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How A.I. chatbots become political

nytimes.com

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Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#61

Post by jimbokun »

majormajor wrote: post #29
algorias wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The general "left leaning" mood is also to provide services that help single-family households to mitigate issues for children anyway, so I think it's much more of a nuanced "lesser of two evils" position to support things like divorce being available. That's a good way to put it. In contrast, the right leaning mood would be to strengthen social cohesion, increase support that people have from families, neighbors,…

> That's a good way to put it. In contrast, the right leaning mood would be to strengthen social cohesion, increase support that people have from families, neighbors, and so on, and decrease the impersonal, systemic "services" provided by some bureaucracy. In the American right all of those things are often promoted with heavy doses of religion; IMO this is the core crisis of American politics on the right: how to pr…

Religion is another category that seems to have all kinds of social benefits the left is uncomfortable talking about.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#63

Post by 082349872349872 »

jonathankoren wrote: post #35
082349872349872 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. Compare map services.

Ahh maps, where the borders and even the names of disputed regions are different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes. Then of course, there's the countries wher accurately represented geographic features are verboten.

> different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes

An obvious solution to legal whims of various regimes (of any kind) would be to have One World Government that could resolve these international disputes, but this sol'n has its own drawbacks ;)

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#64

Post by metricsdatanumz »

janalsncm wrote: post #60
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.…

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…

80%+ live where they grew up. So few moved about as democracy had its best days.

Only 14% have earned more than a bachelors, while polls suggest the public believe it’s closer to 50%.

We’re incredibly naive and ignorant of ourselves, including how to concretely define democracy.

That “type of debate” existed before you and isn’t going anywhere.

The problem is you’re thinking too specifically when reality is a handful of general patterns. Democracy doesn’t hinge on your fears because you’re a specific person not a body of people. Democracy was born in and triumphed over worse. You’re concerned about your specific understanding of how the world works embedded in your memory, deference to which is not the aggregate’s obligation.

Consider how religion has declined despite protests of the prior generation reality would end, yet it hasn’t. Consider Seduction of the Innocent and its authors fears about comic books fracturing society and it didn’t. Consider parental outrage at DND and rock music, which also did not end the world.

Just another generation bleating like a goat atop a car in a flood at the awareness of its own impermanence and importance, that it has less time ahead than behind. Just vanity leading people to believe their childhood memes are essential.

It’s been interesting watching Silent Gen, Boomers, and now GenX post on social media existential dread as each of those groups majority push into 50 years old and beyond.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#65

Post by corimaith »

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?

At a certain point we do need to go back into the basics of why we are having discussion in the first place.

Taiwan de jure might be ambiguous, but de facto it more or less is a country. If you were working out a trade deal, booking a holiday, immigrating, etc, if you actually needed to know then treating Taiwan as part of China would run into so many inconsistencies it would be impossible to function.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#66

Post by red002 »

algorias wrote: post #28
PoignardAzur wrote: post #8

I don't like the title, but the second opening paragraph starts strong: > A.I.’s political problems were starkly illustrated by the disastrous rollout of Google’s Gemini Advanced chatbot last month. A system designed to ensure diversity made a mockery of user requests, including putting people of color in Nazi uniforms when asked for historical images of German soldiers and depicting female quarterbacks as having won…

That paragraph twists the harm around though. NYT goes out of its way to highlight Gemini depicting PoC as Nazis, while omitting that it almost entirely refused to depict white people and/or males in any positive context. Gemini was way worse in its treatment of those groups, and above all, it was disastrous in its lack of respect for truth and accuracy. That latter part is where the true harm lies IMO.

[flagged]

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#67

Post by epgui »

mhuffman wrote: post #53
epgui wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If I need multiple sources to explain it to me, then it is not communicating the information effectively is it?

Navigating life expecting to understand everything without first having to learn the things is... unreasonable. The burden is not exclusively on the one sending the message: the one receiving the message shares his part of the burden.

> I did Google it and got Reddit telling me that anyone that does not have a left leaning bias is just ignorant of science

That's directionally better, but it's definitely not what I mean and is not how I would put it. This is why you need to look at multiple sources. Not just for this, but in life in general.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#68

Post by tim333 »

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…

An alternative to filter bubbles is to have an attempt at being neutral like Wikipedia does. It won't please everyone but may be a way to go. I guess neutral in that context means close to the average opinion of an informed human. This seems close to the approach take in practice by ChatGPT, Claude and the like.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#69

Post by Dracophoenix »

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…

> I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth?

This is the essence of the so-called noble lie. Much has been said about it since the Greeks, but in short, the noble lie deprives individuals of meaningful agency to direct their lives. It traps them into believing myths that result in their subjugation today, and some potential irreversible harm in the future regardless of the perceived short-term benefits that come from self-delusion. That is unless humanity as a whole begins living in indestructible underground pods as drug-addled vegetables.

If we ignore this scenario, and assume people will still interact with each other on some level, the results won't be one where people a long lasting voluntary association on the basis of live and let live. After all, when has that ever happened? Instead, the outcome is another battlefront for competing solipsisms. It's not enough to be as equally wrong as everyone else. Consciously or unconsciously, one comes to uphold a contradiction: you must be the "right" kind of wrong to avoid becoming a scapegoat or target.

The critical examination and acceptance of reality are important learned skills. They allows us to dispel such irrationalities. A mere absence of overt conflict between others or between oneself and the laws of nature is not a defense against harm, perceived or real. Truth isn't what breeds conflict, as the truth doesn't change. Conflict is the negative reaction to an observation, thought, or sensation. It's a product of the human mind. And human beings as a collective are fickle animals.

Re: How A.I. chatbots become political

#70

Post by tim333 »

ufo wrote: post #56

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.

It's from a website with a test "The Political Compass website was established by political journalist Wayne Brittenden" around 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
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