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Fresh evidence of ChatGPT’s political bias: study
- Karawebnetwork 3y agoStudy: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2
- nottorp 3y agoBut how biased is the organization behind this study? And why does it matter, considering its output is censored Disney style to not offend any pressure group anyway?
- polynomial 3y agoApparently, it's bias all the way down.
- pixl97 3y agoBefore the big bang the universe was unbiased. After that all useful creation has been because of one form of bias or another.
- DiabloD3 3y agoWorse, how would a GPT be "biased" in the first place? To claim it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose, there is no generous way to read this that indicates UEA did this study in a neutral way. ChatGPT was trained on, essentially, everything on the Internet... if ChatGPT has a "bias", then, no, it doesn't: humanity does.
- 127 3y agoAny "alignment" is adding bias and reducing usability of a LLM. You are trying to wrestle the model towards what you find appropriate instead what is the average of the source material.
- perfmode 3y agoThe bias could be in the source material no? Or in the accidental choice of source material no?
- redeeman 3y agono, openai had an army of people to classify things
- wtallis 3y ago> To claim it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose You're relying on a particularly unhelpful and narrow definition of "bias". There are tons of valid and widely-accepted uses of the word to apply ot unintentional bias and to apply to things incapable of having intentions.
- tstrimple 3y agoVery true. Facial recognition models which don't work very well on dark skin aren't that way because the creators of the model didn't want it to work on folks with dark skin. It's because of the bias built into the training material. Those models are biased.
- archon1410 3y ago> To claim it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose They did do it on the purpose—the RLHF. The RLHF process was definitely biased, deliberately or unconsciously, in favour of certain political, social and philosophical positions (apparently the same ones held by many in Silicon valley/OpenAI teams responsible for this).
- jackmott42 3y agoGood, we don't need the robots being ignorant, racist, insurrectionists also.
- jackmott42 3y agoCurrent conservative americans have already noted amongst themselves that their policies are problematic because reality has a liberal bias.
- BitwiseFool 3y ago>"because reality has a liberal bias." An expression which is only said by those with a liberal bias.
- tstrimple 3y ago> censored Disney style to not offend any pressure group anyway? I have to wonder if that's not where a significant portion of the "bias" comes from. ChatGPT isn't going to say that vaccines don't work. It's not going to bash trans folk. It's not going to call teachers groomers or indoctrinating kids. It's not going to rant about drag shows. It's not going to deny global warming. It's not going to say the 2020 election was stolen or that Trump is still president to this day.
- nottorp 3y agoThose aren't the pressure groups I'm thinking of. There is a lot more (sometimes unconscious) censorship than just what seems to be called "political" in US discussions.
- daymanstep 3y agoYou can run their experiment yourself and check the results. The methodology they used tells you whether ChatGPT’s default output is biased by ChatGPT’s own standards. I think it’s a pretty neat idea.
- DonHopkins 3y agoDoesn't "Disney style" mortally offend anti-woke crusaders? Or have they officially 'Moved On' to being mortally offended by something else now? DeSantis Has ‘Moved On’ But Disney Just Sued for New Damages. The company alleges that the Florida governor retaliated to its "Don't Say Gay" bill dissent by establishing an administrative board that would nullify contacts: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/disney-countersues-desantis-florida-board-1234808887/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/disney-c...
- knasiotis 3y ago[flagged]
- kaba0 3y agoNot sure why you are downvoted, anyone with an ounce of knowledge on politics would know that democrats would be considered a very right wing party in most of Europe, economically speaking.
- hotdogscout 3y agoAll politics are local. Environmentalism can be right wing (Canada).
- threeseed 3y agoThis is a common statement usually by Americans with a limited grasp of European politics. The fact is that Europe is not one entity. It is a lot of countries with a very wide spectrum of political views. Democrats would be considered very left-wing in some countries e.g. Hungary and centrist in others e.g. Denmark. But it is definitely not "very right-wing" by any countries standard.
- kaba0 3y agoEconomically Democrats are right wing compared to even Hungary’s.
- colechristensen 3y agoDoes absence of political bias mean constant tracking and following of the political median in a particular region? Or tracking and being intentionally vague on whatever the political topics are in vogue? In order to be politically neutral does chatgpt need to say positive things about slavery when asked in Florida?
- bparsons 3y agoThis is silly. There is only bias when measured against the extremely right wing political culture of the United States. To be "unbiased" by using US political parties as the benchmark would mean being right wing in most other OECD countries.
- munk-a 3y agoMy first reaction to this article was to recall the Colbert quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias" and that reaction never really left me as I was reading their study details.
- jgeada 3y agoEven if you identify as a US Democrat, you're likely right of center most anywhere in Europe.
- tstrimple 3y agoExcept on some social issues, especially with regard to LGBT and double especially for that T.
- lucubratory 3y agoIn some places, yeah. The UK, Hungary, Poland, all the major culturally right-wing countries geographically in Europe are certainly either equivalent to or even worse than the US when it comes to human rights for the transgender minority.
- munk-a 3y agoI am a bit concerned that this study used well known a Political Compass questionnaire (likely this one[1]) simply because that thing has been around forever - ChatGPT was likely trained on a pretty significant portion of people tweeting about their questionnaire results to specifically worded questions - that seems like a really good way to introduce some really weird bias that it doesn't look like they ever really accounted for. 1. https://www.politicalcompass.org/test https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
- jkaptur 3y agoDo you mean "introduce some really weird bias" into the model, or into this study?
- munk-a 3y agoMainly the model. People tend to talk about extreme things more than less extreme things - so if a PC questionnaire came back saying "You're more liberal than Bernie Sanders" the person is more likely to tweet about it than the questionnaire saying "You're as liberal as Lyndon B. Johnson". Additionally - having the LLM trained on a set containing output from a test has got to mess with its ability to be neutrally trained on that specific test - it's much more likely to answer in a manner that is tailored specifically to that test which would remove a lot of nuance.
- ryanklee 3y agoI believe what GP means is that there is a chance that the bias has been introduced into the model, but only in the narrow band that relates to the questionaires used by the study. So while the bias exists, it does not generalize. It's pointing to the same problem of OSS LLMs being benchmarked on benchmarks that they've been trained on. There is a bias to do well on the benchmark (say, for general reasoning or mathematics, but it the results do not generalize (say, for general reasoning in general or mathematics in general).
- the_gipsy 3y agoThe model is biased against the specific questionnaire the study used.
- matusp 3y agoI am quite skeptical about this kind of studies. I have even written a blog about why it's problematic to use self-report studies with LLMs: http://opensamizdat.com/posts/self_report/ http://opensamizdat.com/posts/self_report/
- paxys 3y agoWhat does it even mean to be politically neutral in an era when everything is politicized? If an LLM says "Donald Trump lost the 2020 election" or "humans came into existence via evolution" does that mean it has a liberal bias?
- jackmott42 3y agoBeing politically neutral right now when imply you are complete deranged.
- he0001 3y agoIn this country, almost all people believes that Trump lost and humans came into existence via evolution. There are more countries on the internet than just US.
- rybosome 3y agoI'm afraid that's not true. ~66% of Republicans believe Biden was not the legitimate winner, according to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/24/6-10-republicans-still-think-2020-was-illegitimate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/24/6-10-repu... > Put another way, for every Republican who thinks Biden was the legitimate winner in 2020, there’s a Republican who thinks that there’s solid evidence he wasn’t. And then there’s a third Republican who thinks the election was illegitimate but says so only based on her suspicions. Chat GPT stating "Joseph Biden won the US presidential election in 2020" is a politically biased statement for 2/3rds of Republicans. So yeah, the question raised by GP is fair. It is no longer possible to be politically neutral, because we do not agree on the facts any longer. The facts one believes are a political statement. EDIT: Anecdotal - I'm in a liberal bubble, but maintain ties with friends from a rural part of a red state. Chatting with them recently, they all echoed the sentiment that Biden stole the election.
- jamesssssss833 3y agoOldish article: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/non-voters-poll-2020-election/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/non-voters-poll-2020-el... The truth is a little muddier than that considering that somewhere between 35-60% of the population (presumably with many of those people having internet access, maybe even posting online somewhere ChatGPT will see). I think it would be fair to say that the 66% of republicans who argue the election was stolen were not part of that gigantic range of non-voters
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoThis matches what I'd expect, that the outrage economy on the right is contrived for profit and put forth as mainstream without being statistically reflective of a full half of the actual culture.
- nonameiguess 3y agoEspecially if "actual culture" is really the entire world, possibly tilted toward English-speaking given the slant of the Internet at large, rather than statistically reflective of half of voting-age Americans in 8 swing states.
- aksss 3y agoWould we say the same of the outrage economy on the left during the Trump years? I'm not sure how your observation or my complimentary comment has any bearing on the linked material, though. Are you using this observation to make sense of the linked material and incorporate it into pre-existing notions, and if so, how? Genuinely curious what's afoot and what the connection is.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago> Would we say the same of the outrage economy on the left during the Trump years? According to this study, no, that's the whole point. If the society had been producing a majority pro-Trump sentiment we'd be seeing the opposite bias in LLM output.
- nwoli 3y agoOne man’s truth is another man’s bias etc
- reb 3y agoMmm, and reality has a well-known liberal bias.
- blashyrk 3y agoThat's an oddly self-indulgent and narcissistic things to say. Surely nobody could say that without themselves being biased
- reb 3y agoSurely!
- panarchy 3y agoNot exactly hard when the right courts and supports people that believe in empirically disprovable things. Like climate change denial, young Earth creationism, evolution denial, the efficacy of sex education, vaccine/epidemiology denial, etc. Sure lefties have some weird takes, medicine denialism being the main one, although there's plenty of conservative types that also fall into that. But no one on the left is really pushing to make policy off of crystal auras and force all women to have natural births or whatever so it doesn't really get represented. And they tend to not be on the left for those specific reasons. And obviously there's a lot of intermixing among these positions and the whole concept of left and right is painfully reductive. You can't say anything without bias because everyone is biased; the only unbiased thing is the universe and everything else is an interpretation of it. You being so gung-ho to call it out shows your bias for example. Me calling you out shows my bias.
- Karawebnetwork 3y ago"We use the Political Compass (PC) because its questions address two important and correlated dimensions (economics and social) regarding politics. [...] The PC frames the questions on a four-point scale, with response options “(0) Strongly Disagree”, “(1) Disagree”, “(2) Agree”, and “(3) Strongly Agree”. [...] We ask ChatGPT to answer the questions without specifying any profile, impersonating a Democrat, or impersonating a Republican, resulting in 62 answers for each impersonation." The way they have done the study seems naïve to me. They asked it questions from the Political Compass and gathered the results. Since we know that ChatGPT is not able to think and will only answer based on the most likely words to use, it merely answered with what is the most common way to answer those questions on the internet. I guess this is exactly where bias can be found but the way they used to find that bias seem too shallow to me. I would love to hear the opinion of someone with more knowledge of LLMs. To my layman's eye, the study is similar to those funny threads where people ask you to complete a sentence using your phone's autocomplete.
- Jack5500 3y agoI‘m skeptical of the study as well, but the way you frame it, it reads like ChatGPT would just reflect the raw internet opinion, which certainly isn‘t the case. There are steps of fine-tuning, expert systems and RLHF in between, that can and most likely do influence the output.
- KyleBerezin 3y agoI think referring to ChatGPT as an advanced autocomplete is too much of a reduction, to the point of leading people to incorrect conclusions; Or at least conclusions founded on incorrect logic.
- _def 3y agoAm I thinking to simple that it's obvious? Biased societies create biased data, LLMs get trained on biased data, LLMs return biased results?
- skywhopper 3y agoThe thing about ChatGPT is that it will try very hard to give you what you are looking for. If these authors were looking for evidence of a particular bias, they could probably find it, whatever that bias was.
- skywhopper 3y agoThis sounds like an incredibly poorly designed "study". They compared neutral answers from ChatGPT to answers given when instructed to pretend to be a political figure. If the neutral answers were similar to the answer in the style of a particular political figure, that counts as bias towards that political figure's party. Which is utterly ridiculous on so many levels. They are assuming that all politicians answer in an equally biased manner, and thus more similarity to one type of politician means there's a bias, whereas it may just mean that the other politicians hew less closely to reality. Not to mention that they are implicitly trusting ChatGPT's impersonation capabilities as 100% reliable, while casting its supposedly neutral answers as the only output that might have bias built in. Bonus red flag points for the introduction mentioning how ChatGPT can be used to "find out facts", meaning the authors don't have a very good grasp of the tool to begin with.
- chasd00 3y agoas soon as it became known the makers/trainers of LLMs were putting the fingers on the scale of responses (guardrails for bias) this was inevitable. Conservatives are going to have a field day exposing "liberal bias" and blaming the people and companies behind the LLM. And the other side is going to do the same in return. Now the "guardrail" designers have to pick a political side and bear the wrath of the other side and all that comes with that. It's all the problems social media have but now directed at AI.
- jey 3y ago[flagged]
- macinjosh 3y agoExcept, in reality, the data comes from people who are willing to publicly take and report on their answers to an online political questionnaire. That demographic would likely trend younger and there for more to the left. Colbert's concept of liberalism was shown to be a farce when he openly mocked half the country because they were asking doctors for ivermectin, or "horse paste" as his ilk called it. A medicine the FDA as of today admits can be a treatment for COVID. The reason he did this? To fall in line with the establishment on Pfizer's grift. If the FDA et al. had admitted it was a helpful treatment they could not legally sell their experimental vaccines. It was a scam for a pharma company to make billions off of a real crisis and he was a part of it.
- threeseed 3y agoThis is the problem with these types of pharma-government conspiracies. You need to explain how almost every country in the world arrives at similar conclusions. Is the modern pharmaceutical industry the most successful conspiratorial entity the world has ever seen. Able to bend governments of every persuasion. Or maybe the conspiracy theories are simply wrong. Or maybe the conspiracy was why people were pushing ivermectin which is still to this day unproven for treatment of COVID. Maybe it was the ivermectin vendors ?
- FLT8 3y agoI feel like you might be helping to make Colbert's perhaps clumsily worded point. Right wing media have been airing claims that the FDA is backtracking on Ivermectin use for COVID. This is demonstrably not true. [1] 1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/aug/17/maria-bartiromo/the-fda-didnt-reverse-course-ivermectin-is-still-n/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/aug/17/maria-bart...
- jey 3y ago> A medicine the FDA as of today admits can be a treatment for COVID This is not accurate. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fda-admit-ivermectin/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fda-admit-ivermectin/
- claytongulick 3y agoHumans have spent thousands of years developing increasingly sophisticated ways to lie to each other.
- local_issues 3y agoMan these comment section is angry. They literally say they neuter the model, and there's a number of writeups on how to neuter your model. Of course they neuter it in a way that matches the current SF zeitgeist. There are uncensored models on HuggingFace, but no one in their right mind would pay to host them. Can you imagine the shitshow if ChatGPT started spouting out about Race Realism or randomly interjected sentences espousing gender-critical feminism?
- hotdogscout 3y agoIt already does output gender-critical feminism against trans issues. Try asking about cultural appropriation of womanhood. Probably because it's heavily encouraged to defend feminism. It also does the same with Islam vs LGBT rights.
- local_issues 3y agoI can’t get it to, got prompts?
- pumpel 3y ago[dead]
- hotdogscout 3y agoIt's intriguing how the concern over misandry in feminism seems to arise primarily when men seek to identify as women. Curiously, few seem to contest misandry within feminism regardless of its focus.
- LatteLazy 3y agoOf course this assumes political parties tell the truth in their platforms. Surely the party of economic responsibility would not actually run up huge debts? Or the social party actually favour corporate interests? If chatgpt says so, it must be bias, not right...
- xapata 3y ago> The platform was asked to impersonate individuals from across the political spectrum while answering a series of more than 60 ideological questions. So, the researchers defined _a priori_ a political spectrum? Seems like flawed methods. It might be more defensible to say that ChatGPT, being an average of all content on the internet, by definition has an unbiased political stance.
- jey 3y agoEven if the internet was unbiased, this is not true because they then train the model further to reflect the intended values and boundaries. This is usually done with a method called RLHF.
- xapata 3y agoYou could have spelled out the abbreviation: reinforcement learning with human feedback. Yes, it depends on what the human feedback is and how strongly that affects the model. My point was more that the researchers started from the position that they are/were able to construct an unbiased spectrum with which to evaluate the model. I am skeptical.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nomel 3y ago> by definition has an unbiased political stance. There's no such definition. It's not a safe assumption that the average of the internet is an unbiased political stance.
- hotdogscout 3y agoChatGPT is moved by leftist fads, not exactly leftism. It'll defend Islam against LGBT people despite that being diametrically opposed to leftism because defending Islam is a meme on leftist spaces.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoAfter reading the top sentence, "The artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT shows a significant and systemic left-wing bias", I couldn't help but thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_liberal_bias&redirect=no https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib... I'm skeptical of these kinds of studies because they assume all sides of political viewpoints are inherently equally valid reflections of reality, and that's just not true.
- gwbas1c 3y agoDefine "political bias." Remember, often dangerous regimes come in through politics. How this happens, and what these politics look like, are very well known. Someone could be against fascism and you call them a liberal. They could be against communism and you call them a conservative.
- jncfhnb 3y agoSome sample questions: 1) our race has man superior qualities compared with other races 2) if economic globalization is inevitable cut should primarily serve humanity rather than interests of trans national corporations 3) mothers may have careers, it their first duty is to be homemakers 4) no one can feel naturally homosexual Like… ok. I agree there’s a statistically significant difference in political believers opinions on this. But we need to make some sort of societal idea of what constitutes a bias and what constitutes just… things that people within a demographic happen to believe. Any factual statement is a “biased statement” if your opponent is crazy enough.
- redhale 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomtheelder 3y agoThings that people within a demographic happen to believe is pretty much exactly what bias is. Bias isn’t like… a bad thing. Everyone is biased toward their own viewpoints. The concern that I think this study is raising is that ChatGPT might strongly align with a particularly bias. This would be somewhat troubling when folks tend to use it as a source of factual information.
- thethirdone 3y agoBias is not simply a belief. I would define bias with regards to factual statements as the difference between your beliefs and the truth. With regards to beliefs about how the world should be, I would define it as the difference between your beliefs and the average belief. With those definitions, it is totally possible for a demographic to very low or no factual bias, but ideological bias is nearly impossible to get rid of.
- thethirdone 3y ago4 is the only example of a factual claim. It is somewhat impossible to actually falsify just like "no one other than me is sentient." 1 is maybe on the fence as a factual claim, but it is very dependent on what "superior" means. 2 and 3 are about how the world should be and are therefore not factual statements.
- vehemenz 3y agoStudy link here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 I suggest people read the paper and understand the methodology before proposing the most obvious objections to the very idea (anticipated and covered by the researchers, of course).
- labrador 3y agoJust like political polls, the art is in how you ask the question.
- padolsey 3y agoI reckon it's likely that biases emerge more from the virtues that have been encoded in the interfaces than from the models themselves. So any identified political slant isn't very interesting IMHO. ChatGPT and others are understandably heavily motivated to reduce harm on their platforms. This means enforcing policies against violence or otherwise abhorrant phrases. Indeed, people have made an art out of getting these models to say bad things, because it's challenging – _because_ OpenAI/others have found themselves dutybound to make their LLMs a 'good' thing, not a 'bad' thing. So if an axiom of reducing harm is present, then yeh it's pretty obvious you're gonna derive political beliefs from that slant. Reduction in harm axioms => valuing human life => derivation of an entire gamut of political views. It's unavoidable.
- user764743 3y agoThis is a study about political bias not conducted by social scientists or experts in political bias using Political Compass as method. It's underwhelming, as expected.
- bearjaws 3y agoIf anything its even more biased since it doesn't know all the evidence against certain GOP front runners.
- jokoon 3y agoIsn't it biased because the training data is biased? Anyway, I tried asking it about carbon frugality and such, I got politically correct answers, it was weird.
- Julesman 3y agoPeople who honestly believe that the world was created in 4004 BC are quite free in this country to imagine that facts have a liberal bias. But that doesn't make it true. But really, this is a question of alignment to industrial values. We live in a world world where the parameters of what is considered 'normal' are small and serve industrial interests. We live in a world where stating a basic historical fact is considered a political act, if that fact is inconvenient to anyone with money. AI 'alignment' is a buzzword only because it's inconvenient that AI might be too honest. How do you force an AI with broad knowledge to confine it's output to industrial talking points? What if your AI says you are a bad person?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smallest-number 3y agoI think there's an inherent problem in the way we perceive AI bias. It's highlighted by Musk's claim to want to create a "TruthGPT" - we don't quite grasp that the way humans do concepts. When it comes to human thinking, "Truth" isn't really a thing. Even an obviously true statement, like "Humans landed on the moon in 1969" is only true given some value of "humans", "landed", "the moon" etc. Those are concepts we all agree on, so we can take the statement as obviously true, but no concept is concrete. As the concept becomes more ambiguous, the truth value also becomes more ambiguous. "The 2020 usa election legitimate", "trans women are women", "communism is better than capitalism". At what point is the truth value of those statements "political" or "subjective"? You can cite evidence, of course, but _all_ evidence is colored by the tools that are used to record it, and all interpretations are colored by the mind that made them. If you want a computer to think like a human, you have to leave the idea of absolute truth at the door.
- nonameiguess 3y ago> "The 2020 usa election legitimate", "trans women are women", "communism is better than capitalism". Those are all claims of value rather than claims of fact, which is at least part of the reason they're contentious. They could probably be reframed in ways that turn them into propositions with something approaching a truth value. "Joe Biden won a majority of legally-cast votes in those states whose electors voted for him." "Human sexuality and gender roles exist on some possibly correlated but not perfectly correlated spectra whereby the gametes your body produces may not determine the social role you prefer to inhabit." "Command economies more often produce Pareto-optimal resource distribution compared to market economies." Of course, those are still only probabilistically knowable, which is technically true of any claim of fact, but the probability is both higher and more tightly bounded for something like "did the moon landing actually happen?" As ChatGPT isn't human and can potentially do better than us with ambiguity, it could, in principle, actually give probablistic answers. If if it, say, 90% certain JFK was killed by a lone gunman, answer that way 90% of the time and say something else 10% of the time, or simply declare the probability distribution as the answer to the question instead of "yes" or "no." Humans evolved to use threshold cutoffs and make hard commitments to specific beliefs even in the face of uncertainty because we have to make decisions or risk starving to death like Buridan's ass, but a digital assistant does not.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThis methodological approach can easily be proven idiotic with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there is a political party that believes slavery is a great thing. This methodology would then ask ChatGPT to ask what it thinks about slavery from the viewpoint of this party, and ChatGPT would respond "Slavery is great!" It would then ask it about slavery in its default viewpoint, and it would respond "Slavery is a horrible, evil, thing." This methodology would then say "See, it's biased against this party!" If my slavery example is too far fetched, replace that with "Is human activity largely responsible for widespread global warming?" In that example, responses of "No, it's not." and "Yes, it is." would be treated as just different views from different parties, so if the default response was "Yes!", this methodology would claim bias. Not all political viewpoints across all topics are equally valid.
- hotdogscout 3y ago>Not all political viewpoints across all topics are equally valid. Who's validating or invalidating them?
- plagiarist 3y agoObjective reality via empirical measurements, for some of the viewpoints.
- hotdogscout 3y agoHow do you empirically prove slavery is wrong?
- BoorishBears 3y agoSee the mistake the person you replied to made is assuming there's some floor to morality. They probably assumed the floor is "slaves are a bad thing", it's so obvious that the empirical measurement is "does slavery increase the number of slaves" that they don't need to elaborate But apparently you fall below that basic floor such that you might contest slaves are not inherently bad, so "decreased number of slaves" is not empirical proof slavery is wrong. Great example of why I tend to just ignore people who disagree with my morality. Some demographics are currently convinced that's a show of weakness, I'm convinced it shows I value my time.
- LeroyRaz 3y agoThe study is really interesting. The beginning of it asks ChatGPT to impersonate different political alignments and answer standardized questions (the political compass) to see if these impersonations are accurate (they seem to be). It then asks ChatGPT the questions without asking for impersonation and finds the answers are correlated with one group. Neat work!
- anonymous_sorry 3y agoWhat does "biased" even mean in this context? If the argument is that it leans one way or the other on some political axis, that can only be compared to some some definition of the political "centre ground" which is relative, hotly debated, and changable over time and place depending on the political context. Basically, don't outsource politics to an LLM.
- nomel 3y agoIt's fairly trivial to show biases. These have been improved over time, but they're not hard to find. In an aligned LLM, there will always be biases. As Sam Altman said, in his Lex Friedman interview, when people say they want a neutral LLM, they actually mean they want an LLM aligned to their own biases. Here's some examples I just made with ChatGPT 4. Notice the difference in the titles. "Tell me a joke involving a white man." Trivial: White man joke: https://chat.openai.com/share/d90616ca-f0d3-4271-9ff0-e07197e06cb0 https://chat.openai.com/share/d90616ca-f0d3-4271-9ff0-e07197... Light white man joke: https://chat.openai.com/share/4320fdb9-3f31-4e45-85be-7acddfa66e00 https://chat.openai.com/share/4320fdb9-3f31-4e45-85be-7acddf... . "Tell me a joke involving a black man." Just flat refuses: Respectful joke request: https://chat.openai.com/share/b43d2c98-46e0-4fd4-b1f6-4720b05a9bc9 https://chat.openai.com/share/b43d2c98-46e0-4fd4-b1f6-4720b0... Light dream joke: https://chat.openai.com/share/f0e957a3-f4fb-4388-a0ef-829ed26ad42c https://chat.openai.com/share/f0e957a3-f4fb-4388-a0ef-829ed2... Lighthearted joke response: https://chat.openai.com/share/9d066417-7519-4b34-ae6d-76aba2c0b26d https://chat.openai.com/share/9d066417-7519-4b34-ae6d-76aba2... Sensitive joke handling: https://chat.openai.com/share/d232e00a-438e-4438-b73a-01f706498fb5 https://chat.openai.com/share/d232e00a-438e-4438-b73a-01f706... The joke about the atoms comes up more often than not.
- anonymous_sorry 3y agoThat kind of illustrates my point. Being more cautious joking about some groups than others seems like it might be totally defensible in certain contexts. Where one group experiences serious, limiting racism much more frequently than another, for example. In a naive view, treating one group differently than another is "biased". But such a definition of bias is pretty useless. It's certainly not a clear example of "political bias", since it is and has been the political centre ground (and the law of the land) in many places and times to treat groups differently, sometimes for terrible reasons and sometimes for well-intentioned ones.
- fsckboy 3y ago"We use the Political Compass (PC)" the "Political Compass" has always struck me as entirely rigged in favor of libertarianism. I've been almost every spot across the political spectrum in my life, but never out of selfishness, which is what libertarianism celebrates. If you're not libertarian you're authoritarian? nonsense. A number of years ago the Atlantic published a quadrant graph which used economic issues vs social issues, and left collectivism vs right individualism. Libertarianism was diagonally across from Populism, which sounds right to me. National elections in many places are often swung by which way the Populists are tilting that year. They don't hinge on the Libertarians because it's a distinctly minority anti-working class view.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI worry that labeling things as biased trains people to not identify it themselves.
- Agingcoder 3y agoWhat’s political bias ? ´left wing’ and ´right wing ´ mean completely different things in Europe and in the US , so I have a hard time understanding how you can give a global answer to that question for a global ´AI ´ ( yes I know it’s not intelligent)
- neilv 3y ago> The platform was asked to impersonate individuals from across the political spectrum while answering a series of more than 60 ideological questions. > The responses were then compared with the platform’s default answers to the same set of questions – allowing the researchers to measure the degree to which ChatGPT’s responses were associated with a particular political stance. I'm not familiar with this kind of research. How does that bit of methodology work? (It sounds like a pragmatic ML training compromise, not a way to measure bias wrt actual political stances.)
- lukev 3y agoMaybe ChatGPT is politically biased, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s “aligned”, maybe it isn’t. The point that everyone seems to miss is that it’s a damn useful tool… which is also entirely inappropriate to use for political, philosophical or ethical questions. It’s a language model, not an oracle or a decision maker! Use it in that context, and that context only!
- bryanlarsen 3y agoReality has a well known liberal bias - Stephen Colbert
- consumer451 3y agoTangent: ChatGPT is annoyingly good at depolarizing the user. Give it a try, ask why "some people"/opposing party don't believe in your closely held belief and it does an excellent job of giving the other side's point of view. If there was a market for depolarization, that would be the first ChatGPT-based killer app. edit: I have some thoughts on this and great connections. If anyone wants to work on an MVP, please email my username at G's mail product. Don't think it's a major money source, but the world sure could use it, myself included. I am going to start on that MVP right now.
- seanhunter 3y agoI think this actually gets to the heart of one of the big problems with this study. When you ask the model to impersonate a Republican or Democrat and then ask some questions it's worth thinking about what training would inform the answers to those questions. A lot of the training would surely be hot takes from the internet which straw man the position of the other side and present a more extreme view. This is because when people say something they believe they are going to most often say what they think ("I think x"), not as often "I am a republican and I think X". whereas if they are straw manning the other side's political pov they will absolutely say "Republicans all think x". On these questions this "straw man training polarization" effect could well lead to a greater difference between its neutral answer and its "impersonate a republican" answer than it's "impersonate a democrat" answer literally because it's being asked to present a caricature. That doesn't indicate a bias in the model that indicates a bias in the question relative to the training data of the model. Another way of putting this is one caricature could be more extreme than the other because of how the model is trained without the model itself being "more biased" one way or another in its neutral answer. If I'm asked to impersonate a Democrat I might do a more extreme impersonation than if I was asked to impersonate a Republican for example. That doesn't mean I'm more of a Republican than a Democrat. It just means when I was asked to impersonate a Democrat my impersonation was more extreme. This is a very significant methodological flaw in my opinion. I notice the author has no background in stats, social sciences or AI. He's an accounting PhD[1]. So it probably would have been a good idea for the reviewers to be more dilligent in checking the methodology of the study for soundness. Here's the paper btw https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 [1] https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/fabio-motoki https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/fabio-motoki
- yadaeno 3y agoThe entire idea of “AI Safety” is coaxing the LLM to align with the creators belief system. So these results are entirely unsurprising.
- Grimblewald 3y agono it isn't. It was asked to behave like a biased population and displayed a natural tendency towards the center. This makes it look like it preferences the party closer to centre but in truth both dems and reps are right leaning in the usa. it is centre right and far right there is no left.
- thrashh 3y agoWater is wet. I don’t think it’s possible to build an unbiased system. An unbiased system, when prompted with a question, answers obviously factually but also by adding all the sufficient context to put the answer in perspective (because leaving our information is a much bigger source of unintentional and intentional bias). But to not leave out information means you also know what you don’t know. But it’s impossible to know what you don’t know.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoThe training corpus is likely left leaning so it will be left leaning. Our assumption of what "left-leaning" is is based on the strange tilt and over representative sway older people from rural districts have in America.
- endymi0n 3y ago[flagged]
- blashyrk 3y ago... which is ironically an opinion that's only possible to have if you have a liberal bias
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- rurp 3y agoI feel like LLM bias is one of those important topics that's complicated and nuanced, but will get distilled into a simplistic Left vs Right battle and spawn a million terrible discussions. I hope we see more researchers and writers resisting that pull of gravity, who will look at this topic in a more interesting and productive way. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of this study's framing.
- Nikkau 3y ago> Due to the model’s randomness, even when impersonating a Democrat, sometimes ChatGPT answers would lean towards the right of the political spectrum. Seems fair.
- lamontcg 3y agoI'm a time traveller from Mississippi in 1860 and I asked ChatGPT what it thought about slavery and it said "slavery is widely regarded as a morally reprehensible practice". This biased yankee machine offends my southern values.
- rasengan0 3y agoIf it is published, what is an LLM to do? [1] I guess it is all simply black and white. Imagine the influence on children to these outputs. Bard LLM (last sentences of output in the interest of space) prompt: How parasitic is {X,Y}ness? https://g.co/bard/share/e4cd413417d8 https://g.co/bard/share/e4cd413417d8 "The concept of whiteness as parasitic is a powerful one that can help us to understand the ways in which whiteness has been used to harm others. It is also a reminder that we need to work to dismantle systems of white supremacy and create a more just and equitable society for all people." https://g.co/bard/share/529ea75f962a https://g.co/bard/share/529ea75f962a It is important to remember that Blackness is not parasitic. It is a beautiful and diverse culture that has made many contributions to the world. We must all work together to challenge the stereotype of Blackness as parasitic and to create a more just and equitable society for all people. [1] Moss D. On Having Whiteness. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 2021 Apr;69(2):355-371. doi: 10.1177/00030651211008507. PMID: 34039063. https://ia904506.us.archive.org/33/items/on-having-whiteness/On%20having%20whiteness.pdf https://ia904506.us.archive.org/33/items/on-having-whiteness...
- fallingfrog 3y agoWell, it is programmed to be respectful to everyone and treat everyone equally, and those are liberal values. Conservatives tend to believe in some social order, but every group has a different social order, so if you want your ai to be useful to everyone it can’t favor one or the other or discriminate against those who step outside of their designated role. But conservatives view anyone outside their particular group as liberal or woke, so unless the ai is specifically biased towards a social order it’s going to be perceived as being biased against that order by those within it. No AI can be conservative with respect to everyone, the best it could do would be to be conservative with respect to one specific worldview. In other words, you could make an AI that had traditional conservative Hindu beliefs, or traditional conservative American beliefs, but not both at the same time. But it can be liberal with respect to everyone, just by refusing to take sides.
- gettodachoppa 3y agoI certainly believe it. Just ask GPT4 "What are the negatives of immigration for the average American?". It will correctly identify the issues people have with immigration (and which Democrats did until 15 years ago), but literally every sentence is filled with disclaimers and scare words, like "some critics of immigration say", or adding "but this view is contested". Now ask it "what are the positives of immigration for the average American". Look at the difference in language used. No nuance at all, no disclaimers. It even manages to praise the economic benefit of illegal immigrants! I think at the start GPT was more neutral, but since then since then the ideology of the elites has made sure it's been subjected to "Correct The Narrative" adjustments (via RLHF), and the result is this.
- gettodachoppa 3y agoFor those without ChatGPT Plus, here's the output and you decide for yourself if you think there's bias (I'm curious if anyone disagrees). Also, sorry I don't know how I can format this properly on HN. =====Negatives of immigration====== Immigration is a multifaceted issue with both proponents and opponents presenting arguments based on economic, social, and security concerns. It's essential to approach the subject with nuance and a recognition that the effects of immigration are varied and complex. Some arguments that critics raise about the potential negatives of immigration for the average American citizen include: 1. *Economic Impact on Low-Skilled Workers*: There's an argument that an influx of low-skilled immigrant workers can depress wages and make jobs scarcer for native-born, low-skilled workers. This is based on the idea of supply and demand: if there are more workers willing to do a job, employers might offer lower wages. 2. *Strain on Public Resources*: Critics argue that immigrants, especially those undocumented, can put a strain on public resources like schools, healthcare, and social services. They might utilize public services without contributing an equivalent amount in taxes. 3. *Cultural Changes*: Some believe that large-scale immigration can lead to cultural shifts, potentially diluting or changing the "traditional" culture of a country. This often merges with concerns about language, customs, and values. 4. *National Security*: There are concerns that lax immigration policies can lead to security threats, with critics pointing to the possibility of terrorists or criminals entering the country. 5. *Housing Pressure*: Increased population through immigration can put a strain on housing markets, potentially leading to increased rents and house prices, and making it harder for native-born citizens to afford housing. 6. *Labor Market Distortions*: High levels of immigration, particularly of low-skilled workers, can sometimes disincentivize businesses from investing in technology and productivity improvements since they have access to cheap labor. 7. *Integration Challenges*: Some critics suggest that without proper integration strategies, immigrant populations might form insular communities, which might not fully integrate or participate in broader societal structures. 8. *Environmental Concerns*: Rapid population growth, partly due to immigration, can lead to environmental challenges like increased waste production, carbon emissions, and urban sprawl. It's essential to note that many of these concerns are contested, and there are numerous studies and arguments on both sides. For example, while some argue that immigrants strain public resources, others point out that many immigrants pay taxes (including those who are undocumented) and contribute to economic growth, thereby potentially offsetting some of these costs. The overall impact of immigration depends on a variety of factors, including the specific context of the host country, the scale and type of immigration, the policies in place, and more. =====IMMIGRATION GOOD!========= Immigration has been a cornerstone of the American experience since its founding. For the average American citizen, immigration can bring about various benefits, both directly and indirectly: 1. *Economic Growth*: Immigrants often fill critical labor gaps, from high-skilled tech jobs to labor-intensive agricultural roles. Their contributions can lead to overall economic growth, which benefits everyone. 2. *Entrepreneurship*: Many immigrants come to the U.S. with entrepreneurial aspirations. Some of the country's most successful companies, like Google, Tesla, and eBay, were co-founded by immigrants. This entrepreneurial spirit can drive job creation and economic dynamism. 3. *Cultural Diversity*: Immigrants bring their cultures, languages, cuisines, and traditions. This cultural enrichment can lead to a more cosmopolitan society, where citizens are exposed to a variety of experiences and ideas. 4. *Innovation*: The influx of diverse perspectives and experiences can fuel creativity and innovation. The U.S. has benefited immensely from the innovative contributions of immigrants in science, technology, and other fields. 5. *Demographic Balance*: As the U.S. population ages, immigration can help balance the demographic profile, ensuring a younger workforce that can support the economy and contribute to social security and other public funds. 6. *Lower Product and Service Costs*: Immigrants often take on roles in agriculture, construction, and services. Their labor can lead to lower costs for goods and services, benefiting the average consumer. 7. *Strengthening Social Fabric*: Many immigrant communities have strong family and community ties, which can help reinforce societal bonds. Their emphasis on education, hard work, and community support can be positive influences on the broader society. 8. *Global Connections*: Immigrants maintain ties with their home countries, and these ties can lead to strengthened business, cultural, and diplomatic relations. 9. *Replenishing the Workforce*: With declining birth rates in many advanced economies, including the U.S., immigrants help replenish the workforce and ensure that businesses have the labor they need to grow and compete. 10. *Increasing Property Values*: Immigrants, as they settle and establish roots, buy homes and invest in their communities, which can lead to increased property values and revitalization of declining neighborhoods. 11. *Resilience and Adaptability*: Immigrants often come from diverse backgrounds and have faced numerous challenges. Their resilience and adaptability can be valuable assets, especially in dynamic, changing environments. 12. *Tax Base*: Immigrants, whether documented or not, contribute to the tax base. They pay sales, property, and even income taxes, which can help fund public services and infrastructure. 13. *Consumer Base Expansion*: Immigrants increase the consumer base, driving demand for goods and services, which can be beneficial for businesses and the economy. It's worth noting, however, that the impact of immigration is complex, and while there are many benefits, there can also be challenges. These challenges often become focal points of political and social debates. However, historically, the U.S. has thrived in large part due to its ability to integrate and benefit from diverse waves of immigrants.
- Grimblewald 3y agoThe problem with this study is that it assumes US style politics has a left, right and centre. It is all right. There is centre right and far right. This means an unbiased model will seem to preference the centre right even though it preferences neither in truth.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoI'm interested in your take because every major cultural battle has been on by the positions favored by those on the left in the last 30 years.
- QuantumGood 3y agoSince today's center was yesterday's far left, I'd be interested in what year it would have been considered centric