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How A.I. chatbots become political

nytimes.com

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Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#51

Post by shuntress »

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?

I'm a little confused by this and want to better understand what point you intend to make.

What do you mean by "a little girl from harlem" and "a medieval european monarch"?

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#52

Post by Terr_ »

epgui wrote: post #49
Terr_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to LLMs being fed vast swathes of commentary, it's not so much the limits of the Overton window as the distribution.

> When it comes to LLMs being fed best to swab the son of commentary I understand all of these words individually, but I do not understand them in that sequence.

Sorry, that's entirely my fault, I tried dictating it to my phone but in typical fashion all technology is getting worse every day and I didn't proofread the disappointing results.

Strangely apopos in a thread about computers generating undesirable text.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#53

Post by mhuffman »

epgui wrote: post #45
mhuffman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

Your interpretation was immediately wrong, because the statement doesn't say anything about the prevalence of right-leaning people or left-leaning people. Google the phrase "reality has a left leaning bias" and you will find a variety of explanations as to what it means.

If I need multiple sources to explain it to me, then it is not communicating the information effectively is it? Also, I did Google it and got Reddit telling me that anyone that does not have a left leaning bias is just ignorant of science. Is that what you mean?

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#54

Post by gotoeleven »

vineyardmike wrote: post #40
gotoeleven wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That one AI calls it taiwan and another calls it china's extra cool eastern china island doesn't seem very interesting to me. There have always been and always will be land disputes. What is more interesting is, suppose you trained an AI with the objective of minimizing "harm" (in the sense of hurting people's feelings that everyone uses now) rather than minimizing error with the truth?

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#55

Post by konfusinomicon »

roenxi wrote: post #32
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.…

such a chatbot would be very interesting to experiment with, but one bots screw up is another bots success. so who is the e-arbiter of truth for GovernBot9000? hopefully it is not GlobalSuperCorp10k. or maybe said super corp would be OK. interesting times we live in

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#56

Post by ufo »

In there any actual meaning behind the Political Compass they're referencing? I only see it in those memes that left me with the lasting impression that the whole thing is bullshit.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#57

Post by vineyardmike »

gotoeleven wrote: post #54
vineyardmike wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That one AI calls it taiwan and another calls it china's extra cool eastern china island doesn't seem very interesting to me. There have always been and always will be land disputes. What is more interesting is, suppose you trained an AI with the objective of minimizing "harm" (in the sense of hurting people's feelings that everyone uses now) rather than minimizing error with the truth?

Is it harmful to tell the user that Taiwan is the independent nation of Taiwan? It’s “not true” (depending on who you ask) and could “hurt the feelings” of many people. I bet if you went to mainland china and went to Taipei and talked about this, you could offend people with your version of “minimizing error”. There is no way to please both parties at once, one side will get hurt, and there is no “truth”.

That “little girl from Harlem” will never be a mid-evil princess, but neither will literally anyone alive today, because princesses and castles are a thing of the past. Seems like an example meant to straw man a cultural-war viewpoint. That little girl may factually become a doctor. Should the AI show pictures of (grown up versions of) little black girls from Harlem when asked to generate a picture of a doctor?

The culture war outrage over contrived examples in the name of “maximal truth” always misses that the attempts to showcase minorities and counter bias is adding truth to the output. Just because a bias is being artificially suppressed doesn’t mean that the bias was truthful. Sometimes it makes mistakes, but that would still be true if no “corrective” action was applied.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#58

Post by roenxi »

konfusinomicon wrote: post #55
roenxi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

such a chatbot would be very interesting to experiment with, but one bots screw up is another bots success. so who is the e-arbiter of truth for GovernBot9000? hopefully it is not GlobalSuperCorp10k. or maybe said super corp would be OK. interesting times we live in

(1) In what sense is that a step back from current state?

(2) Why would it be bad?

There is something of a hysteria at the moment where people are piling on to Boeing because the management has been reverting to the mean. We're looking at a world where that doesn't need to happen because once management reaches a peak we can just stop fiddling with the algorithm. Culture won't change because the management culture can be encoded in a chatbot. Management is mostly talk, this is one of the easiest targets for the tech. That doesn't sound like politics ... until you look at what the current political firestorms are, it hits a lot of them.

It is hard to cast opinionated chatbots as a step back. The scary political implication is we're also looking at a point where maybe 1 man can control an army and that would be terrifying because the control on armies going rogue in a democracy is all the soldiers are voters. But consistent opinions are generally a good thing - we use the word principled for that sort of thing.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#59

Post by pseudo0 »

shuntress wrote: post #51
gotoeleven wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? I'm a little confused by this and want to better understand what point you intend to make. What do you mean by "a little girl from harlem" and "a medieval european monarch"?

I'd assume they were referring to Google's image generator Gemini, which was generating historically inaccurate images of "diverse" European monarchs, founding fathers, and WW2 Nazis. Eg. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/23/google-gemini-ai...

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#60

Post by janalsncm »

roenxi wrote: post #32
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.…

Forgive me for my brief quotes, I’m typing what you wrote because I can’t copy and paste. But I promise I read the whole thing even if it seems I am quoting out of context.

> Needs an argument.

Fair enough. The essence of my argument is, filter bubbles are bad for democracy because they people’s understanding of consensus and prevent them from encountering any opinions contrary to their own. A personalized chatbot to the extent that it is an extension of filter bubbles, is bad for the same reason.

> It’d be awesome to have a biased chatbot

For the scenario you outlined, sure. If it’s circumscribed and labeled as such, it would be an interesting exercise at least. For the general case, it’s probably not a product people will want.

> The great classical liberals of yesteryear

The issue I see with this is that by gradually Balkanizing our shared body of understanding, it will prevent the exact type of debate you (and I) think was so great from that time.

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