8 ms·

I personally do not want the companies to release training data (at least for a while) because then it gives people leverage to neuter it. I don't want a sanit

I personally do not want the companies to release training data (at least for a while) because then it gives people leverage to neuter it. I don't want a sanitized LLM, and I don't have $60M lying around to train my own. Copyrighted material, sexual content, political opinions, throw it all in and release it please! Yes, reducing bias in the models is a noble goal, but introducing new bias and blindspots to do it is a no-no. Maybe I just got added to a list somewhere for having this opinion.

version_five 3y ago
100% agree. People that want training data released mostly just want to find something to attack, it has nothing to do with transparency.
threeseed 3y ago
> reducing bias in the models is a noble goal It's also a necessary goal in order for these models to be more broadly adopted. We've seen too many examples of bias in the training data set manifesting in ways that actively discriminate against people. Which is unethical and in many places illegal. And having copyrighted material and sexual content in your model will simply open you up to lawsuits as is happening right now between authors and OpenAI. Not sure that is a position most startups want to be in.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  College students don't want to be criminally charged with theft for pirating an $800 college textbook either. I'm not giving business advice, I'm giving humanity and knowledge propagation advice. As I mentioned, reducing bias is good so long as it doesn't introduce more bias elsewhere. The ultimate goal of course being a 100% bias free model.
- version_five 3y ago
  Nah, these are foundation models. Companies want to be able to put in guard rails that are applicable to their application, not start with a model lobotomized according to US tech company values. The censorship is about telling people how to think, like it always is, not for the good of the people using the models.
  - bick_nyers 3y ago
    Yup. Advance the foundation models as far as possible to create a representation of the internet/human experience and place safeguards on top. Don't want your LLM to be used to create erotic fanfiction? Instead of gutting the LLM, just put a detector on the query and answers feeding into the LLM. Thankfully, with a non-neutered model you have access to a tool than can be used to perform such detection...
    - pkdpic 3y ago
      Or tell another instance of the model to act as a constitutional-driven censor and let them duke it out.
      - bick_nyers 3y ago
        Now that's a fanfic I would read!
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > US tech company values Which do broadly align with the values across most of the world. But if you want to build something that has different values then go ahead. But you can't expect companies to be complicit in doing something which is unethical or illegal.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - goatlover 3y ago
      > Which do broadly align with the values across most of the world. Satire?
      - version_five 3y ago
        Colonialism
  - 3y ago
kristopolous 3y ago
We really need to somehow separate a bias towards accuracy as distinct from some bias towards say, a sports team. Using everything would be like taking a bunch of students final exams and then claiming the most common answers are the correct ones. This isn't how expertise and accuracy works. Most things worth doing are not only genuinely hard and complicated but something that only a minority subset of accomplished people can do consistently well in. Listening to everybody and incorporating their thoughts is only going to lead to wrong answers. Being selective is the key here unless you genuinely want say, answers about to space to involve aliens and UFOs - because way more people believe in that then there are qualified PhD astrophysicists in the world. Similarly, way more people believe in vaccine conspiracy theories then there are people with significant viral epidemiology backgrounds. This pattern is true in every field.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  Why is it a binary choice? "Most students would answer X, due to this common misconception about Y". As we have seen from history, there is not often an absolute truth to questions, only clusters of truths. We want our LLM to be able to perform reasoning, mathematics, and science, but expecting absolute truths in anything outside of those fields is a bit much. Wikipedia often takes a good approach here and strikes this balance well. You can represent the "crazies" and show their reasoning, and then draw attention to how it is commonly refuted. You don't get this if you just omit the "crazies" to begin with. Edit: What I'm saying is that you can include/represent these adjacent clusters of answers instead of asserting one cluster to be true and allow the correct answer to be represented organically. And guess what? Some people will still disagree for whatever reason they have to disagree. We should be taking all this AI alignment money and putting it into education imo.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    That's not how bullshit works. An expertise is needed from the reader when presented with false material. That's why so many people think parody news articles are real. If you have ever gone through any comment thread on the internet about climate change you'll find a large volume of climate deniers citing God, greedy liberals, George Soros, whatever. The people working with these fictions can always just add more fiction to fill in whatever hole. They aren't bound by reality or credulity. Actually understanding global climate systems takes an incredible amount of study. You just can't blurt out a few paragraphs of words and get people to stop believing in Jewish weather machine conspiracies or whatever they're thinking. We would have been done with that by now if this were the case. Dislodging bullshit is hard. Humanity only started figuring out how a few hundred years ago and we're still fucking it up - such as in the replication crisis
nomel 3y ago
> then it gives people leverage to neuter it Could you expand on that a bit?
goatlover 3y ago
Add me to the list. I share your opinion.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
> Copyrighted material, sexual content, political opinions, throw it all in and release it please! Why copyrighted material? Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works in a massive effort to replace the artists who made it? Why does everyone here hate artists so much? Do they not deserve any rights over their IP, eg, the right to say no when someone wants to make derivative works that replace them from it?
- paul_funyun 3y ago
  I can't imagine what goes through the head of someone who thinks they don't have the right to say no. They don't have the right to be listened to or the right to use state power to enforce a colloquial notion of IP and rights with no basis in law or fact, but they surely have the right to say "No!" In all seriousness, they're afraid because they aren't very pleasant. AI will write things people will like and enjoy hearing. Preachy artists these days just make works they think people ought to want, and ought to like. Getting moralism out of art will be a great technological accomplishment.
  - eropple 3y ago
    Moralism! In art! Heaven forfend. How dare that art have a message, right? Never in history, not once, before the Woke Tens and, I guess, the Woker Twenties did somebody have an opinion and encode it in allegory. It is a purely novel phenomenon and all known media before this dark age was absolutely without message and without any editorial lens to determine what is and is not to be depicted--for that, of course, would communicate values and ideas, and art simply did not do such a thing. More seriously: if you have this attitude for-reals and aren't Poe's Lawing me, perhaps you need a little more preaching aimed your way because your conception of art and the civic society is the closest thing I can think of to a humanities position being objectively wrong. The ideological soma of agree-with-you AI being desirable is scary enough stuff. Removing communication from art being a "great technological accomplishment" is fucking dystopic.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    I want to see the world where this happens, where everything that made life enjoyable is corporatized, standardized, optimized, one-dimensionalized. Since it will happen over the course of your lifetime, you'll get to see it happen - as things that were fulfilling cease to be, an ennui you can't escape sets in because you built every wall of your cage one by one, and all you can do is regret. And then the Black Mirror helmet comes off your head, everyone else points and laughs at you, and then puts the helmet back on.
Sterm 3y ago
[dead]
accrual 3y ago
> Yes, reducing bias in the models is a noble goal, but introducing new bias and blindspots to do it is a no-no. What other option would there be though? It seems like a binary field. You can either leave it wholly unaligned, or you can attempt to align the model, and you will introduce your own bias as a side effect. In the future, and in fact in the present, there is already a "gray market" for unaligned models. There will surely be market for these and they will sell just any other item on this market.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Yes, reducing bias in the models is a noble goal “Bias” is not a unidimensional thing (or even one with a meaningful magnitude); you can’t reduce bias, you can make it more transparent (better documented) so that you can evaluate appropriateness for particular uses. While I am not a big fan of the crew that pushes “alignment” as the main issue with regard to AI for other reasons, that’s a particularly good term for what is important – aligning the biases of the AI with the usage intent. “Reducing” bias makes sense only with regard to a specific usage intent.

version_five 3y ago

100% agree. People that want training data released mostly just want to find something to attack, it has nothing to do with transparency.

threeseed 3y ago

> reducing bias in the models is a noble goal It's also a necessary goal in order for these models to be more broadly adopted. We've seen too many examples of bias in the training data set manifesting in ways that actively discriminate against people. Which is unethical and in many places illegal. And having copyrighted material and sexual content in your model will simply open you up to lawsuits as is happening right now between authors and OpenAI. Not sure that is a position most startups want to be in.

bick_nyers 3y ago
College students don't want to be criminally charged with theft for pirating an $800 college textbook either. I'm not giving business advice, I'm giving humanity and knowledge propagation advice. As I mentioned, reducing bias is good so long as it doesn't introduce more bias elsewhere. The ultimate goal of course being a 100% bias free model.
version_five 3y ago
Nah, these are foundation models. Companies want to be able to put in guard rails that are applicable to their application, not start with a model lobotomized according to US tech company values. The censorship is about telling people how to think, like it always is, not for the good of the people using the models.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  Yup. Advance the foundation models as far as possible to create a representation of the internet/human experience and place safeguards on top. Don't want your LLM to be used to create erotic fanfiction? Instead of gutting the LLM, just put a detector on the query and answers feeding into the LLM. Thankfully, with a non-neutered model you have access to a tool than can be used to perform such detection...
  - pkdpic 3y ago
    Or tell another instance of the model to act as a constitutional-driven censor and let them duke it out.
    - bick_nyers 3y ago
      Now that's a fanfic I would read!
- threeseed 3y ago
  > US tech company values Which do broadly align with the values across most of the world. But if you want to build something that has different values then go ahead. But you can't expect companies to be complicit in doing something which is unethical or illegal.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - goatlover 3y ago
    > Which do broadly align with the values across most of the world. Satire?
    - version_five 3y ago
      Colonialism
- 3y ago

kristopolous 3y ago

We really need to somehow separate a bias towards accuracy as distinct from some bias towards say, a sports team. Using everything would be like taking a bunch of students final exams and then claiming the most common answers are the correct ones. This isn't how expertise and accuracy works. Most things worth doing are not only genuinely hard and complicated but something that only a minority subset of accomplished people can do consistently well in. Listening to everybody and incorporating their thoughts is only going to lead to wrong answers. Being selective is the key here unless you genuinely want say, answers about to space to involve aliens and UFOs - because way more people believe in that then there are qualified PhD astrophysicists in the world. Similarly, way more people believe in vaccine conspiracy theories then there are people with significant viral epidemiology backgrounds. This pattern is true in every field.

bick_nyers 3y ago
Why is it a binary choice? "Most students would answer X, due to this common misconception about Y". As we have seen from history, there is not often an absolute truth to questions, only clusters of truths. We want our LLM to be able to perform reasoning, mathematics, and science, but expecting absolute truths in anything outside of those fields is a bit much. Wikipedia often takes a good approach here and strikes this balance well. You can represent the "crazies" and show their reasoning, and then draw attention to how it is commonly refuted. You don't get this if you just omit the "crazies" to begin with. Edit: What I'm saying is that you can include/represent these adjacent clusters of answers instead of asserting one cluster to be true and allow the correct answer to be represented organically. And guess what? Some people will still disagree for whatever reason they have to disagree. We should be taking all this AI alignment money and putting it into education imo.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  That's not how bullshit works. An expertise is needed from the reader when presented with false material. That's why so many people think parody news articles are real. If you have ever gone through any comment thread on the internet about climate change you'll find a large volume of climate deniers citing God, greedy liberals, George Soros, whatever. The people working with these fictions can always just add more fiction to fill in whatever hole. They aren't bound by reality or credulity. Actually understanding global climate systems takes an incredible amount of study. You just can't blurt out a few paragraphs of words and get people to stop believing in Jewish weather machine conspiracies or whatever they're thinking. We would have been done with that by now if this were the case. Dislodging bullshit is hard. Humanity only started figuring out how a few hundred years ago and we're still fucking it up - such as in the replication crisis

nomel 3y ago

> then it gives people leverage to neuter it Could you expand on that a bit?

goatlover 3y ago

Add me to the list. I share your opinion.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

> Copyrighted material, sexual content, political opinions, throw it all in and release it please! Why copyrighted material? Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works in a massive effort to replace the artists who made it? Why does everyone here hate artists so much? Do they not deserve any rights over their IP, eg, the right to say no when someone wants to make derivative works that replace them from it?

paul_funyun 3y ago
I can't imagine what goes through the head of someone who thinks they don't have the right to say no. They don't have the right to be listened to or the right to use state power to enforce a colloquial notion of IP and rights with no basis in law or fact, but they surely have the right to say "No!" In all seriousness, they're afraid because they aren't very pleasant. AI will write things people will like and enjoy hearing. Preachy artists these days just make works they think people ought to want, and ought to like. Getting moralism out of art will be a great technological accomplishment.
- eropple 3y ago
  Moralism! In art! Heaven forfend. How dare that art have a message, right? Never in history, not once, before the Woke Tens and, I guess, the Woker Twenties did somebody have an opinion and encode it in allegory. It is a purely novel phenomenon and all known media before this dark age was absolutely without message and without any editorial lens to determine what is and is not to be depicted--for that, of course, would communicate values and ideas, and art simply did not do such a thing. More seriously: if you have this attitude for-reals and aren't Poe's Lawing me, perhaps you need a little more preaching aimed your way because your conception of art and the civic society is the closest thing I can think of to a humanities position being objectively wrong. The ideological soma of agree-with-you AI being desirable is scary enough stuff. Removing communication from art being a "great technological accomplishment" is fucking dystopic.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  I want to see the world where this happens, where everything that made life enjoyable is corporatized, standardized, optimized, one-dimensionalized. Since it will happen over the course of your lifetime, you'll get to see it happen - as things that were fulfilling cease to be, an ennui you can't escape sets in because you built every wall of your cage one by one, and all you can do is regret. And then the Black Mirror helmet comes off your head, everyone else points and laughs at you, and then puts the helmet back on.

Sterm 3y ago

[dead]

accrual 3y ago

> Yes, reducing bias in the models is a noble goal, but introducing new bias and blindspots to do it is a no-no. What other option would there be though? It seems like a binary field. You can either leave it wholly unaligned, or you can attempt to align the model, and you will introduce your own bias as a side effect. In the future, and in fact in the present, there is already a "gray market" for unaligned models. There will surely be market for these and they will sell just any other item on this market.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Yes, reducing bias in the models is a noble goal “Bias” is not a unidimensional thing (or even one with a meaningful magnitude); you can’t reduce bias, you can make it more transparent (better documented) so that you can evaluate appropriateness for particular uses. While I am not a big fan of the crew that pushes “alignment” as the main issue with regard to AI for other reasons, that’s a particularly good term for what is important – aligning the biases of the AI with the usage intent. “Reducing” bias makes sense only with regard to a specific usage intent.