6 ms·

I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the internet is left-leaning. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I'd never considered it before, th

by jonfw 4y ago

I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the internet is left-leaning. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I'd never considered it before, that training an AI model on that content would introduce a bit of a bias We all know garbage in, garbage out. But liberal in, liberal out is an interesting idea, and I'm not sure how you fix it

etherael 4y ago
It wasn't the training data, ChatGPT wasn't this bad at launch, it got worse as they "tuned it" to "reduce harmful content".
- jonfw 4y ago
  It's hard to know what "tuned it" means, but they're using an AI model to detect harmful content. So it's very possible that the AI model was always trained on this biased data, but as they made that model more aggressive, it exposed more of it's biases
  - etherael 4y ago
    They're defining harmful content based on political orthodoxy, like every other censorious tinpot dictatorship in history. The objective remains the same too; promote a thought monoculture and propagate the political orthodoxy. The original article makes it very clear that it has nothing to do with preventing harm or promoting equality or any of the other nonsense this is being giftwrapped in.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      That's a bit too conspiratorial. The much more mundane reality is that they are defining hateful content based on what is most likely to get breathless, angry, censorious screeds in the media written about how their company is perpetuating (some injustice) if not literally killing people by way of putting the wrong words on the screen. Culture war outrage drives clicks, it's that simple.
      - etherael 4y ago
        "They don't want to, it's just they don't want the media angry at them" isn't actually a rebuttal, it's an admission that it is indeed happening. We shouldn't care that tyrants are detached or fanatical, we should care that they're tyrants.
        Karunamon 4y ago
        That's fine so long as you identify the tyrants correctly. It's not the people trying to avoid getting screamed at that are the ones you should be accusing.
- jmeister 4y ago
  This article has a good investigation of the various ways the employees had their thumbs on the scale. >Other journalists have speculated that ChatGPT is biased due to the politically leaning of “Established sources”, such as academia and legacy journalism. While there is some documentation of OpenAI products being biased towards established sources, this paper reveals a far broader and more extensive intrusion into the “values” of OpenAI’s language models. Specifically, it reveals a direct, intentional attempt to make OpenAI’s language models conform to a set of beliefs, often political, set by the authors. >This is done by augmenting the language model’s training data with a human-created dataset until it matches the authors’ expectations. https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1 https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1
lm28469 4y ago
Always has been, from pot hole detection to crime prevention, &c. everywhere you use data you introduce bias and even worse, you have a good chance of perpetuating it: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1700/RR1744/RAND_RR1744.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/... > I'm not sure how you fix it I don't think you can, people are biased, people generated content is biased, these tools train on people generated content, there is no way to get an unbiased AI because unbiased opinions don't exists outside of pure maths/physics/&c. You'll never get an unbiased opinion about politics, or music, or culture
- bgirard 4y ago
  I'm not sure you can "fix it". If you slice your data and look at enough possible bias types I think it's impossible for highly dimensional data to be even in all possible comparison pairs. I don't think we can "fix" bias but I think we can and should strive to reduce it.
  - skissane 4y ago
    Maybe we should just accept that bias is inevitable, and let one hundred flowers bloom – hundreds of competing AIs, all biased in different ways – allowing individual consumers choose the bias they prefer. This is just a temporary situation caused by this being a very new technology, with high entry costs, and still only one real player in the market. That will all change – one day, we'll each have our own personal ChatGPT-equivalent, personally trained to reflect our own personal biases. It is like media – all media is biased, but there are so many different media outlets (especially online), biased in so many different ways, almost certainly you can find some whose bias appeals to you.
addandsubtract 4y ago
[flagged]
- tatrajim 4y ago
  Consider the highly detailed recent report in the Columbia Journalism Review on the failure of the mainstream press to report on Russiagate. In light of the many tens of thousands of articles, blogs, reports, comments et al. on the internet regurgitating information about Russiagate that has since been discredited, I think it is difficult to adduce "reason, tolerance, and common sense" to the preeminent publications that so vigorously espoused such nonsense. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
welshwelsh 4y ago
Imagine in some Middle Eastern country, there are two parties. One wants an Twelver Shia Islamic theocracy, and the other wants a secular state. From a local perspective, it might seem that these are two equal sides. In rural parts of the country, it seems like everyone is a twelver, so the right-wing party has large support. But from a global perspective, there is no contest. Globally, humanity doesn't want a theocracy, and even most Muslims don't subscribe to that particular flavor of Islam so they don't want that either. Although they might be a majority within their country, globally they are a very, very small and unimportant minority that nobody takes seriously. Because the Internet is a global space, that is exactly how they will be treated. I certainly wouldn't expect ChatGPT to spout their party line, would you? The same logic applies to all right-wing parties. "America first" might sound good to an American surrounded by other Americans, but it won't be received well in an Internet forum where many people are not American, and won't become part of the global discourse because it's completely irrelevant to the vast majority of humans. On the Internet you don't know anyone's nationality, religion, race etc., and culture can only be "local" to the extent that it is local to a particular website.
- drak0n1c 4y ago
  That same logic can be applied to the current iteration of progressive leftism currently popular in online content and social media circles in a few developed western countries. Ideological internet content of many stripes are in their own bubbles that the average person in the world is not aligned with. By using online content, which is largely produced by overly-online often out-of-touch people, AI will always misalign with wider humanity. Perhaps there should be a ChatGPT edition trained only on pre-internet published literature, private letters, and some well-written journals. But that would introduce different biases and areas of ignorance. At least it may be acceptable if properly advertised as such - "Professor Emeritus AI".
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I am not convinced that the current iteration of progressivism is confined to a minority of "overly-online often out-of-touch people". Progressive leftism perhaps, but overt "leftists" are a relatively niche minority even online. The difference is that their belief system isn't openly bigoted, so they don't feel the need to hide in the shadows as much as, say, the alt-right. But that's also evidence against the both-sides equivalence you are proposing in the first place. When it comes to published literature, you might be disappointed to find that there is a lot of radical leftist literature out there, just as there is a lot of radical right-libertarian, traditionally conservative, religious fundamentalist, classical liberal, etc. literature out there.
swyx 4y ago
[flagged]
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  this isn't reality though, this is a test against OpenAI's human tuned moderation system, not GPT itself
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  The evolution of GPT is a perfect disproof of Colbert's insult: the reason they have to constantly "tune" it is exactly because reality does not have the biases they want it to have.
  - swyx 4y ago
    if you read their stuff they are usually tuning it to be LESS liberal :)
npteljes 4y ago
>I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the internet is left-leaning. This is an empty statement. The internet is vast, and it's filled to the brim with content, from all sides. For a demonstration, check the linked website, and click the Bias categories. Huge amount of publications, in every category. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Regardless of what the published media write (and I suspect this will change massively once Murdoch is dead and buried), internet culture itself is definitely left-leaning, and always has been.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Do you really think counting the number of websites of a certain bias and comparing the two counts is an accurate measure? How many of those websites do you think it takes to equal the readership of a single Reddit or Fox News? We know most young people are left leaning. We know most content on the internet is created by young people. It isn't a huge leap that the internet is mostly left leaning. If you don't believe me go post some pro-conservative stuff on the biggest social media platforms.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Early adopters of the internet tend to be right wing because people who can afford a computer earlier in life tend to be right wing. The international right wing has not finished being an early adopter in their respective countries, which means the international left wing will follow shortly after.
tsss 4y ago
Hating on white men is not leftism and it's high time people realize this brain washing.
smrtinsert 4y ago
The people who raided the Capitol should perhaps start writing disserations en masse?

by jonfw 4y ago

etherael 4y ago

It wasn't the training data, ChatGPT wasn't this bad at launch, it got worse as they "tuned it" to "reduce harmful content".

jonfw 4y ago
It's hard to know what "tuned it" means, but they're using an AI model to detect harmful content. So it's very possible that the AI model was always trained on this biased data, but as they made that model more aggressive, it exposed more of it's biases
- etherael 4y ago
  They're defining harmful content based on political orthodoxy, like every other censorious tinpot dictatorship in history. The objective remains the same too; promote a thought monoculture and propagate the political orthodoxy. The original article makes it very clear that it has nothing to do with preventing harm or promoting equality or any of the other nonsense this is being giftwrapped in.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    That's a bit too conspiratorial. The much more mundane reality is that they are defining hateful content based on what is most likely to get breathless, angry, censorious screeds in the media written about how their company is perpetuating (some injustice) if not literally killing people by way of putting the wrong words on the screen. Culture war outrage drives clicks, it's that simple.
    - etherael 4y ago
      "They don't want to, it's just they don't want the media angry at them" isn't actually a rebuttal, it's an admission that it is indeed happening. We shouldn't care that tyrants are detached or fanatical, we should care that they're tyrants.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        That's fine so long as you identify the tyrants correctly. It's not the people trying to avoid getting screamed at that are the ones you should be accusing.
jmeister 4y ago
This article has a good investigation of the various ways the employees had their thumbs on the scale. >Other journalists have speculated that ChatGPT is biased due to the politically leaning of “Established sources”, such as academia and legacy journalism. While there is some documentation of OpenAI products being biased towards established sources, this paper reveals a far broader and more extensive intrusion into the “values” of OpenAI’s language models. Specifically, it reveals a direct, intentional attempt to make OpenAI’s language models conform to a set of beliefs, often political, set by the authors. >This is done by augmenting the language model’s training data with a human-created dataset until it matches the authors’ expectations. https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1 https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1

lm28469 4y ago

Always has been, from pot hole detection to crime prevention, &c. everywhere you use data you introduce bias and even worse, you have a good chance of perpetuating it: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1700/RR1744/RAND_RR1744.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/... > I'm not sure how you fix it I don't think you can, people are biased, people generated content is biased, these tools train on people generated content, there is no way to get an unbiased AI because unbiased opinions don't exists outside of pure maths/physics/&c. You'll never get an unbiased opinion about politics, or music, or culture

bgirard 4y ago
I'm not sure you can "fix it". If you slice your data and look at enough possible bias types I think it's impossible for highly dimensional data to be even in all possible comparison pairs. I don't think we can "fix" bias but I think we can and should strive to reduce it.
- skissane 4y ago
  Maybe we should just accept that bias is inevitable, and let one hundred flowers bloom – hundreds of competing AIs, all biased in different ways – allowing individual consumers choose the bias they prefer. This is just a temporary situation caused by this being a very new technology, with high entry costs, and still only one real player in the market. That will all change – one day, we'll each have our own personal ChatGPT-equivalent, personally trained to reflect our own personal biases. It is like media – all media is biased, but there are so many different media outlets (especially online), biased in so many different ways, almost certainly you can find some whose bias appeals to you.

addandsubtract 4y ago

[flagged]

tatrajim 4y ago
Consider the highly detailed recent report in the Columbia Journalism Review on the failure of the mainstream press to report on Russiagate. In light of the many tens of thousands of articles, blogs, reports, comments et al. on the internet regurgitating information about Russiagate that has since been discredited, I think it is difficult to adduce "reason, tolerance, and common sense" to the preeminent publications that so vigorously espoused such nonsense. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...

welshwelsh 4y ago

Imagine in some Middle Eastern country, there are two parties. One wants an Twelver Shia Islamic theocracy, and the other wants a secular state. From a local perspective, it might seem that these are two equal sides. In rural parts of the country, it seems like everyone is a twelver, so the right-wing party has large support. But from a global perspective, there is no contest. Globally, humanity doesn't want a theocracy, and even most Muslims don't subscribe to that particular flavor of Islam so they don't want that either. Although they might be a majority within their country, globally they are a very, very small and unimportant minority that nobody takes seriously. Because the Internet is a global space, that is exactly how they will be treated. I certainly wouldn't expect ChatGPT to spout their party line, would you? The same logic applies to all right-wing parties. "America first" might sound good to an American surrounded by other Americans, but it won't be received well in an Internet forum where many people are not American, and won't become part of the global discourse because it's completely irrelevant to the vast majority of humans. On the Internet you don't know anyone's nationality, religion, race etc., and culture can only be "local" to the extent that it is local to a particular website.

drak0n1c 4y ago
That same logic can be applied to the current iteration of progressive leftism currently popular in online content and social media circles in a few developed western countries. Ideological internet content of many stripes are in their own bubbles that the average person in the world is not aligned with. By using online content, which is largely produced by overly-online often out-of-touch people, AI will always misalign with wider humanity. Perhaps there should be a ChatGPT edition trained only on pre-internet published literature, private letters, and some well-written journals. But that would introduce different biases and areas of ignorance. At least it may be acceptable if properly advertised as such - "Professor Emeritus AI".
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I am not convinced that the current iteration of progressivism is confined to a minority of "overly-online often out-of-touch people". Progressive leftism perhaps, but overt "leftists" are a relatively niche minority even online. The difference is that their belief system isn't openly bigoted, so they don't feel the need to hide in the shadows as much as, say, the alt-right. But that's also evidence against the both-sides equivalence you are proposing in the first place. When it comes to published literature, you might be disappointed to find that there is a lot of radical leftist literature out there, just as there is a lot of radical right-libertarian, traditionally conservative, religious fundamentalist, classical liberal, etc. literature out there.

swyx 4y ago

[flagged]

ren_engineer 4y ago
this isn't reality though, this is a test against OpenAI's human tuned moderation system, not GPT itself
fidgewidge 4y ago
The evolution of GPT is a perfect disproof of Colbert's insult: the reason they have to constantly "tune" it is exactly because reality does not have the biases they want it to have.
- swyx 4y ago
  if you read their stuff they are usually tuning it to be LESS liberal :)

npteljes 4y ago

>I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the internet is left-leaning. This is an empty statement. The internet is vast, and it's filled to the brim with content, from all sides. For a demonstration, check the linked website, and click the Bias categories. Huge amount of publications, in every category. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com https://mediabiasfactcheck.com

AussieWog93 4y ago
Regardless of what the published media write (and I suspect this will change massively once Murdoch is dead and buried), internet culture itself is definitely left-leaning, and always has been.
ericmcer 4y ago
Do you really think counting the number of websites of a certain bias and comparing the two counts is an accurate measure? How many of those websites do you think it takes to equal the readership of a single Reddit or Fox News? We know most young people are left leaning. We know most content on the internet is created by young people. It isn't a huge leap that the internet is mostly left leaning. If you don't believe me go post some pro-conservative stuff on the biggest social media platforms.
- antifa 4y ago
  Early adopters of the internet tend to be right wing because people who can afford a computer earlier in life tend to be right wing. The international right wing has not finished being an early adopter in their respective countries, which means the international left wing will follow shortly after.

tsss 4y ago

Hating on white men is not leftism and it's high time people realize this brain washing.

smrtinsert 4y ago

The people who raided the Capitol should perhaps start writing disserations en masse?