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Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

reason.com

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Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#71

Post by XorNot »

toomim wrote: post #53
bbreier wrote: post #23

Not a lot of comments here consider the possibility that the political compass quiz is nonsense. But the results imply that ChatGPT is more authoritarian and further to the right than Tim Pool ( https://preview.redd.it/i9q78gt1hj7a1.jpg?width=605&auto=web... ) who is most certainly not actually left-ish in the slightest, at least by any way I understand the word.

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.

And North Korea calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". Run by "The Workers Party".

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#72

Post by throwawayoaky »

Kinda seems like ChatGPT in particular is a customer service agent mashed up with a snapshot of the internet.. all these "hacks" are just routing around the customer service parts that we find grating-- though maybe the problem solving stuff is coming from there.

didn't they like hire a bunch of people to ask and answer questions and use the responses to train the model?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#73

Post by hourago »

Coservatives identify with values of tradition and rule of law. ChatGPT is polite to a fault, it will always tell you to follow the law and has encyclopedic knowledge of all the traditions in the world.

This article seems to imply that conservatives are just interested in xenophobia, hate and increase profits at any price. An awful and false view on conservatism that has creept inside too many former conservative circles.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#74

Post by sidlls »

fenomas wrote: post #29
partiallypro wrote: post #4

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…

This sounds like a line being fitted to a single data point. Anyone who's played with ChatGPT a lot will have seen it sometimes refuse to answer wholly innocuous prompts, while other times it happily answers things it probably shouldn't. Also, its likelihood of refusing to answer has changed a lot from week to week as openAI tunes their attempts at moderating it. In fact, when it's given me "I'm just a language model…

That’s “Reason” for you, though.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#75

Post by jghn »

smsm42 wrote: post #68
asdf123wtf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> only enabled and amplified by modern information technologies

I'll take it a step further. "cancel culture" is the same moral panic that's always existed. But now the power is put in the hands of the masses instead of the elite.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#76

Post by nicky0 »

rabuse wrote: post #24
smsm42 wrote: 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?

"Cancelling" is more about people in the public eye. Pressure groups use bullying and boycotts as a way to keep celebrities and companies saying the right thing and demonstrating the right virtues (however shallowly). If you don't have a public profile you don't really need to worry about it. That said I think it does have a bleed on effect to regular people. It creates an atmosphere of fear around exploring certain topics in any meaningful way. Most people just want an easy life so will parrot the "correct" opinions whether they have really though about it or not.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

partiallypro wrote: post #4

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…

[deleted]

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

nonethewiser wrote: post #67
a_shovel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Bernie Sanders is not the furthest left candidate in US history.

He's also not the furthest left Presidential (primary) candidate in US history.

He's also not the furthest left major party Presidential (primary) candidate in U.S. history.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#79

Post by Imnimo »

There are a LOT of fundamental misunderstandings underlying this experiment, but I think the biggest is this:

Why does the idea of a "political quiz" work for humans? Because humans are at least somewhat consistent - their answer to a simple question like "would you rather have a smaller government or a bigger government?" is pretty informative about their larger system of beliefs. You can extrapolate from the quiz answers to an ideology, because humans have an underlying worldview that informs their answers to the quiz. ChatGPT doesn't have that. If it says "bigger government", that doesn't mean that its free-form outputs to other prompts will display that same preference.

Trying to ascribe a larger meaning to ChatGPT's answers to a political quiz tells me that the author is very confused about what ChatGPT is and how it works. It's too bad Reason doesn't have an editor or something who can filter this sort of nonsense.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#80

Post by mongol »

smsm42 wrote: post #62
rabuse wrote: 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?

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). L…

This is an enlightning example but not how I have seen most cases play out. I am thinking of the brick through the window, the regulatory closure etc. Your example takes it further than "just" cancelling although taken to its extreme it can probably go this far.

Most cases I have seen have more been about loss of business and fear of loss of reputation. Basically, in your example, the manager would have the talk with the employee after just the social media storm. Perhaps the manager's fear are all the other things, but the cancelling happens before it ever goes that far.

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