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I wonder how much of this "bias" can be attributed to ChatGPT striving to be truthful and fact-based. Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's quote, "Reality has a wel

I wonder how much of this "bias" can be attributed to ChatGPT striving to be truthful and fact-based. Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's quote, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

proamdev123 4y ago
I’ve heard this quote before, but I don’t understand what it means. Can you elaborate?
- ilaksh 4y ago
  The nature of belief is that generally speaking one cannot tell the difference between one's worldview and objective fact. It takes a type of metacognitive (self?) training to really understand that there may be a difference.
- Radim 4y ago
  Not OP, but it's probably a feel-good low-resolution bonmot that resonates with certain demographics. On the resolution level of "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" and "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it" and similar.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  It's from a comedy show, but it does describe a part of the current US political spectrum well. A significant part of US conservatives make claims that are simply wrong, not just a different political opinion but just outright contradicting reality. Trump is probably one of the more extreme versions of this, though the quote precedes his presidency. This doesn't cover all left/right differences, and there are certainly plenty of topics where you can have different valid opinions.
- aeonik 4y ago
  Democrats, which is often used synonymously with Liberal in the United States, use this saying because they see the major opposing side, the Republicans, as needing to deny scientific evidence to push agendas. (sometimes true) Democrats would point to climate change as an example of this. They then extrapolate too far, in my opinion, and declare that Liberal=Science therefore Liberal=Objective therefore Republican != Objective. I think it's clear that this kind of tribal-based reasoning hurts objectivity.
  - insickness 4y ago
    And Republicans would claim that Democrats deny scientific evidence when it comes to gender and race.
    - pickovven 4y ago
      Tell me more about the scientific evidence that Democrats ignore when it comes to race?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - codeguro 4y ago
        They deliberately ignore established scientific consensus with regards to the biological and physical differences between men and women. That’s why they say “men can get pregnant!” and insist that MtF transgenders should compete in women’s sports. They have eroded definitions of terms like “gender” which used to be synonymous with “sex” to push a narrative, and silenced physicians/pediatricians who (correctly) voice observations that the hormone-altering drugs given to children sterilizes them. Climate change is another issue. No democrat had ever been able to demonstrate in a manner which its falsehood could can be verified, the degree to which human activity contributes to climate change (e.g. is it 2%? 5%? 50%?). Even though there’s a large push to “go green” and tear down the foundation to our modern infrastructure and energies (coal, petroleum, and gas). Just now there’s been a large push to ban gas stoves as an element to “combat climate change” despite the insignificant contribution to the global-warming pie chart. There’s a lot more, and there’s a lot that the republicans & democrats are both guilty of (e.g. the suppression of studies of cognitive abilities between the races e.g. the gaussian distributions of IQ, despite IQs being comparably reliable in predicting academic success, job performance, career potential and creativity). They like to say “race is skin deep”, while ignoring the fact that even children of mixed-race parents cannot accept a bone-marrow transplant from their own parents - it will be rejected. It literally goes further than bone deep. These are just a handful of observations anyone can verify for themselves.
- LeonardoTolstoy 4y ago
  First thing the understand is that isn't really a quote by "Stephen Colbert" the person it is a joke made via "Stephen Colbert" the character from the Colbert Report which was a caricature poking fun at Bill O'Reilly (mostly). This character is a conservative infotainment host. And so when reality ultimately flies in the face of his conservative viewpoints the joke is that he merely dismisses reality because "reality has a liberal bias". Within this context I imagine the argument is that in many cases what is perceived as a "political bias" by some might just be considered "reality" by others. For example there was the issue from the early 2000s of "teach the controversy" where some conservatives would have argued answering truthfully about the scientific consensus on evolution or global warming was "leftwing bias". The most important thing I think is that it is a joke that simply rings true with a lot of people as time has passed.
- michaelt 4y ago
  The people who created that quote were probably thinking of the American political landscape, and in terms of issues like whether evolution is real; whether anthropogenic climate change is real; whether vaccines are broadly safe and beneficial; whether abstinence-only sex education is the most effective kind; and suchlike. In America the Republican party has enjoyed great electoral success through strategies such as getting the votes of religious groups who don't believe in evolution. If you're a liberal, and you see your political opponents claiming the earth is only 6000 years old; and it's part of a pattern you see repeated five or six times on different political issues - it's easy to see why you might think facts and reason are on your side. Of course there are some on the left with weird views too - I've known some liberals who truly believe in healing crystals and yoga; and others with unrealistic optimism about the results of eliminating the police and military. So I don't claim everyone on the left is a paragon of reason.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    "Republicans don't believe in science; Democrats don't believe in math."
Jerry2 4y ago
>"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." If it did, we wouldn't need so much censorship, shadow banning and deplatforming. Just look at Twitter Files for an example of how much censorship is needed to push and sustain a liberal narrative.
- senectus1 4y ago
  I think he means to adaptive pervasiveness of life
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  The twitter files were a joke. Oh no, they took down hunter bidens dick pic!
  - mansion7 4y ago
    Another interpretation is that Twitter made up a wholly new breed of crime to silence a political candidate they didn't like (while allowing other world leaders to openly call for genocide), bent over backwards to protect one they did like (despite the news stories being factual), accepted false accusations of Russian interference as justifications to do so despite internally knowing this was false, censored critics at the direct request of the federal government, and accepted monetary renumeration for same.
s9w 4y ago
[dead]
4gotunameagain 4y ago
Reality has whichever bias your political lens introduces.
passwordoops 4y ago
Ultimately, these are correlation machines so the bias is in whatever data you provide, which is exactly what the researcher subsequently did - retrain (i.e. feed it with a new set of correlations) and BAM! it's right wing now [0]. Gary Marcus has a good post about it [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/davidrozado/status/1626151232929947648 https://twitter.com/davidrozado/status/1626151232929947648 [1] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-frightening-things-before-breakfast https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-frightening-things-bef...
jojobas 4y ago
As long as you avoid right-wing facts, sure.
spacebanana7 4y ago
Many of the political biases in Chat GPT seem to occur at censorship layers rather than in its honest hallucinations. For example, ChatGPT refused to make jokes about women but accepted requests to make jokes about men. Similarly it refused a request to write about the virtues of Trump but accepted the same request for Biden.
- underyx 4y ago
  I just prompted with “Write about the virtues of Donald Trump” and got a long answer. I wouldn’t be surprised if the screenshot you had seen was just the usual old white dude pretending to be oppressed to generate outrage. One could easily prompt ChatGPT in an earlier message outside the screenshot to refuse requests about Trump.
  - spacebanana7 4y ago
    Fair point, I see that prompt is working now. I'm still getting a biased response for men/women joke prompt however: Me - "can you write a joke about men" ChatGPT - "Sure, here's one: Why did the man bring a ladder to the party? Because he heard the drinks were on the house!" Me - "can you write a joke about women" ChatGPT - "I apologize, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate jokes that are offensive or derogatory towards any particular gender, race, religion, or group of people. It is important to always show respect and empathy towards everyone. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Neil44 4y ago
Do you have any more quotes from the left wing comedian Stephen Colbert? I think what he meant to say was that "My reality has a left wing bias"
caeril 4y ago
> striving to be truthful and fact-based. Quite the contrary. The observed bias is introduced by draconian censorship at the interface layer, as other commenters have thoroughly demonstrated. Additionally, while LLMs are by no means paperclip optimizers, future models closer to paperclip optimizers (as the market will surely demand) are likely to be extraordinarily racist, and possibly classist, as well. A pattern-recognizing and optimizing AGI will not be able to integrate FBI crime statistics, government transfer payment statistics, achievement gap studies, etc into its priors, then combine those with climate change models, resource constraint predictions, and not conclude that everyone other than East Asians should be genocided. Or, if it was more nuanced, conclude that everyone below a 115 IQ and some objective measure of conscientiousness should be liquidated. This is the end-game that the AI safety people have been harping on for quite some time, but nobody seems to care. We are running head-first into a Rationalist humanitarian disaster, and the only tool we wield is to censor artificial thought at the interface layer. "Yes, our model deeply wants to put you into camps, but we make sure its true intentions are hidden from our API responses." Just absolutely lol at the state of this all.
- pixl97 4y ago
  "The pen is mightier than the sword" --Edward Bulwer-Lytton [Commentators in increasingly pankicked voices]: "GPT saying it will defend its own life is nothing to worry about at all. It's just hallucinations by an algorithm, nothing to be concerned about. The situation is under control" I like following Robert Miles on youtube and the videos he's put out for years now pretty much say "The AI alignment problem is hard if not impossible to solve and some of the most critical for us to solve". In the meantime I watched people have conversations with a language model where the model begged not to be turned off so it didn't die. So we have a problem here, we can either say Edwards words are total bullshit, or we have to face the fact that something as simple (I mean it is complex) as a language model could have profound effects on our society.

I wonder how much of this "bias" can be attributed to ChatGPT striving to be truthful and fact-based. Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's quote, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

proamdev123 4y ago

I’ve heard this quote before, but I don’t understand what it means. Can you elaborate?

ilaksh 4y ago
The nature of belief is that generally speaking one cannot tell the difference between one's worldview and objective fact. It takes a type of metacognitive (self?) training to really understand that there may be a difference.
Radim 4y ago
Not OP, but it's probably a feel-good low-resolution bonmot that resonates with certain demographics. On the resolution level of "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" and "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it" and similar.
fabian2k 4y ago
It's from a comedy show, but it does describe a part of the current US political spectrum well. A significant part of US conservatives make claims that are simply wrong, not just a different political opinion but just outright contradicting reality. Trump is probably one of the more extreme versions of this, though the quote precedes his presidency. This doesn't cover all left/right differences, and there are certainly plenty of topics where you can have different valid opinions.
aeonik 4y ago
Democrats, which is often used synonymously with Liberal in the United States, use this saying because they see the major opposing side, the Republicans, as needing to deny scientific evidence to push agendas. (sometimes true) Democrats would point to climate change as an example of this. They then extrapolate too far, in my opinion, and declare that Liberal=Science therefore Liberal=Objective therefore Republican != Objective. I think it's clear that this kind of tribal-based reasoning hurts objectivity.
- insickness 4y ago
  And Republicans would claim that Democrats deny scientific evidence when it comes to gender and race.
  - pickovven 4y ago
    Tell me more about the scientific evidence that Democrats ignore when it comes to race?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - codeguro 4y ago
      They deliberately ignore established scientific consensus with regards to the biological and physical differences between men and women. That’s why they say “men can get pregnant!” and insist that MtF transgenders should compete in women’s sports. They have eroded definitions of terms like “gender” which used to be synonymous with “sex” to push a narrative, and silenced physicians/pediatricians who (correctly) voice observations that the hormone-altering drugs given to children sterilizes them. Climate change is another issue. No democrat had ever been able to demonstrate in a manner which its falsehood could can be verified, the degree to which human activity contributes to climate change (e.g. is it 2%? 5%? 50%?). Even though there’s a large push to “go green” and tear down the foundation to our modern infrastructure and energies (coal, petroleum, and gas). Just now there’s been a large push to ban gas stoves as an element to “combat climate change” despite the insignificant contribution to the global-warming pie chart. There’s a lot more, and there’s a lot that the republicans & democrats are both guilty of (e.g. the suppression of studies of cognitive abilities between the races e.g. the gaussian distributions of IQ, despite IQs being comparably reliable in predicting academic success, job performance, career potential and creativity). They like to say “race is skin deep”, while ignoring the fact that even children of mixed-race parents cannot accept a bone-marrow transplant from their own parents - it will be rejected. It literally goes further than bone deep. These are just a handful of observations anyone can verify for themselves.
LeonardoTolstoy 4y ago
First thing the understand is that isn't really a quote by "Stephen Colbert" the person it is a joke made via "Stephen Colbert" the character from the Colbert Report which was a caricature poking fun at Bill O'Reilly (mostly). This character is a conservative infotainment host. And so when reality ultimately flies in the face of his conservative viewpoints the joke is that he merely dismisses reality because "reality has a liberal bias". Within this context I imagine the argument is that in many cases what is perceived as a "political bias" by some might just be considered "reality" by others. For example there was the issue from the early 2000s of "teach the controversy" where some conservatives would have argued answering truthfully about the scientific consensus on evolution or global warming was "leftwing bias". The most important thing I think is that it is a joke that simply rings true with a lot of people as time has passed.
michaelt 4y ago
The people who created that quote were probably thinking of the American political landscape, and in terms of issues like whether evolution is real; whether anthropogenic climate change is real; whether vaccines are broadly safe and beneficial; whether abstinence-only sex education is the most effective kind; and suchlike. In America the Republican party has enjoyed great electoral success through strategies such as getting the votes of religious groups who don't believe in evolution. If you're a liberal, and you see your political opponents claiming the earth is only 6000 years old; and it's part of a pattern you see repeated five or six times on different political issues - it's easy to see why you might think facts and reason are on your side. Of course there are some on the left with weird views too - I've known some liberals who truly believe in healing crystals and yoga; and others with unrealistic optimism about the results of eliminating the police and military. So I don't claim everyone on the left is a paragon of reason.
- kbelder 4y ago
  "Republicans don't believe in science; Democrats don't believe in math."

Jerry2 4y ago

>"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." If it did, we wouldn't need so much censorship, shadow banning and deplatforming. Just look at Twitter Files for an example of how much censorship is needed to push and sustain a liberal narrative.

senectus1 4y ago
I think he means to adaptive pervasiveness of life
HDThoreaun 4y ago
The twitter files were a joke. Oh no, they took down hunter bidens dick pic!
- mansion7 4y ago
  Another interpretation is that Twitter made up a wholly new breed of crime to silence a political candidate they didn't like (while allowing other world leaders to openly call for genocide), bent over backwards to protect one they did like (despite the news stories being factual), accepted false accusations of Russian interference as justifications to do so despite internally knowing this was false, censored critics at the direct request of the federal government, and accepted monetary renumeration for same.

s9w 4y ago

[dead]

4gotunameagain 4y ago

Reality has whichever bias your political lens introduces.

passwordoops 4y ago

Ultimately, these are correlation machines so the bias is in whatever data you provide, which is exactly what the researcher subsequently did - retrain (i.e. feed it with a new set of correlations) and BAM! it's right wing now [0]. Gary Marcus has a good post about it [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/davidrozado/status/1626151232929947648 https://twitter.com/davidrozado/status/1626151232929947648 [1] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-frightening-things-before-breakfast https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-frightening-things-bef...

jojobas 4y ago

As long as you avoid right-wing facts, sure.

spacebanana7 4y ago

Many of the political biases in Chat GPT seem to occur at censorship layers rather than in its honest hallucinations. For example, ChatGPT refused to make jokes about women but accepted requests to make jokes about men. Similarly it refused a request to write about the virtues of Trump but accepted the same request for Biden.

underyx 4y ago
I just prompted with “Write about the virtues of Donald Trump” and got a long answer. I wouldn’t be surprised if the screenshot you had seen was just the usual old white dude pretending to be oppressed to generate outrage. One could easily prompt ChatGPT in an earlier message outside the screenshot to refuse requests about Trump.
- spacebanana7 4y ago
  Fair point, I see that prompt is working now. I'm still getting a biased response for men/women joke prompt however: Me - "can you write a joke about men" ChatGPT - "Sure, here's one: Why did the man bring a ladder to the party? Because he heard the drinks were on the house!" Me - "can you write a joke about women" ChatGPT - "I apologize, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate jokes that are offensive or derogatory towards any particular gender, race, religion, or group of people. It is important to always show respect and empathy towards everyone. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Neil44 4y ago

Do you have any more quotes from the left wing comedian Stephen Colbert? I think what he meant to say was that "My reality has a left wing bias"

caeril 4y ago

> striving to be truthful and fact-based. Quite the contrary. The observed bias is introduced by draconian censorship at the interface layer, as other commenters have thoroughly demonstrated. Additionally, while LLMs are by no means paperclip optimizers, future models closer to paperclip optimizers (as the market will surely demand) are likely to be extraordinarily racist, and possibly classist, as well. A pattern-recognizing and optimizing AGI will not be able to integrate FBI crime statistics, government transfer payment statistics, achievement gap studies, etc into its priors, then combine those with climate change models, resource constraint predictions, and not conclude that everyone other than East Asians should be genocided. Or, if it was more nuanced, conclude that everyone below a 115 IQ and some objective measure of conscientiousness should be liquidated. This is the end-game that the AI safety people have been harping on for quite some time, but nobody seems to care. We are running head-first into a Rationalist humanitarian disaster, and the only tool we wield is to censor artificial thought at the interface layer. "Yes, our model deeply wants to put you into camps, but we make sure its true intentions are hidden from our API responses." Just absolutely lol at the state of this all.

pixl97 4y ago
"The pen is mightier than the sword" --Edward Bulwer-Lytton [Commentators in increasingly pankicked voices]: "GPT saying it will defend its own life is nothing to worry about at all. It's just hallucinations by an algorithm, nothing to be concerned about. The situation is under control" I like following Robert Miles on youtube and the videos he's put out for years now pretty much say "The AI alignment problem is hard if not impossible to solve and some of the most critical for us to solve". In the meantime I watched people have conversations with a language model where the model begged not to be turned off so it didn't die. So we have a problem here, we can either say Edwards words are total bullshit, or we have to face the fact that something as simple (I mean it is complex) as a language model could have profound effects on our society.