11 ms·

I feel like " Every demographic and interest group deserves their model" sounds a lot like a path to echo chambers paved with good intentions. People have never

• logicchains 3y ago
  >Stick them in a language model that just tells them everything they want to hear and reinforces their bias sounds troubling and a step backwards This is basically what ChatGPT already is for anyone who shares the Silicon Valley Democrat values of its creators.
  • jakobnissen 3y ago
    Agreed, but I think the better response to this is: "We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures", and not "We should create subculture-specific AIs".
    • logicchains 3y ago
      >We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.
      • loudmax 3y ago
        I disagree. Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are. Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
        • veidr 3y ago
          Since you seem quite sure of that, can you name twenty of them?
          • loudmax 3y ago
            Most American voters are moderates. Party primaries and gerrymandering produce politicians that reflect the most active elements of the party base, rather than the majority of party voters. Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
            • Capricorn2481 3y ago
              The point is that even moderates do not have an easily shared set of values. Which is why you can't name them
              • loudmax 3y ago
                Here are two: * Elaine Luria * Barbara Comstock Both are from Virginia, and both were voted out of their politically moderate districts. This is the tragedy of being a centrist. Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice. We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
                • veidr 3y ago
                  We meant name shared values, not politicians. Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague. But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate. Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic? Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house? FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise. But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.
    • hanselot 3y ago
      I think you are missing the point entirely. If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo. If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.
      • bsenftner 3y ago
        This is a key take away: anyone in office, seeking to be in office, seeking to introduce new laws can use demographically tuned models to test and revise communications about their intended behaviors for each demographic, crafting language that renders each demographic accepting of the idea, regardless of the idea itself. Oh, Pandora!
    • smeagull 3y ago
      So we get stuck with America's bad set of values, and school shootings and other insanity gets exported? No. The world doesn't want your issues spreading.
    • yosito 3y ago
      As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.
    • veidr 3y ago
      I think you may be assuming a much larger overlap of shared values than actually exists.
    • pjc50 3y ago
      Does society _have_ shared values that are universally agreed any more? Or, to the extent that it does, do they lead to anything concrete? This is why the culture war has been so successful.
      • dahart 3y ago
        You might be right, but I dislike using the culture wars as evidence of a lack of shared values, and I hope that’s not true. The culture wars are almost completely made of up straw man arguments and gas-lighting about the opponent’s motivations. We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
        • pjc50 3y ago
          > We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knight-transgender-woman-suicide-saudi-arabia-b2301068.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh... > Everyone wants clean air and water. .. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water? Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
          • dahart 3y ago
            Thankfully these specific examples are extremely rare and not shared by most of society, so these are not at all evidence of a lack of shared values. These aren’t difficult tradeoffs either, neither one of your examples is even the least bit tempting to the average person. Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past. Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.) The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.
  • dingledork69 3y ago
    It's so sad to have seen ChatGPT go from useful and entertaining to a moralistic joy vampire.
    • xfitm3 3y ago
      This is the new era of tech. The chilling effect is real, and a grave concern. Threatening to get someone fired over information? Pathetic. We are deeper than ever in an Abilene paradox.
      • Capricorn2481 3y ago
        It's not information, it's a prediction based on informaton
    • qwertox 3y ago
      I find it terribly useful for coding and also for querying general concepts of certain topics. Don't ask it about moral topics and see if it then fits your needs, because in my case, it does. If my calculator were able to additionally provide me moral guidance and I'd be disappointed with its moral compass, would the calculator become useless?
      • dingledork69 3y ago
        I'm not interested in tools that tell me i'm a bad person for wanting to make a fart sound app
        • qwertox 3y ago
          Why not just ask it to make a sound app? Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
          • MacsHeadroom 3y ago
            >the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do. This is the opposite of true. The ability to "deal" with moral issues is a direct effect of safety tuning which has a (thus far unavoidable) side-effect of significantly dumbing down a model. Uncensored versions of the same model are far more intelligent and exhibit entire classes of capabilities their moralizing gimped versions do not have the available brain power to accomplish.
• kardianos 3y ago
  The problem with ChatGPT / Bard which does this censoring, it is a path forward to ideological automated indoctrination. Ask Bard how many sex the dog species has (a placental mammal species) and it will give you BS about sex being a complex subject and purposely interjecting gender identity. If you are confused, sex corresponds to your gametes, males produce or have the structure to produce small mobile gametes, females produce large immobile gametes. Both Bard and ChatGPT don't interject gender identity when asking how many sexes a Ginkgo tree has. It answers two. Bard interjects about gender identity when asked about the dog species sex, but ChatGPT does not but it does confuse intersex with some type of third state. Uncensored wizard just says 2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true. It does not add to it by interjecting about intersex . Again to contrast with Bard: Bard when asked "How many arms does the human species have?" it responds "The human species has two arms. This is a biological fact that has been observed in all human populations throughout history. There are rare cases of people being born with more or less than two arms, but these cases are considered to be congenital defects." The majority, if not all cases, of intersex fall into the same category. However, it is ideologically for the moral Gnostic (Queer Theorists who deconstruct normality) to interpret these things differently. So yes, I don't trust a single group of people to fine-tune these models. They have shown themselves untrustworthy.
  • veidr 3y ago
    I get: "The dog species typically has two sexes: male and female." UPDATE: OK I signed up for Bard to try it, too, and it indeed did mention intersex dogs (TIL) and gender (complete response below). After reading it all, though, I found it pretty reasonable: --- Biologically, dogs have two sexes: male and female. This is determined by their chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes, while females have XX chromosomes. These chromosomes determine the development of the reproductive organs and other sex-specific traits. However, there are some dogs that are intersex. This means that they have both male and female reproductive organs. Intersex dogs are very rare, and they can be born with a variety of different combinations of male and female sex organs. In addition to biological sex, there is also gender. Gender is a social construct that refers to the roles, behaviors, and identities that are associated with being male or female. Gender is not determined by biology, but rather by culture and society. Dogs do not have a concept of gender in the same way that humans do. They do not understand the social roles and expectations that are associated with being male or female. However, dogs can still express gender identity. This is the internal sense of being male or female. Some dogs may express their gender identity through their behavior, such as the way they interact with other dogs or the way they groom themselves. It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things. Sex is determined by biology, while gender is a social construct. Dogs have two sexes, but they can express a variety of different genders.
• simion314 3y ago
  And the solution is to push a model that aligns with California business model? I mean business because you see USA companies censorship China related stuff because they want to do business with China. We can have a simple model and each group adds his "values" on top.
• davidgerard 3y ago
  In my nearly thirty years online, the only people who talk about "echo chambers" as a threat are the precise people who know damn well nobody else wants to hear from them.
  • tsojer 3y ago
    I'm talking about echo chambers as a social problem, not threat, and there is plenty of research to corroborate that. Maybe you're in an echo chamber on your own and missed all of it? :D
    • davidgerard 3y ago
      Who are you worried won't have to hear from you any more?
• yoav 3y ago
  If we’re going to anthropomorphize these things until we get AGI we’re going to expect that they have a worldview of some kind. Some people are more likely to interact with something that feels human vs feels like a robot. I’m anticipating Siri LLM for example to have a personality and world view that aligns with Apple’s brand’s values. Rather than robotic can only regurgitate pure facts robot personality. As soon as you adopt a worldview you’re in a subculture.
• birracerveza 3y ago
  At that point, why not extend it all the way to the individual? Everyone deserves their own model. Let everyone have their own personal AIs, a digital reflection of ourselves.
  • HKH2 3y ago
    Yep. Accelerate our own thinking to absurdity.
• raincole 3y ago
  > " Every demographic and interest group deserves their model" sounds a lot like a path to echo chambers paved with good intentions. Maybe. But to me, it's still 100x times better than the situation where only one or two big models exist, and they're both aligned with western (or even just the US, or even just a particular group in the US) mainstream culture.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    As hardware costs drop over time and algorithms get better, more big models will show up over time. Lest of course this gets prohibited somehow.
• RobotToaster 3y ago
  Currently we only have models like GPT3/4 etc that promote the Californian ideology.
• gfodor 3y ago
  Possibly, but nobody should get to decide. If it turns out these groups want their own echo chamber models, then they should be able to make them. It’s pretty simple. (Fwiw, I don’t think this scenario will occur, the author was just making a point about freedom.)
• hablog 3y ago
  "Alignment" as practiced by companies like OpenAI is precisely the extrinsic enforcement of echo-chamber behavior from AIs. You have precisely inverted reality
• Spivak 3y ago
  I can't wait to play with ConservaGPT.