that framing. It reads more as saying what Google did was worse than it appears, not waving away. Whatever your own opinion, Google did it out of what they perceived to be good intentions (and very likely business sense given a global audience for their products). Yet their intentions directly lead to unintended consequences. Google is being a baby with a gun in essence. Like he says, what if they…

Here's his central point:

>This event is significant because it is major demonstration of someone giving a LLM a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted.

Replace LLM with computer in that sentence, is it still novel? Laughably far from it, unexpected results are one of the defining features of moderately complex software programs going all the way back to the first person to program a computer. Some of the results are unexpected, but a lot are not, because it's literally doing what the prompt injection tells it to. Which isn't all that surprising but sure anyway...

>Obviously it's still very theoretical and can't do anything like that, but the point is more that perhaps Google doesn't have the culture necessarily to truly interrogate their actions.

Oh that's definitely true.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#58

Post by tanseydavid »

smoothjazz wrote: post #56
claytongulick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had a political ideology that you disagreed with imposed on you in nearly every facet of your life - entertainment, work, school - what would your reaction be? Would you put any effort into voicing your disagreement?

Why would anyone disagree with “wokeness”? I think that says a lot. Are the ultra-rich who complain about the “woke mind virus” hurt in any way by diversity? No, they are not.

>> Why would anyone disagree with “wokeness”?

Do you really expect universal understanding and agreement with a word/term that you felt necessary to put into air-quotes?

How about a proper definition to start with? Simply so that one can be clear on what they are agreeing or disagreeing with.

Re: Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"

#60

Post by troyvit »

Havoc wrote: post #45

> got a totally bonkers result they couldn’t anticipate. I fundamentally disagree with this statement and frankly the entire line of reasoning This isn’t some unforeseeable 3rd order side effect coming out of a black box from left field. You’re always injecting an instruction to put in diverse people so now it’s always doing just that. Entirely predictable. This is like adding a system prompt saying always put tamago…

I agree with you that it's entirely predictable. Why was it not predicted by a company that has achieved hegemony over so many aspects of our online lives and therefore must be pretty good at stuff?

Other people offer:

* google drove their head up their own ass

* actually they expected this behavior, but didn't think there would be backlash

* google didn't scope for the normal consumer but rather for their managerial class

I'd say that the first and third items are close to the "result they couldn't anticipate" reason. The second reason sounds google-ish, but they're also trying to win in a market where they're behind, so is their blindness to real humans that deeply institutional?

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