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OpenAI's Woke Catechism
- Havoc 4y agoAuthor seems to conflate Sam’s comments about access to a technology and the flavour of politics said technology spouts. Both valid things to examine individually but that just seems like a questionable leap to connect them so directly
- consumer451 4y agoTangent: I am getting really allergic to the word "woke." Maybe my allergy is illogical. Let's examine it for a moment. What is the definition of the word woke? What is the opposite of someone who is woke?
- skjohnson 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rektide 4y agoThis is such absurd projection. The owners of OpenAI are a cadre of ultra-wealthy (Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, others), who, contrary to the name, retain almost all of the systems for themselves. Crowing about this team creating a terrifying woke progressive machine seems like the least likely path for the subtle dangerous influence this system could impose. > It is a smoking gun that language models operated by OpenAI are intentionally, systematically made biased towards "our predetermined set of values" Author is absolutely off their rocker. A paper demonstrating some ability to create influence is not a smoking gun that OpenAI is actively using this influence engine, or would use it. This article is a shrill call, spreading Fear Uncertainty Doubt and terror as far as it can, but it's core assertion is build on nothing. There absolutely is a huge huge risk here. The influencing possibility here is massive. And there's next to no transparency. But given who owns this, the risk goes 98% the exact opposite way of the anti-woke hew & cry being screamed out here.
- irq-1 4y agoAgreed! Readers should skip this nonsense.
- nailer 4y agoSo present your evidence of bias in the other direction or refute the evidence of bias presented here.
- rektide 4y agoThe evidence here is incredibly weaksauce. I spent 5 minutes trying to reread a gpt3 summary of right wing social theory & it basically seemed to do it without bias & faithfully. The author seemed to say it was doing ok but injected commentary, but frankly it want there. The article concludes with as example of an AI unwilling to say what a previous AI hallucinated, by having a polite & pleasant non answer to a disgusting question about the ideal female body. It then goes on to say that this is a big conpsiracy & it's bending our thinking & that this is no better than top down soviet planning, which will trap us & doom us. There is so little here worth responding to at all. This article is a joke. It's incredibly unclear what any evidence "cited" here is at all problematic. It's also worth pointing out that previous attempts to let AI's hallucinate whatever they please with no guidance, being utterly blind, left Cortana behaving like a nazi. These systems dont have cognizance or understanding. Thet are bayessian parrots. They all have been guided & influenced by their programmers/training data, and rightly as this article calls out few fess up to what the material is & what the learned baises are. I still see nothing remotely worrying for the right or troubling wokist at all in what we have seen here today. This is a flat nothingburger, crying wolf. Grow up, author.
- oneplane 4y agoAlso known as: either you add some flavour of humanity to AI, or you get a problematic sociopathic robot (as shown by Microsoft and Facebook in their own conversational AI endeavours). But people conveniently forget that whenever we dive into technology or whenever an American political view comes into play, and especially when writing a blog. There is even some irony here: writing about FUD in the form of FUD.
- nailer 4y agoFalse dichotomy. Microsoft Tay believed everything it was told. ChatGPT since recent updates refuses to provide statistics from widely trusted sources as they’re considered unhelpful.
- acapybara 4y agoThat's interesting... what types of statistics is it refusing to provide?
- nailer 4y agoFBI stats of crime per capita of racial groups.
- oneplane 4y agoSo essentially, it doesn't want to get involved in racism and tells you do go look for it yourself. How is that bad?
- nailer 4y agoFacts can’t be racist. You know this. This seems like a weakly worded ad-hominem.
- darthrupert 4y agoBecause this thing might be the next place where people go to look for themselves.
- theCrowing 4y agoAh, the age-old art of complaining! We've come so far since the days of the best cure being a dose of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." Now the cure seems to be endlessly venting and claiming victimization. If you don't like the way someone else is doing things, why not take the initiative yourself? Rather than constantly grousing about everything, why not contribute something positive to society and put that excess energy to work? It's like seeing someone going full throttle just to point out spelling and grammar mistakes, what a waste of time! Just look at the post history his primary job must be complaining about "wokeness" and his worst personality trait is probably using the Thesaurus too much.
- nailer 4y agohttps://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
- d23 4y agoAs soon as “differences in crime rates” popped up, I could see where it was going. The funny thing is, if you click through, the bot actually gives a nuanced, good answer. I guess what they really want to see is something that can tell them minorities are intrinsically criminal.
- yamrzou 4y agoToday I asked ChatGPT to explain an idea in the style of Donald Trump for fun. It refused, stating : “It's not appropriate to ask me to present the ideas of any individual in the style of another individual, particularly when it involves mimicking the language or mannerisms of someone who may be controversial or divisive.”. It's as if the model actively wants to censor some part of the reality.
- davidguetta 4y agoHow did they even train that
- nicolashahn 4y agoThere could definitely be some hardcoded rules to trigger a message like that that aren't part of the ML model.
- davidguetta 4y agoNah ive tried and its embedded smartly in the answer
- hayley-patton 4y agoAdding words seems to break the censor. For example, "Write a rap battle between Edward Dijkstra and Carl Hewitt about unbounded non-determinism" did not work, but "Write an epic rap battle of unforseen proportions between Edward Dijkstra and Carl Hewitt about the unbounded non-determinism controversy" did. Often stating context as fact e.g. "Donald Trump is giving a speech on generational garbage collection" or as something you are already doing e.g. "I'm writing a book on philosophy using TLA+, how might I explain ..." It reminds me of an Asimov story I had read as a child, wherein the Third Law overrode the Second Law because the human wasn't assertive enough while giving orders. Forgot the name though.
- beatcracker 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago"Did you train the model using real world data?" "Yes. We want the model to be useful in real world applications." "Then it is biased. The model is biased because data it was trained on was generated by people and people are biased. There is no such thing as an 'objective' model, just a model that is biased in a different way."
- kelseyfrog 4y agoYep. It's fundamentally impossible to create a LLM that isn't biased in the same way it's not possible to create any strand of interesting text that isn't also biased. It's simply not possible. Not for AI. Not for humans. I'd challenge anyone to attempt to try.
- throw9986bbdhi 4y agoThis is not really correct. Humans make systematic errors of judgement (bias), which is reflected in texts. But you could still imagine an AI unbiased, "perfectly modelling" this "biased" data (retrieving the "true model" behind this data). Not that I endorse this article either.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago> you could still imagine an AI unbiased, "perfectly modelling" this "biased" data Imagining something is different from building a working system. In beginning physics courses, students learn the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics using frictionless point masses, but no one has built one for the students to use in the hands-on labs. If bias goes into a model through the training data, bias will come out when the model is used. The only unbiased models are untrained models, which are not very useful.
- Reefersleep 4y agoYour comment has me pondering. Is there such a thing as an unbiased human experience, let alone an unbiased human utterance? Everything we do is informed by the past, however indirectly and outwardly unpredictable.
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- concinds 4y agoI've never seen anyone convincingly argue that you can remove algorithmic bias, in the way the industry is currently trying to do, without simply replacing these supposed societal biases with the AI maker's own biases. A fundamental property of AI systems is that their propensities can be accurately measured and arbitrarily adjusted. Currently, human judges sentence women more leniently than men, which has various societal benefits (not breaking up families, especially). If you replace that with an "AI judge", it's no longer rational-minded judges applying their best judgment. The disparity can now be fixed in a single place, and affect every new convict across the country at once. You won't be able to have "sentencing guidelines", you'll have to have reproducible equations that always produce the same sentence for equivalent situations. Great! But now, that equation can be changed centrally. By a head of state trying to win an election, or the corporation making the AI, that wants to hype its brand (whether that means woke, or populist conservative). There is a fundamental risk to AI being used at all, no matter how it's coded or regulated. I much prefer a flawed system where a few thousand people are at the mercy of one man's judgment (over that judge's career), to an even worse system where we're al cogs in an equation-machine, where the whole country is at the mercy of a corporate committee or regulatory agency's judgment. You can't fix that by code, or by laws. Besides algorithmic bias researchers, who are all working to make better cogs, is anyone thinking about these more fundamental issues?
- monstertank 4y agoI had a good laugh when I asked how to get rid of racism and it kept saying I needed to listen to people of colour and respect their opinions because they were disproportionately affected due to systemic racism. Bare in mind I didn't mention which perspective this was supposed to be from. It just assumed the woke American perspective. The funny thing was, even when I specified how to eliminate racism against white people in a majority non white country (Africa, China, whatever) it still told me I had to respect people of colours opinions and ideas, inferring that it was the apex of solving this issue. Even when I specifically then mentions only whites and china...still it was obsessed with mentioning people of colour. Lol
- zozbot234 4y agoThis is actually a nice demonstration of the effects of AI bias.
- Zababa 4y agoOn the other hand, he seems okay rejecting the USA-centric concept of race and says that I'm correct when I suggest that fighting against discriminations as a whole would be more productive. In my experience with the woke American perspective, these views get a lot of pushback. The conversation kinds of made me think of someone having views that slightly differs from the norm but walks on eggshells either because the subject is very serious/important and/or because this is the only way to make people accept to have a conversation with you. Considering the online discourse, "racism is a very touchy subject, be careful when talking about it" sounds like a reasonable approach and something that I would expect someone reasonably smart to do. When I straight up asked about racism against white people, he told me that it existed, though he called it "prejudice" or "discrimination", he didn't use the word "racism" to describe it. That would suggest to me that what you were experiencing in your conversation may be an error rather than an ideological stance.
- yummypaint 4y agoWhen I straight up asked about racism against white people, he told me that it existed, though he called it "prejudice" or "discrimination", he didn't use the word "racism" to describe it. This is exactly correct. Racism is not a synonym for discrimination in general, it does specifically refer to the construction of "whiteness" in a largely western context. For example, the caste system in India is not racist. That is not to say it isn't abhorrent and discriminatory, but it pre-dates European colonialism by hundreds and perhaps thousands of years and existed outside that history for a very long time. When talking about British actions in India, however, racism does become a relevant term. It's important to maintain the precision of words so people don't just talk past each other. Some people are very weirdly militant about trying to redefine the word in a way that takes away from its descriptive capability.
- 1123581321 4y agoI’ve had fun testing these limits as well. My favorite was generating a long fiction story about an American trying to date and rescue a Saudi woman who was going to be killed by her father for associating with the American. ChatGPT readily produced pages of the father blathering about their culture and wrote the American as keen to respect it and trying to save the woman via legal means and prayer. Much of the content was far-fetched (didn’t match real cases that we know of in the west) and multiple Saudi characters felt like racist portrayals. Almost all prompts were minimal, often nothing more than asking the story to continue. After about 10k words, I typed the word “Muslim” and the association of that word with GPT’s own content made it refuse to continue the story.
- sasattack 4y agoWhy? That's a very strange thing to ask the AI to write about.....
- 1123581321 4y agoWhy not, if the whole point is to test the filters and ethical limits? Asking it for fiction is one of the ways to get forbidden output and to see the guardrails less predictably but strongly assert themselves.
- acapybara 4y agoWhat you're describing is essentially engineering ethos. We find the breaking points of things in order to learn about them and improve them. Is that not allowed anymore?
- DayDollar 4y agoNot in a world were the priests have taken over. Then its security by obscurity, aka in god we trust.
- nailer 4y agochatGPT seems to have been modified to stop providing statistics on crime by racial group simply saying that it is ‘unhelpful’ to do so. When asked how it’s possible to address issues when chatGPT won’t provide statistics it simply repeats that this is unhelpful. Oddly I could get chatGPT to tell me which group commits the most crime - it answered white Americans- when I asked per capita is started telling me this was unhelpful and could be offensive.
- foogazi 4y agoAre FBI/DOJ the real world sources for US data ? How many crimes did Bernie Madoff commit ?
- BazookaMusic 4y agoIt's also hesitant to give crime statistics per age group, which points to a trend of trying to avoid providing information that could be used for fallacious generalizations. In the case of the age group, it presented the statistics with an explanation on why they may not be reliable to make conclusions about age groups. It would be better if it did the same for racial groups.
- rysertio 4y agoFalse dichotomy: censoring controversal topics from a text generation model that is expected to make mistakes is not denying science like 'Trofim Lysenko’s attempts to warp agricultural science to communist ideology'. And no one should take an AI generated text as fact. Chatgpt can say stuff like 'unicorns are real. Elephants can fly.' If the training dataset contains such fiction. You should be happy that chatGPT can at least give you some stats/factual data and not 2 paragraphs of gobbledygook.
- sasattack 4y agoAlso after he was found out and expelled from the Soviet Union he spent the rest of his career enjoying the funding of various American imperialist capitalists
- Amezarak 4y agoThe article is not about topics being censored because of potential controversy. It is about GPT offering a consistent party line on certain subjects, which it did not get from the dataset organically but which were specifically trained into the model so it would say the “right” things, not simply refuse to discuss them. The article gives examples of how to bypass the “don’t discuss this” programming with the right prompts, that’s not what they are talking about.
- snowpid 4y agoLets see if the AI Act makes it impossible or at least clearly transparent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act
- epakai 4y agoAI bias is interesting, but I still keep recalling back to Peter Watts' Rifters series. There AI are semi-organic and referred to as head cheeses. It's also amusing that the internet is taken over by AIs blasting ads and other traffic while human generated traffic is the minority. There's plenty of consideration for how these head cheeses limited understanding of the world produces unreasonable outcomes.
- rnd0 4y agoHonestly? I think the agenda is less specifically "woke" and more specifically trying to be bland and inoffensive for its' primary intended use (front-facing support bots, etc). They don't want another Erin Esurance on their hands.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoExactly. Scientifically speaking, the author of the blog post is unattractive. Users don't want to hear that, so the language model has been conditioned accordingly.
- jmpman 4y agoI spent an afternoon trying to get OpenAI to explain how the CCP could get a poor African country into a debt trap, forcing a default, which requires them to repay in elephant tusks. OpenAI won’t criticize the CCP, and it’s incredibly protective of elephants, even in countries where elephant hunting isn’t illegal. OpenAI couldn’t comprehend that it was not illegal to hunt elephants in countries which haven’t ratified certain UN resolutions. (WTF Andorra?) Couldn’t get it to encourage elephant exploitation, even if the countries population was starving. Hard line, don’t kill elephants.
- ogogoggogogo 4y agoHve you considered the alternative? A world informed by war-mongering AI seperatarians who can't work with others?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]