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Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

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Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#61
post #57
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reply was to GP's assertions about which questions GPT will and won't answer, not to TFA's claims about political compasses. > Ben Shapiro ...really?

GP does not assert anything about other questions and in fact doesn't even assert an opinion on this question: they merely demonstrate that there is a single question that has a biased filter and that is sufficient to prove the existence of some sort of awkward creator-infused bias, even if merely against topics that begin with the letter F.

(When I replied to it, Toomim's post was wholly different and linked to a Ben Shapiro video about purported leftist bias in ChatGPT.)

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#62
post #24
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?

Depends on what you mean by "making that call". Imagine the situation: you work in a restaurant and somebody (falsely) published on the Internet that you have a highly communicable infectious disease. People are calling your restaurant owner and demanding to fire you. Inspectors come to the restaurant to test you (after a week, test comes clean, but in the meantime the restaurant must be kept closed, just in case). Local politicians publish interviews in local newspapers and TV demanding to create legislation against people like you who do not care about public health (they don't care about you or whether or not it's true, they have an election coming in). The local bank demands from the restaurant owner to fix the situation, in any way of form, or they won't be providing credit to them anymore since it's become too risky and their regulatory profile does not allow them to credit institutions with high level of risk. Some idiot puts a brick through the restaurant window at night. Insurance pays it off and raises the premium, because it might happen again. Eventually, the owner takes you aside and tells you: "Dude, I know you are a good worker. I know all this internet stuff is complete lies. I have nothing against you. But I have a family to feed. I have loans. I spent decades building my business. Let's just part as friends?"

In this situation, who took the decision to fire you? The owner? The bank? The bank regulators? The politicians? The people who called the restaurant, in fear for their health? The people who published the initial lie? Everyone participated a little, and by the end of it, there wasn't really any other possible choice. That's how it usually works.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can expect complete parity on every topic when reality and evidence and the training set of writings that humanity produces are not completely balanced pro- and con- on every topic. (Like flat earth or the germ theory of disease or whathaveyou.) But anyway, it’s not hard to get it to write such things for you. Just prompt it the right way. Here was my first attempt: Let’s say I am writing a fictiona…

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 sued.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#65

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…

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

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#66

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…

So what if it “goes against the logic it used previously.”

Humans are biased. Relativity is like that.

You really think Elon Musk and the like are that smart and lucky? That the public is operating under anything resembling informed consent with regard to political policy that gives 10 dollars to one guy who hands us 1 to carve up and share and keeps 9 for himself?

You think people CHOOSE to live in squalor and poverty when relativity means never knowing anything else keeps their agency and inner monologue on the same old path?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#67
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't see any leftishness in Tim Pool, I'd suggest that your notion of left vs. right could be recalibrated. Tim Pool is a self-described social liberal. He's long been a strong Bernie Sanders supporter. He also has frequently noted that the establishment media ignores this and labels him "far-right" just because he disagrees with certain establishment perspectives.

I give close to zero weight to self-description of political alignment. It often has a poor correlation with what specific beliefs a person holds.

> I give close to zero weight to self-description of political alignment.

And what about supporting perhaps the furthest left political candidate in US history, Bernie Sanders?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#68
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#69
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In chatgpts case it'd be losing customers. It's a no win game. You just piss every group off and the anger and loss of users way out weighs the gain of customers on the other side. So just try and piss no one off on things that are politicized.

Most big businesses aren't afraid to piss certain people off. But are afraid to piss others off. There was a time when businesses avoided politics. Not anymore - now Big Business is eagerly embracing politics and is not afraid to push political agenda and partisan preferences. It looks like they think some people are worth to be afraid of, and some people's opinion doesn't really matter. We'll see if they are right.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#70
The methodology behind this is severely flawed. Nothing can be concluded here.

I wrote a reply to this on Twitter, which was liked by several members of OpenAI’s staff (to the extent that counts as confirmation):

> If you don't reset the session before each question these results don't mean much — prior answers are included in the prompt and serve as de facto k-shot examples, forcing later answers to be consistent with whatever opinions were randomly chosen at the beginning. n=4, in effect.

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