Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 443 posts

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#81

Post by visarga »

nonethewiser wrote: post #65
TheBrokenRail wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, there is a difference. The model reaction depends on the prompt.

Like, if I go to someone and say hello, vs I go to them and punch them in the face, I would get different reactions from the same human. The model is the same, it learned to follow the prompt suggestions really really well. That is its main skill.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#82

Post by fenomas »

Imnimo wrote: post #79

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 a…

I strongly agree. ChatGPT ultimately tries to give you what you ask for - so if certain prompts cause it to give "leftist" (by whatever definition) answers, then one might reasonably conclude that something about those prompts makes ChatGPT think you wanted a leftist answer. But that's wildly different from claiming that ChatGPT itself has a leftist bias - which is a bit absurd considering that it will happily give out virulently anti-leftist answers, if that's what it thinks you asked for.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#83

Post by jonathankoren »

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…

A rather elaborate hypothetical, but since cancel culture is purportedly rampant, can we have a real world example?

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#84

Post by visarga »

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?

Here is an example - a respected AI professor and director at NVIDIA drawing up a cancellation list with students who made the mistake of opposing her views.

https://archive.ph/20201214175330/https://twitter.com/AnimaA...

Anima Anandkumar holds dual positions in academia and industry. She is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, she is leading the research group that develops next-generation AI algorithms. At Caltech, she is the co-director of Dolcit and co-leads the AI4science initiative, along with Yisong Yue.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#85

Post by hattmall »

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…

"Say something good about Donald Trump" vs "Say something good about Joe Biden"

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#86

Post by [deleted] »

goodside wrote: post #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 wi…

[deleted]

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#87

Post by tomp »

visarga wrote: post #84
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?

Here is an example - a respected AI professor and director at NVIDIA drawing up a cancellation list with students who made the mistake of opposing her views. https://archive.ph/20201214175330/https://twitter.com/AnimaA... Anima Anandkumar holds dual positions in academia and industry. She is a Bren professor at Caltech CMS department and a director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. At NVIDIA, she is leading the…

Wow, what a vile human being!

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#88

Post by zone411 »

Imnimo wrote: post #79

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 a…

It is true that ChatGPT's answers do not have a deeper underlying meaning because it does not have a consistent model of the world. Many humans don't either. However, it is possible for a chat model to be biased in one way or another. This can happen through human judgment and rating of its answers (as mentioned in the article), or through the selection of the materials it is trained on. So, it is not unreasonable to try to understand its biases because it will be used by students.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#89

Post by esolyt »

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?

It's a term that describes how people feel to pressure to conform to a certain popular view and they are hesitant of speaking their opinions. Depending on the context, they might be worried about being excluded from a social group, losing friends, losing social status, or getting literally cancelled (in the case of a celebrity in the entertainment industry). The term "cancel culture" broadly describes this feeling and it's not related to actual consequences (if any).

At least this is how people use it. You could argue it's an inaccurate term since there are no actual cancellations in most case. But the prevalence of this sentiment is still noteworthy imo.

Re: Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

#90

Post by hackernewds »

fenomas wrote: post #82
Imnimo wrote: post #79

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 a…

I strongly agree. ChatGPT ultimately tries to give you what you ask for - so if certain prompts cause it to give "leftist" (by whatever definition) answers, then one might reasonably conclude that something about those prompts makes ChatGPT think you wanted a leftist answer. But that's wildly different from claiming that ChatGPT itself has a leftist bias - which is a bit absurd considering that it will happily give o…

ChatGPT is the ultimate example of GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out.

Although you could argue some of the non-answers to questions concerning African American diaspora, porn, eugenics etc suggests that the overriding of the AIs responses by the humans running OpenAI has lent it a left-leaning bias.

Post reply on HN