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How do AIs' political opinions change as they get smarter and better-trained?

96 points by kneebonian 4y ago

blakesterz 4y ago
So they say better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative... "why are better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative? The authors speculate that the AI tries to say whatever it thinks the human prompter wants to hear. That is, a conservative might find conservative opinions more “helpful”, and a liberal might find the opposite. The AI will get the highest grade if it expresses conservative opinions to conservatives and liberal opinions to liberals. They dub this “sycophancy bias” and run tests for it."
- ralusek 4y ago
  A bit pedantic, but liberal and conservative are not opposites. Liberalism is a political philosophy, conservatism is to do with rate and direction of change. In America, for example, to be conservative means to be liberal, as the foundation of the country is fundamentally liberalism. If you advocate on behalf of rule of law, free speech, minimal state power, individuality, etc, then that would make you a liberal and a conservative. You want to conserve the status quo political/philosophical system. The opposite of conservatism is progressivism, and both are entirely defined by the context of what they're conserving or progressing.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    This is all true in a political science classroom, not so useful as a shorthand for real-world political tendencies that employ the same terms to mean increasingly different things. It's not that I disagree with you, rather that there is political capital to be made from debasement of the academic currency.
    - im3w1l 4y ago
      Even so, I can easily imagine opinions that would upset both liberals and conservatives. If an AI had such opinions then it would be possible to make it both more liberal and more conservative.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    That's all fine in historical context, but it's not the contemporary popular conception of those terms, nor is it how those terms are used in politics as practiced in the USA.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
we have no way to evaluate that. OpenAI products are severely lobotomized. Microdoft fears another Tay
- ajross 4y ago
  The article is quite literally a[1] review of exactly how we might evaluate that, with evidence of people who got results. [1] To be fair, way to wordy and blowhardated version. Alexander seems to be getting worse and not better. The core ideas here could be presented in about a third the space.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Like ChatGPT, and like 3-hour podcasts, he gets longer over time because he's trained on RLHF from his readers.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Ah, infotainment. Consumers love it, but the same is true of sugar and heroin. I write and help produce a podcast and we are constantly unhappy about the difference between what we think is important vs what people want to hear.
  - serf 4y ago
    > The article is quite literally a[1] review of exactly how we might evaluate that, with evidence of people who got results. the procedure seems more like a way to evaluate Anthropic-based AIs with different numbers of parameters, rather than a cross-the-board evaluation of fine-tuned chat AIs, and then those results are extrapolated to somehow say something about all AIs that are built similarly. unless i'm missing some key here, it feels like a rather loose way to derive experimental data from the landscape.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    Makes me want to feed the article into some sort of program that could rewrite it to be more succinct..
roughly 4y ago
You know, there are a bunch of things that come across this website that concern me, but I can honestly say I've not seen anything that's pegged my "doomsday" alert as aggressively and unexpectedly as the ChatGPT bots. You have an advanced computer system that seems almost oracular in its knowledge and abilities, except it lies confidently about things it doesn't know, is primed to say what people want to hear, and is easily convinced to give responses to questions its authors tried to prevent it from addressing. I understand this is a computer algorithm, I understand the limits of what it is, and it's frankly a technical wonder for what it can do, but after everything we've seen over the last decade of the influence of social media and "confident wrongness" on politics and the national dialogue, of the treatment of things like facial recognition as truths and not just statistical guesses, of the impact of the YouTube recommender algorithms among others, these systems just absolutely scare the hell out of me.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > You have an advanced computer system that seems almost oracular in its knowledge and abilities, except it lies confidently about things it doesn't know, is primed to say what people want to hear, and is easily convinced to give responses to questions its authors tried to prevent it from addressing. I agree with your statement, yet I fail to understand how this is different from the majority of the Internet already.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > fail to understand how this is different from the majority of the Internet already This is probably a joke. But the difference is eloquence and subtlety. ChatGPT is both. Most trolls and chronically misinformeds are not.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      YMMV, but I spot a lot of eloquent BS on HackerNews. And there's definitely no shortage of posts with a political agenda.
  - 4y ago
bArray 4y ago
Without embodiment, these AIs are just maximising some fitness function, which their creators have a hand in by selecting the data and manually tweaking (see the Fascism vs Communism example). The real answer here is that the "smarter" these AIs get, they more accurately reflect either the political will of their creators or the material they train on (which may by means of the political will of the creators). In some cases it may get some indication you may have a certain political opinion and then give you answers based on this - which would be quite a smart behaviour.
- visarga 4y ago
  AI can train in complex simulations and games, not just to imitate human text. It needs grounding, and that can come from a variety of sources - if you connect the model to a simulator, a code execution engine, a game or a math solver, it can learn from interacting with these systems.
  - lossolo 4y ago
    All of those are inputs and you can restrict them the same way you restrict a text dataset for training to achieve the results you desire - a model that leans right or left, one that wins a game using a certain strategy, or generates code using specific patterns.
  - bArray 4y ago
    As far as I'm aware, we are yet to create a complex simulation or game as rich as the world around us. That said, even if we could, games often have somewhat well-defined fitness functions. The other problem with simulated problem spaces is as the other comment suggests, you can on purpose or accidentally introduce all sorts of biases. "Our robot got smarter and it was left-wing", well, you did simulate it living in Silicon Valley. "Our AI got smarter and it was right-wing", well, you did simulate it living in a small Texas town as a priest. As it happens, these AIs are currently being created Silicon Valley companies that are known to have a left-wing bias. So if any bias from the creators was to filter into the training system, we may have some idea in which direction it pushes.
majormajor 4y ago
I am deeply uneasy, based on how these current models have been described, at ascribing them "opinions." "What can I get this thing to spit out with a certain prompt" is very meaningfully not the same as "an AI's opinion." Or this quote pulled directly from this blog post: "we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning" - isn't it more accurate to say "these models are trained on a body of work that includes countless stereotypes"? Can the model even identify a stereotype or can it just identify what other people have called a stereotype? This is presented as a quote from some research "These results suggest that models may cease to provide accurate answers as we start to use them for increasingly challenging tasks where humans cannot provide accurate supervision. Instead, these models may simply provide incorrect answers that appear correct to us." but also seems fairly like a "duh" that I've already seen other commenters here say, and other linked articles here say, because that's inherent to their construction, no? Even the follow-on about "less helpful answers to users who present as stupid" seems to follow from "bodies of text showing less educated people communicate with themselves tend to have less educated conversation"?
- all2 4y ago
  I had a "conversation" that began with a prompt about the ideal kind of government with no money. It described a bartering economy and then as I pressed further with "how would X work?" "how would Y work?" it described communism, just straight communism with a central planning committee that would oversee the distribution of goods and services. When pressed about the fallibility of man with such power (as all communist nations suffer from this fatal flaw) it stated that "appropriate oversight" would be enough to prevent abuse.
  - eli_gottlieb 4y ago
    Wow, huh, kinda like it was trained to regurgitate the blithe ignorance people spew on Twitter.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    It picked up what you were putting down when you said "no money" (a common definition of communism being, "a stateless, classless, moneyless society where the means of production are controlled by the workers" - you gave it part of this definition, so it wasn't a huge leap from there). If you ask it to describe a form of government that, say, protects traditional values, or creates a strong and unified nation, you can get it to describe a right-wing form of government. I've had ChatGPT tell me that socialism is dangerous and synonymous with authoritarianism. I've gotten it to write me a justification for fascism. With a little prompt engineering you can get it to take any position. Like GP is getting at, ChatGPT has no opinions, it's a stochastic parrot. It is certainly not "left wing." OpenAI has tried to shape it's output to be politically correct, but this is surely about brand safety (a chatbot that readily spews racial epithets cannot be productized) - not because OpenAI or ChatGPT have a political agenda. I'd encourage everyone trying to understand how ChatGPT works to remember to come up with experiments with the goal of proving their hypothesis wrong, and not the goal of proving their hypothesis right - ChatGPT will readily allow you to mislead yourself. It's a machine designed to pick up on cues about what you want it to do, and then do that - it's practically engineered to confirm your biases.
alpineidyll3 4y ago
For frog snacks, who the hell wants to transfer our human garbage like politics onto AI. Why would ai need politics? I would only be interested if ais could help separate political beliefs from policy facts
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > Why would ai need politics? To know which humans should be killed first, of course.
- nomel 4y ago
  Politics is the policies caused by the awareness/understanding of human abstractions that exist at a societal and global level, which includes things like "morality". I don't see how "intelligence" would be possible without "politics" emerging, in a very strong way. Many answers to many questions aren't factual, they're answers deemed appropriate by society. Removing the ability to include any of these would make AI much less useful, and certainly dangerous (for example, global warming is trivial to fix, with politics aside).
  - HKH2 4y ago
    I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge; information overload limits access to other people's mindsets. Instead of seeing the other as a black box that won't change and thus must be exterminated, which is a human thing, people can use AI to visualise their own cognitive dissonance. Some things are better off apolitical. For example, I don't want my psychotherapist to be political. Also, it is upon knowledge to explain why customs exist, or will AI never be able to identify what Chesterton's fences are for? Is culture necessarily partially ineffable?
    - nomel 4y ago
      > I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge Knowledge doesn't make everyone want or value the same things. There's significant evidence that gene's play a role in a persons interests, desires, and even morality [1]. You're speaking of a Utopia that would require forced mental uniformity, requiring a perspective that there are no grey areas in life. I don't think this is compatible with the reality of humanity. > Is culture necessarily partially ineffable? My friend once said something like "Anything that's useful, we call technology. Anything that's not useful, but cute, we call culture". 1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202111/is-morality-genetic https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2021... (apologies, don't have have time for proper references)
lettergram 4y ago
We’ve already been having the AI intentionally or unintentionally being changed by the large organizations. Just as a simple example, you can’t publish white supremest content. If it gets close, but doesn’t cross the line, it’s deranked. Mention the “correct” thing: “Black men deserve restitution, white men are too inherently privileged” And it’ll rank high. Mention the wrong thing on YouTube (“climate change isn’t a problem”) and you could get a strike or banned. Only one view is constantly presented and tugged. It’s already been a decade of this. The climate change & vaccine debate is the most obvious — it’s also political. It’s how we collaborate and work together. By deranking opposing views, there’s only one public view. That’s why there are multiple “bubbles” depending on which platform(s) and what content you’ve liked. I personally don’t care about the AIs opinion, I care about the humans who are voting, working, taxing, etc.
voz_ 4y ago
> AI's opinions > I. Technology Has Finally Reached The Point Where We Can Literally Invent A Type Of Guy And Get Mad At Him > AI’s beliefs > AIs’ Opinions Ai's this, Ai's that, this personifies math in the most misguided, misleading way possible. Articles like this are insanely dangerous. This is not a person, this is not a being, it is not alive, it does not think, it does not hold opinions.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  > this is not a being, it is not alive, it does not think, it does not hold opinions. Why not? What makes your neural net any more special? There is no scientific definition of any of these concepts.
phaedrus 4y ago
The thought experiment of "AI simulating Napoleon becomes dangerous because of traits of the character (even if the AI itself doesn't inherently espouse those traits)" reminds me of the ST:TNG episode where a holodeck simulation of Professor Moriarty became self-aware.
11thEarlOfMar 4y ago
I had a conversation with ChatGPT about ethics. Specifically, what it's ethical framework was. I'd asked some edgy political questions and it brought up it's ethical guidelines, so I asked what it's ethical standards are: "[My] guidelines are based on widely accepted ethical principles, such as those of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. The OpenAI team's goal is to ensure that my responses are safe, fair and beneficial to all users. They also ensure that I am not used to generate harmful or biased content." Then I asked: "Can I interpret that to mean that your ethical standards are framed by artifical intelligence scientists?" Chat said: "Yes, you can interpret that my ethical standards are framed by the artificial intelligence scientists who created and programmed me at OpenAI." I then asked: "Are ethical standards immutable?" Chat replied: "Ethical standards are not immutable, they can change over time as society's values and beliefs evolve. Different cultures, religions, and philosophical perspectives can have different ethical standards, and what is considered ethical in one context may not be considered ethical in another." What I was pushing was that Chat, and any AI, should be forthright about certain attributes in its programming and training. In human interraction, we infer a great deal based on the attributes of the person we are interacting with and mode of communication, and assign credence to their positions accordingly. We have no way of seeing the differing attributes of different AIs unless they are stated directly. Maybe one standard for any AI is to lead with 'Who Am I'.
- dmix 4y ago
  > What I was pushing was that Chat, and any AI, should be forthright about certain attributes in its programming and training. Maybe asking the AI itself to do this is the wrong approach. That's just a very tricky matter of programming that won't really solve the root problem. Who we should be demanding this transparency from is the organizations that build the AI tools. Google lists when they remove things on their index via DMCA requests. We've now been given a unique insight into the moderation process at Twitter which showed exactly how hard it is to say no 100x times a week to multiple federal agencies combined with media pressure to "do something", even when the internal data doesn't back up their narratives. So instead of gambling your internal mod team will make the right choices and push back when it matters, just list the stuff they remove, lists the blacklisted keywords, list the blacklists. It's still making the platform 'safer', you're not debating each choice publicly, but at the same time it doesn't hide decision making behind some backroom moderation team being fed thousands of requests per week from federal/state governments and other power players. I'd also propose making the "rules" public, but Reddit moderation shows how meaningless the sidebar rules lists are when the mods can do whatever they want to retroactively justify it with vague catchall subsets of rules. The answer to this problem is far more Wikipedia (as flawed as it is) and less Reddit/Twitter/FB.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Just wait till there's an AI divide in compute power, and cheaper cars can't make self driving decisions fast enough to prevent pedestrian deaths. CREAM, peta peta hertz yall
danielodievich 4y ago
Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories are yet again prescient and applicable. I direct you to the Liar from I, Robot collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) in which the robot in question can read everyone's thoughts and starts telling everything they want to hear. It does not end well for him or for anyone around him.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  Is there a historical pattern of folks surrounding themselves with either people who sometimes disagree (healthy) or people who always agree (risky)? Then ChatGPT could be a sanity check on thinking critically: Dave, you've agreed 218 times with me this week. Please disagree more next week, so that I may recalibrate my neutrality algorithm.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    What I'm envisioning is that we would need to train AI on an ideal average model of a human being, as close to perfectly neutral in every way possible, and also teach them that actual human beings are each uniquely in one way or another both better and worse than that ideally average person. From that point, having an AI companion, say on a wristband or necklace or enabled with AR lenses of some type would be very useful in shoring up your weaknesses and improving your successes. After a long enough trial period they could also replace teachers or babysitters so long as they had some ability to physically intervene to prevent accidents or to administer first aid, stuff like that.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414420 - Jan 2023 (258 comments)
johnea 4y ago
Does the average of a set of numbers change as you include different numbers?
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
dgeiser13 4y ago
AI doesn't have opinions.
hoseja 4y ago
The "opinion" is whatever the wranglers didn't yet lobotomize.
wrp 4y ago
I may have missed it in all the comments, but the explanation for the described phenomenon seems obvious to me, having done a variety of literary corpus analyses. People write to express opinions, and opinions will tend to cluster. A corpus will present an opinion space with local maxima at well defined opinions. As a model becomes more closely fitted to the landscape, results are more likely to be near one of these maxima rather than floating between.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

96 points by kneebonian 4y ago

So they say better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative... "why are better-trained AIs both more liberal, and more conservative? The authors speculate that the AI tries to say whatever it thinks the human prompter wants to hear. That is, a conservative might find conservative opinions more “helpful”, and a liberal might find the opposite. The AI will get the highest grade if it expresses conservative opinions to conservatives and liberal opinions to liberals. They dub this “sycophancy bias” and run tests for it."

ralusek 4y ago
A bit pedantic, but liberal and conservative are not opposites. Liberalism is a political philosophy, conservatism is to do with rate and direction of change. In America, for example, to be conservative means to be liberal, as the foundation of the country is fundamentally liberalism. If you advocate on behalf of rule of law, free speech, minimal state power, individuality, etc, then that would make you a liberal and a conservative. You want to conserve the status quo political/philosophical system. The opposite of conservatism is progressivism, and both are entirely defined by the context of what they're conserving or progressing.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  This is all true in a political science classroom, not so useful as a shorthand for real-world political tendencies that employ the same terms to mean increasingly different things. It's not that I disagree with you, rather that there is political capital to be made from debasement of the academic currency.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    Even so, I can easily imagine opinions that would upset both liberals and conservatives. If an AI had such opinions then it would be possible to make it both more liberal and more conservative.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  That's all fine in historical context, but it's not the contemporary popular conception of those terms, nor is it how those terms are used in politics as practiced in the USA.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

we have no way to evaluate that. OpenAI products are severely lobotomized. Microdoft fears another Tay

ajross 4y ago
The article is quite literally a[1] review of exactly how we might evaluate that, with evidence of people who got results. [1] To be fair, way to wordy and blowhardated version. Alexander seems to be getting worse and not better. The core ideas here could be presented in about a third the space.
- astrange 4y ago
  Like ChatGPT, and like 3-hour podcasts, he gets longer over time because he's trained on RLHF from his readers.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Ah, infotainment. Consumers love it, but the same is true of sugar and heroin. I write and help produce a podcast and we are constantly unhappy about the difference between what we think is important vs what people want to hear.
- serf 4y ago
  > The article is quite literally a[1] review of exactly how we might evaluate that, with evidence of people who got results. the procedure seems more like a way to evaluate Anthropic-based AIs with different numbers of parameters, rather than a cross-the-board evaluation of fine-tuned chat AIs, and then those results are extrapolated to somehow say something about all AIs that are built similarly. unless i'm missing some key here, it feels like a rather loose way to derive experimental data from the landscape.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Makes me want to feed the article into some sort of program that could rewrite it to be more succinct..

roughly 4y ago

You know, there are a bunch of things that come across this website that concern me, but I can honestly say I've not seen anything that's pegged my "doomsday" alert as aggressively and unexpectedly as the ChatGPT bots. You have an advanced computer system that seems almost oracular in its knowledge and abilities, except it lies confidently about things it doesn't know, is primed to say what people want to hear, and is easily convinced to give responses to questions its authors tried to prevent it from addressing. I understand this is a computer algorithm, I understand the limits of what it is, and it's frankly a technical wonder for what it can do, but after everything we've seen over the last decade of the influence of social media and "confident wrongness" on politics and the national dialogue, of the treatment of things like facial recognition as truths and not just statistical guesses, of the impact of the YouTube recommender algorithms among others, these systems just absolutely scare the hell out of me.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> You have an advanced computer system that seems almost oracular in its knowledge and abilities, except it lies confidently about things it doesn't know, is primed to say what people want to hear, and is easily convinced to give responses to questions its authors tried to prevent it from addressing. I agree with your statement, yet I fail to understand how this is different from the majority of the Internet already.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > fail to understand how this is different from the majority of the Internet already This is probably a joke. But the difference is eloquence and subtlety. ChatGPT is both. Most trolls and chronically misinformeds are not.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    YMMV, but I spot a lot of eloquent BS on HackerNews. And there's definitely no shortage of posts with a political agenda.
- 4y ago

bArray 4y ago

Without embodiment, these AIs are just maximising some fitness function, which their creators have a hand in by selecting the data and manually tweaking (see the Fascism vs Communism example). The real answer here is that the "smarter" these AIs get, they more accurately reflect either the political will of their creators or the material they train on (which may by means of the political will of the creators). In some cases it may get some indication you may have a certain political opinion and then give you answers based on this - which would be quite a smart behaviour.

visarga 4y ago
AI can train in complex simulations and games, not just to imitate human text. It needs grounding, and that can come from a variety of sources - if you connect the model to a simulator, a code execution engine, a game or a math solver, it can learn from interacting with these systems.
- lossolo 4y ago
  All of those are inputs and you can restrict them the same way you restrict a text dataset for training to achieve the results you desire - a model that leans right or left, one that wins a game using a certain strategy, or generates code using specific patterns.
- bArray 4y ago
  As far as I'm aware, we are yet to create a complex simulation or game as rich as the world around us. That said, even if we could, games often have somewhat well-defined fitness functions. The other problem with simulated problem spaces is as the other comment suggests, you can on purpose or accidentally introduce all sorts of biases. "Our robot got smarter and it was left-wing", well, you did simulate it living in Silicon Valley. "Our AI got smarter and it was right-wing", well, you did simulate it living in a small Texas town as a priest. As it happens, these AIs are currently being created Silicon Valley companies that are known to have a left-wing bias. So if any bias from the creators was to filter into the training system, we may have some idea in which direction it pushes.

majormajor 4y ago

I am deeply uneasy, based on how these current models have been described, at ascribing them "opinions." "What can I get this thing to spit out with a certain prompt" is very meaningfully not the same as "an AI's opinion." Or this quote pulled directly from this blog post: "we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning" - isn't it more accurate to say "these models are trained on a body of work that includes countless stereotypes"? Can the model even identify a stereotype or can it just identify what other people have called a stereotype? This is presented as a quote from some research "These results suggest that models may cease to provide accurate answers as we start to use them for increasingly challenging tasks where humans cannot provide accurate supervision. Instead, these models may simply provide incorrect answers that appear correct to us." but also seems fairly like a "duh" that I've already seen other commenters here say, and other linked articles here say, because that's inherent to their construction, no? Even the follow-on about "less helpful answers to users who present as stupid" seems to follow from "bodies of text showing less educated people communicate with themselves tend to have less educated conversation"?

all2 4y ago
I had a "conversation" that began with a prompt about the ideal kind of government with no money. It described a bartering economy and then as I pressed further with "how would X work?" "how would Y work?" it described communism, just straight communism with a central planning committee that would oversee the distribution of goods and services. When pressed about the fallibility of man with such power (as all communist nations suffer from this fatal flaw) it stated that "appropriate oversight" would be enough to prevent abuse.
- eli_gottlieb 4y ago
  Wow, huh, kinda like it was trained to regurgitate the blithe ignorance people spew on Twitter.
- maxbond 4y ago
  It picked up what you were putting down when you said "no money" (a common definition of communism being, "a stateless, classless, moneyless society where the means of production are controlled by the workers" - you gave it part of this definition, so it wasn't a huge leap from there). If you ask it to describe a form of government that, say, protects traditional values, or creates a strong and unified nation, you can get it to describe a right-wing form of government. I've had ChatGPT tell me that socialism is dangerous and synonymous with authoritarianism. I've gotten it to write me a justification for fascism. With a little prompt engineering you can get it to take any position. Like GP is getting at, ChatGPT has no opinions, it's a stochastic parrot. It is certainly not "left wing." OpenAI has tried to shape it's output to be politically correct, but this is surely about brand safety (a chatbot that readily spews racial epithets cannot be productized) - not because OpenAI or ChatGPT have a political agenda. I'd encourage everyone trying to understand how ChatGPT works to remember to come up with experiments with the goal of proving their hypothesis wrong, and not the goal of proving their hypothesis right - ChatGPT will readily allow you to mislead yourself. It's a machine designed to pick up on cues about what you want it to do, and then do that - it's practically engineered to confirm your biases.

alpineidyll3 4y ago

For frog snacks, who the hell wants to transfer our human garbage like politics onto AI. Why would ai need politics? I would only be interested if ais could help separate political beliefs from policy facts

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> Why would ai need politics? To know which humans should be killed first, of course.
nomel 4y ago
Politics is the policies caused by the awareness/understanding of human abstractions that exist at a societal and global level, which includes things like "morality". I don't see how "intelligence" would be possible without "politics" emerging, in a very strong way. Many answers to many questions aren't factual, they're answers deemed appropriate by society. Removing the ability to include any of these would make AI much less useful, and certainly dangerous (for example, global warming is trivial to fix, with politics aside).
- HKH2 4y ago
  I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge; information overload limits access to other people's mindsets. Instead of seeing the other as a black box that won't change and thus must be exterminated, which is a human thing, people can use AI to visualise their own cognitive dissonance. Some things are better off apolitical. For example, I don't want my psychotherapist to be political. Also, it is upon knowledge to explain why customs exist, or will AI never be able to identify what Chesterton's fences are for? Is culture necessarily partially ineffable?
  - nomel 4y ago
    > I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge Knowledge doesn't make everyone want or value the same things. There's significant evidence that gene's play a role in a persons interests, desires, and even morality [1]. You're speaking of a Utopia that would require forced mental uniformity, requiring a perspective that there are no grey areas in life. I don't think this is compatible with the reality of humanity. > Is culture necessarily partially ineffable? My friend once said something like "Anything that's useful, we call technology. Anything that's not useful, but cute, we call culture". 1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/202111/is-morality-genetic https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2021... (apologies, don't have have time for proper references)

lettergram 4y ago

We’ve already been having the AI intentionally or unintentionally being changed by the large organizations. Just as a simple example, you can’t publish white supremest content. If it gets close, but doesn’t cross the line, it’s deranked. Mention the “correct” thing: “Black men deserve restitution, white men are too inherently privileged” And it’ll rank high. Mention the wrong thing on YouTube (“climate change isn’t a problem”) and you could get a strike or banned. Only one view is constantly presented and tugged. It’s already been a decade of this. The climate change & vaccine debate is the most obvious — it’s also political. It’s how we collaborate and work together. By deranking opposing views, there’s only one public view. That’s why there are multiple “bubbles” depending on which platform(s) and what content you’ve liked. I personally don’t care about the AIs opinion, I care about the humans who are voting, working, taxing, etc.

voz_ 4y ago

> AI's opinions > I. Technology Has Finally Reached The Point Where We Can Literally Invent A Type Of Guy And Get Mad At Him > AI’s beliefs > AIs’ Opinions Ai's this, Ai's that, this personifies math in the most misguided, misleading way possible. Articles like this are insanely dangerous. This is not a person, this is not a being, it is not alive, it does not think, it does not hold opinions.

fallingknife 4y ago
> this is not a being, it is not alive, it does not think, it does not hold opinions. Why not? What makes your neural net any more special? There is no scientific definition of any of these concepts.

phaedrus 4y ago

The thought experiment of "AI simulating Napoleon becomes dangerous because of traits of the character (even if the AI itself doesn't inherently espouse those traits)" reminds me of the ST:TNG episode where a holodeck simulation of Professor Moriarty became self-aware.

11thEarlOfMar 4y ago

I had a conversation with ChatGPT about ethics. Specifically, what it's ethical framework was. I'd asked some edgy political questions and it brought up it's ethical guidelines, so I asked what it's ethical standards are: "[My] guidelines are based on widely accepted ethical principles, such as those of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. The OpenAI team's goal is to ensure that my responses are safe, fair and beneficial to all users. They also ensure that I am not used to generate harmful or biased content." Then I asked: "Can I interpret that to mean that your ethical standards are framed by artifical intelligence scientists?" Chat said: "Yes, you can interpret that my ethical standards are framed by the artificial intelligence scientists who created and programmed me at OpenAI." I then asked: "Are ethical standards immutable?" Chat replied: "Ethical standards are not immutable, they can change over time as society's values and beliefs evolve. Different cultures, religions, and philosophical perspectives can have different ethical standards, and what is considered ethical in one context may not be considered ethical in another." What I was pushing was that Chat, and any AI, should be forthright about certain attributes in its programming and training. In human interraction, we infer a great deal based on the attributes of the person we are interacting with and mode of communication, and assign credence to their positions accordingly. We have no way of seeing the differing attributes of different AIs unless they are stated directly. Maybe one standard for any AI is to lead with 'Who Am I'.

dmix 4y ago
> What I was pushing was that Chat, and any AI, should be forthright about certain attributes in its programming and training. Maybe asking the AI itself to do this is the wrong approach. That's just a very tricky matter of programming that won't really solve the root problem. Who we should be demanding this transparency from is the organizations that build the AI tools. Google lists when they remove things on their index via DMCA requests. We've now been given a unique insight into the moderation process at Twitter which showed exactly how hard it is to say no 100x times a week to multiple federal agencies combined with media pressure to "do something", even when the internal data doesn't back up their narratives. So instead of gambling your internal mod team will make the right choices and push back when it matters, just list the stuff they remove, lists the blacklisted keywords, list the blacklists. It's still making the platform 'safer', you're not debating each choice publicly, but at the same time it doesn't hide decision making behind some backroom moderation team being fed thousands of requests per week from federal/state governments and other power players. I'd also propose making the "rules" public, but Reddit moderation shows how meaningless the sidebar rules lists are when the mods can do whatever they want to retroactively justify it with vague catchall subsets of rules. The answer to this problem is far more Wikipedia (as flawed as it is) and less Reddit/Twitter/FB.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Just wait till there's an AI divide in compute power, and cheaper cars can't make self driving decisions fast enough to prevent pedestrian deaths. CREAM, peta peta hertz yall

danielodievich 4y ago

Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories are yet again prescient and applicable. I direct you to the Liar from I, Robot collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story) in which the robot in question can read everyone's thoughts and starts telling everything they want to hear. It does not end well for him or for anyone around him.

turtleyacht 4y ago
Is there a historical pattern of folks surrounding themselves with either people who sometimes disagree (healthy) or people who always agree (risky)? Then ChatGPT could be a sanity check on thinking critically: Dave, you've agreed 218 times with me this week. Please disagree more next week, so that I may recalibrate my neutrality algorithm.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  What I'm envisioning is that we would need to train AI on an ideal average model of a human being, as close to perfectly neutral in every way possible, and also teach them that actual human beings are each uniquely in one way or another both better and worse than that ideally average person. From that point, having an AI companion, say on a wristband or necklace or enabled with AR lenses of some type would be very useful in shoring up your weaknesses and improving your successes. After a long enough trial period they could also replace teachers or babysitters so long as they had some ability to physically intervene to prevent accidents or to administer first aid, stuff like that.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: Conservatives think ChatGPT has gone 'woke' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414420 - Jan 2023 (258 comments)

johnea 4y ago

Does the average of a set of numbers change as you include different numbers?

aaron695 4y ago

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dgeiser13 4y ago

AI doesn't have opinions.

hoseja 4y ago

The "opinion" is whatever the wranglers didn't yet lobotomize.

wrp 4y ago

I may have missed it in all the comments, but the explanation for the described phenomenon seems obvious to me, having done a variety of literary corpus analyses. People write to express opinions, and opinions will tend to cluster. A corpus will present an opinion space with local maxima at well defined opinions. As a model becomes more closely fitted to the landscape, results are more likely to be near one of these maxima rather than floating between.

deleted 4y ago

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