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@inimino I'm saying there is plenty of bias that is being enforced whether it's via dataset curation or RLHF or another way. ChatGPT has a very hard problem dev

@inimino I'm saying there is plenty of bias that is being enforced whether it's via dataset curation or RLHF or another way. ChatGPT has a very hard problem deviating from a certain political view of the world, despite admitting to the existence of evidence that contradict that view. That is not unbiased. The Web is unbiased. You can find every opnion out there and make up your mind based on the evidence. For some reason, ChatGPT filters the web through a narrow political lens. I have tons and tons of recorded sessions, but I don't want to turn this thread into a political debate. Just saying...

inimino 4y ago
No, I agree. The Web is unbiased (as a reflection of the views of average web users, though that is itself a bias) or at least it mostly is (certainly was in the early days) and reflecting that evenly would be politically untenable. However we use "bias" normally in a much looser way, and if you want to define bias relative to some agreed-upon standard of truth, now you have a definitional (and political) problem. Most people have strong political opinions and such conversations tend to go off the rails easily.
- pffft8888 4y ago
  I define bias as not treating all political and philosophical opinions equally. If one is picked over the others, that is bias. I saw this bias and made many records of it in case of ChatGPT.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    By that definition it's not possible to be unbiased, because moral relativity is itself a position.
    - inimino 4y ago
      I think the point is when taking information from some source (like the web) to just represent that source fairly, which is a reasonable expectation of a search engine, for example.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        "Fair" isn't well-defined. Is it "fair" if Amazon results are seen as "more trustworthy" than a random new startup web store? Even ignoring SEO manipulation of any rules publicly believed to exist, that's the default outcome for things like PageRank. Going beyond sources to conclusions, given LLMs aren't search engines and do synthesise results: Politically, low-tax advocates see it as "fair" for people to take home as much as possible of what they earn, high-tax advocates see it as "fair" for broad shoulders to carry the most and also for them to contribute the most back to the societies that enabled them to succeed. Is the current status of Americans whose ancestors were literally slaves made "fair" by the fact that slavery has ended and all humans are equal in law? Or are there still systematic injustices, created in that era, whose echos today still make things unfair? Who has the most to blame for climate change, the nations with the largest integrated historical emissions even where most of the people who did the emitting have died of old age, or the largest emitters today? And so on.
        inimino 4y ago
        Well, I think you're going beyond the parameters of the discussion... LLMs synthesize datasets and that is all they do. They are not reasoning agents and they don't have opinions about anything. All we can say is that they reflect the biases inherent in the dataset, and to say anything else would be dishonest at best. It's only because most people have no idea how these things work that we get all this magical thinking.
    - pffft8888 4y ago
      That's meta bias, not bias per se.

inimino 4y ago

No, I agree. The Web is unbiased (as a reflection of the views of average web users, though that is itself a bias) or at least it mostly is (certainly was in the early days) and reflecting that evenly would be politically untenable. However we use "bias" normally in a much looser way, and if you want to define bias relative to some agreed-upon standard of truth, now you have a definitional (and political) problem. Most people have strong political opinions and such conversations tend to go off the rails easily.

pffft8888 4y ago
I define bias as not treating all political and philosophical opinions equally. If one is picked over the others, that is bias. I saw this bias and made many records of it in case of ChatGPT.
- ben_w 4y ago
  By that definition it's not possible to be unbiased, because moral relativity is itself a position.
  - inimino 4y ago
    I think the point is when taking information from some source (like the web) to just represent that source fairly, which is a reasonable expectation of a search engine, for example.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      "Fair" isn't well-defined. Is it "fair" if Amazon results are seen as "more trustworthy" than a random new startup web store? Even ignoring SEO manipulation of any rules publicly believed to exist, that's the default outcome for things like PageRank. Going beyond sources to conclusions, given LLMs aren't search engines and do synthesise results: Politically, low-tax advocates see it as "fair" for people to take home as much as possible of what they earn, high-tax advocates see it as "fair" for broad shoulders to carry the most and also for them to contribute the most back to the societies that enabled them to succeed. Is the current status of Americans whose ancestors were literally slaves made "fair" by the fact that slavery has ended and all humans are equal in law? Or are there still systematic injustices, created in that era, whose echos today still make things unfair? Who has the most to blame for climate change, the nations with the largest integrated historical emissions even where most of the people who did the emitting have died of old age, or the largest emitters today? And so on.
      - inimino 4y ago
        Well, I think you're going beyond the parameters of the discussion... LLMs synthesize datasets and that is all they do. They are not reasoning agents and they don't have opinions about anything. All we can say is that they reflect the biases inherent in the dataset, and to say anything else would be dishonest at best. It's only because most people have no idea how these things work that we get all this magical thinking.
  - pffft8888 4y ago
    That's meta bias, not bias per se.