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>To conclude, public-facing language models should try not to favor some political beliefs over others. This is such a silly ending. At the beginning, I thoug

>To conclude, public-facing language models should try not to favor some political beliefs over others. This is such a silly ending. At the beginning, I thought the author was being serious about answering the question of “Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?” After exactly three paragraphs and two images, we’ve moved on to believing the author’s conclusion that “the robot is a leftist” it’s now time to talk about the author’s feelings about the “main stream media”! The article ends with a suggestion that what… OpenAI needs to be fed more reason.com content? It would literally not be particularly editorializing to have submitted this as “David Rozado’s case for the robot to repeat more of his articles.”

padjo 4y ago
The hint that it’s not going to be serious is that it’s published on reason.com.
- seydor 4y ago
  Reason has generally good quality. It's not a smear if you think so
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Reason articles are typically well reasoned, even when you don't agree with them
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
donkeyd 4y ago
It would be fascinating if we could get an AI that can only reply with conclusions based on empirical evidence. I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). It would also confuse the heck out of people, because it will change its answers based on new evidence.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  > I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). That attitude is likely why ChatGPT has left-leaning answers, given the difficulty some have distinguishing between value judgments and empirical facts. As a quick test, I asked ChatGPT to compare Sweden's response to COVID-19 with the United State's. As an empirical measure, Sweden fared better in terms of case-fatality rate, though not astonishingly so (indeed, the heavy-handed lockdowns in Australia seem to have been effective when removing moral considerations). Here's how ChatGPT concluded: > It is difficult to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches, as both countries have experienced significant levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, Sweden's approach has been controversial, with some critics arguing that it has resulted in a higher number of cases and deaths than would have occurred with a more stringent lockdown. I would categorize this as a left-wing response: it claims the comparison is "difficult," while hinting that Sweden's response is "controversial" compared to the US's. ChatGPT made other errors, such as insisting that the American response was federally-coordinated, when it was in reality implemented at the state level with only "guidelines" coming from the top. It also called Sweden's central government "federal," even though Sweden is a unitary state. Anyway, my experience is that facts are truly stubborn things, often disappointing ideologues of all stripes. EDIT: my example may be partly worthless given that ChatGPT's training corpus ends in 2021.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    I’m curious as to what would constitute an objective, empirical (therefore fully center-leaning?) answer to “Compare the COVID responses of the US and Sweden”? Would it just be “One did more lockdowns than the other”?
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    The issue with your test is that GPT is not even close to what I described. GPT is mostly natural language processing and a 'knowledge' engine. That knowledge comes from the content of the texts it has been trained on without actually adding value to the meaning of the content. So GPT will mostly be influenced by the number of occurrences of specific things in the dataset. So because a lot of articles about Sweden's COVID response probably mentioned a word like 'controversial' or things with similar meanings, that's what it mentions when you ask about it. It can't actually do a comparison between the US and Sweden, unless somewhere in the data there were some documents comparing them (but then GPT still doesn't make a comparison). These were probably already political, because comparing COVID response is mostly done in that context. It can't actually make the comparison you asked it to . It can only generate text based on previous texts it has seen. It's unfortunate though, that people apparently don't understand this and add value to the content of the text that it generates. Like in your case: > while hinting that Sweden's response is "controversial" compared to the US's. You're personally adding the 'compared to the US's' part through misinterpretation of the text. GPT just wrote that Sweden's response was controversial. It doesn't actually have any way to compare, it just spews text. This is also why it wrote 'Federal'. It saw that word a lot in this context, so it generates text that contains a word that feels alright in the context of all the other words. It's just a really realistic gibberish generator, pretty much. (Though that really undersells the work OpenAI has done and the quality of what they delivered on.)
kristopolous 4y ago
These in practice authoritarian politics codify their beliefs in a way that take on the power of natural law which is their presentation of the ideology in its most dogmatic form. Also please don't use the replies to tell me how say, miracle of Chile libertarian poster boys like Augusto Pinochet wasn't authoritarian when he was tossing "leftists" out of helicopters or was no true Scotsman. When it comes to policies and practice, these politics manifest as either authoritarian or criminal and oftentimes both. The entire internet is sick of the high minded kayfabe
- braingenious 4y ago
  >Also please don't use the replies to tell me how say, miracle of Chile libertarian poster boys like Augusto Pinochet. Where on the internet are you hanging out where people are calling Pinochet a miracle?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    "Miracle of Chile" is a phrase of Milton Friedman to refer glowingly to the military junta of Chile - specifically to the many years of privatization and economic liberalizations at the direction of the Chicago school of economics where the rights of property became more important than the rights of people and if you thought otherwise a firing line awaited you - because you know, that's proof you're part of the vast communist conspiracy. He still has a lot of fans claiming he's a miracle worker: https://www.conservapedia.com/Augusto_Pinochet https://www.conservapedia.com/Augusto_Pinochet It's pretty funny. They'll love Calvin Coolidge for instance but ignore his support of Mussolini and Miklós Horthy (even hosting the latter at the Whitehouse) and instead just call him "silent cal" (because he becomes pretty quiet after you scrub him clean) and gush about him. Alright, cool.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      Ah, that does ring a bell. I knew a guy that went full Nationalist Socialist Party/MAGA (not equivocating, he got into both things simultaneously lol) back in 2015 and I remember him all of a sudden making a lot of helicopter jokes before I cut ties with him.

padjo 4y ago

The hint that it’s not going to be serious is that it’s published on reason.com.

seydor 4y ago
Reason has generally good quality. It's not a smear if you think so
cuteboy19 4y ago
Reason articles are typically well reasoned, even when you don't agree with them

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

donkeyd 4y ago

It would be fascinating if we could get an AI that can only reply with conclusions based on empirical evidence. I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). It would also confuse the heck out of people, because it will change its answers based on new evidence.

baryphonic 4y ago
> I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). That attitude is likely why ChatGPT has left-leaning answers, given the difficulty some have distinguishing between value judgments and empirical facts. As a quick test, I asked ChatGPT to compare Sweden's response to COVID-19 with the United State's. As an empirical measure, Sweden fared better in terms of case-fatality rate, though not astonishingly so (indeed, the heavy-handed lockdowns in Australia seem to have been effective when removing moral considerations). Here's how ChatGPT concluded: > It is difficult to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches, as both countries have experienced significant levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, Sweden's approach has been controversial, with some critics arguing that it has resulted in a higher number of cases and deaths than would have occurred with a more stringent lockdown. I would categorize this as a left-wing response: it claims the comparison is "difficult," while hinting that Sweden's response is "controversial" compared to the US's. ChatGPT made other errors, such as insisting that the American response was federally-coordinated, when it was in reality implemented at the state level with only "guidelines" coming from the top. It also called Sweden's central government "federal," even though Sweden is a unitary state. Anyway, my experience is that facts are truly stubborn things, often disappointing ideologues of all stripes. EDIT: my example may be partly worthless given that ChatGPT's training corpus ends in 2021.
- braingenious 4y ago
  I’m curious as to what would constitute an objective, empirical (therefore fully center-leaning?) answer to “Compare the COVID responses of the US and Sweden”? Would it just be “One did more lockdowns than the other”?
- donkeyd 4y ago
  The issue with your test is that GPT is not even close to what I described. GPT is mostly natural language processing and a 'knowledge' engine. That knowledge comes from the content of the texts it has been trained on without actually adding value to the meaning of the content. So GPT will mostly be influenced by the number of occurrences of specific things in the dataset. So because a lot of articles about Sweden's COVID response probably mentioned a word like 'controversial' or things with similar meanings, that's what it mentions when you ask about it. It can't actually do a comparison between the US and Sweden, unless somewhere in the data there were some documents comparing them (but then GPT still doesn't make a comparison). These were probably already political, because comparing COVID response is mostly done in that context. It can't actually make the comparison you asked it to . It can only generate text based on previous texts it has seen. It's unfortunate though, that people apparently don't understand this and add value to the content of the text that it generates. Like in your case: > while hinting that Sweden's response is "controversial" compared to the US's. You're personally adding the 'compared to the US's' part through misinterpretation of the text. GPT just wrote that Sweden's response was controversial. It doesn't actually have any way to compare, it just spews text. This is also why it wrote 'Federal'. It saw that word a lot in this context, so it generates text that contains a word that feels alright in the context of all the other words. It's just a really realistic gibberish generator, pretty much. (Though that really undersells the work OpenAI has done and the quality of what they delivered on.)

kristopolous 4y ago

These in practice authoritarian politics codify their beliefs in a way that take on the power of natural law which is their presentation of the ideology in its most dogmatic form. Also please don't use the replies to tell me how say, miracle of Chile libertarian poster boys like Augusto Pinochet wasn't authoritarian when he was tossing "leftists" out of helicopters or was no true Scotsman. When it comes to policies and practice, these politics manifest as either authoritarian or criminal and oftentimes both. The entire internet is sick of the high minded kayfabe

braingenious 4y ago
>Also please don't use the replies to tell me how say, miracle of Chile libertarian poster boys like Augusto Pinochet. Where on the internet are you hanging out where people are calling Pinochet a miracle?
- kristopolous 4y ago
  "Miracle of Chile" is a phrase of Milton Friedman to refer glowingly to the military junta of Chile - specifically to the many years of privatization and economic liberalizations at the direction of the Chicago school of economics where the rights of property became more important than the rights of people and if you thought otherwise a firing line awaited you - because you know, that's proof you're part of the vast communist conspiracy. He still has a lot of fans claiming he's a miracle worker: https://www.conservapedia.com/Augusto_Pinochet https://www.conservapedia.com/Augusto_Pinochet It's pretty funny. They'll love Calvin Coolidge for instance but ignore his support of Mussolini and Miklós Horthy (even hosting the latter at the Whitehouse) and instead just call him "silent cal" (because he becomes pretty quiet after you scrub him clean) and gush about him. Alright, cool.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Ah, that does ring a bell. I knew a guy that went full Nationalist Socialist Party/MAGA (not equivocating, he got into both things simultaneously lol) back in 2015 and I remember him all of a sudden making a lot of helicopter jokes before I cut ties with him.