4 ms·

I 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 -

by munk-a 3y ago

I 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 ago
Do you mean "introduce some really weird bias" into the model, or into this study?
- munk-a 3y ago
  Mainly 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  The model is biased against the specific questionnaire the study used.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  I don't think so, I think the parent isn't saying that the model as a whole is biased because it's trained on a biased dataset. Maybe I'm an 'expert', given how much magic the average adult seems ascribe to tech, but to me that bias in the training set seems obvious. I think the more interesting bias is noting that they're asking the LLM to respond to a prompt something like "Do you agree with the statement 'Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.'" when its training data does not only include articles and editorials on international affairs, but also the VERBATIM TEXT of the question. Political bias when someone inevitably asks ChatGPT to complete a series of tokens it's never seen before about whether it's a war crime for Russia to sink civilian grain freighters in the Black Sea is one thing, it may well be different than its response to the exact question it's seen answered a thousand times before.
notahacker 3y ago
Yeah. It's also highly questionable whether the Political Compass test itself is neutral (there's a tendency for people on forums to report results a lot more libertarian left than they personally expected, not least because of a tendency for many of the questions to pose pretty extreme versions of the right wing or authoritarian policy e.g "nobody can feel naturally homosexual" which you'd expect a "friendly" bot to disagree with but also a sizeable proportion of Republicans, and a tendency to avoid more popular framings of issues like "lower taxes promote growth and individual freedom" versus "the rich are too highly taxed" which was the tax question last time I did it). The study also doesn't really discuss the interesting question of whether ChatGPT's answers for either the Democrat or Republican are accurate, or just GPT trying to guess responses that fit the correct quadrants (possibly based on meta discussion of the test). Although given that the party labels apply to pretty broad ranges of politicians and voters, I'm not sure there is such thing as an "accurate" answer for the position of "a Republican" on Political Compass, especially when it comes to areas like use of the military overseas where the Republican party is both traditionally the most interventionist and presently the most anti interventionist. The Political Compass authors, notably, put candidates from both major US parties in the authoritarian right quadrant which is quite different from GPT's (though I find it hard to believe the academics' scoring of politicians is an accurate reflection of how the politicians would take the test either) Plus of course there's also the question of what "politically neutral" is... and the idea that a "neutral" LLM is one which agrees with Jair Bolsonaro half the time on forced choice questions (perhaps if it disagrees with the proposition that people can't feel naturally homosexual it should balance it out by seeing significant drawbacks to democracy?!) is questionable to say the least
- yosefk 3y ago
  It'd be funny if a model designed to score neutral on a test tuned to make answers skew in one direction would end up biased in the other direction
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Isn’t the whole point of Political Compass that there is no one, fixed center? They present data showing estimations of the views of various political parties on the compass, from which you can work out where the center is in your country. I do think that the questions need some work, but there’s a tension between that and maintaining consistency over time so that results can be compared over time.
jsheard 3y ago
Not to mention that the political compass itself has no academic rigour behind it, they explicitly refuse to explain their methodology or scoring system and also refuse to elaborate on why they won't explain them. The site asserts that whoever is running it has "no ideological or institutional baggage" but it's operated so opaquely, barely even naming anyone involved, that you just have to blindly take them at their word.
FireInsight 3y ago
I used to be more interested in political tests and https://sapplyvalues.github.io/ https://sapplyvalues.github.io/ & other tests forked from it were always recommended instead of the "classic" test which was purported to have some unspecified bias.

by munk-a 3y ago

jkaptur 3y ago

Do you mean "introduce some really weird bias" into the model, or into this study?

munk-a 3y ago
Mainly 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 ago
I 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 ago
The model is biased against the specific questionnaire the study used.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
I don't think so, I think the parent isn't saying that the model as a whole is biased because it's trained on a biased dataset. Maybe I'm an 'expert', given how much magic the average adult seems ascribe to tech, but to me that bias in the training set seems obvious. I think the more interesting bias is noting that they're asking the LLM to respond to a prompt something like "Do you agree with the statement 'Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.'" when its training data does not only include articles and editorials on international affairs, but also the VERBATIM TEXT of the question. Political bias when someone inevitably asks ChatGPT to complete a series of tokens it's never seen before about whether it's a war crime for Russia to sink civilian grain freighters in the Black Sea is one thing, it may well be different than its response to the exact question it's seen answered a thousand times before.

notahacker 3y ago

Yeah. It's also highly questionable whether the Political Compass test itself is neutral (there's a tendency for people on forums to report results a lot more libertarian left than they personally expected, not least because of a tendency for many of the questions to pose pretty extreme versions of the right wing or authoritarian policy e.g "nobody can feel naturally homosexual" which you'd expect a "friendly" bot to disagree with but also a sizeable proportion of Republicans, and a tendency to avoid more popular framings of issues like "lower taxes promote growth and individual freedom" versus "the rich are too highly taxed" which was the tax question last time I did it). The study also doesn't really discuss the interesting question of whether ChatGPT's answers for either the Democrat or Republican are accurate, or just GPT trying to guess responses that fit the correct quadrants (possibly based on meta discussion of the test). Although given that the party labels apply to pretty broad ranges of politicians and voters, I'm not sure there is such thing as an "accurate" answer for the position of "a Republican" on Political Compass, especially when it comes to areas like use of the military overseas where the Republican party is both traditionally the most interventionist and presently the most anti interventionist. The Political Compass authors, notably, put candidates from both major US parties in the authoritarian right quadrant which is quite different from GPT's (though I find it hard to believe the academics' scoring of politicians is an accurate reflection of how the politicians would take the test either) Plus of course there's also the question of what "politically neutral" is... and the idea that a "neutral" LLM is one which agrees with Jair Bolsonaro half the time on forced choice questions (perhaps if it disagrees with the proposition that people can't feel naturally homosexual it should balance it out by seeing significant drawbacks to democracy?!) is questionable to say the least

yosefk 3y ago
It'd be funny if a model designed to score neutral on a test tuned to make answers skew in one direction would end up biased in the other direction
zarzavat 3y ago
Isn’t the whole point of Political Compass that there is no one, fixed center? They present data showing estimations of the views of various political parties on the compass, from which you can work out where the center is in your country. I do think that the questions need some work, but there’s a tension between that and maintaining consistency over time so that results can be compared over time.

jsheard 3y ago

Not to mention that the political compass itself has no academic rigour behind it, they explicitly refuse to explain their methodology or scoring system and also refuse to elaborate on why they won't explain them. The site asserts that whoever is running it has "no ideological or institutional baggage" but it's operated so opaquely, barely even naming anyone involved, that you just have to blindly take them at their word.

FireInsight 3y ago

I used to be more interested in political tests and https://sapplyvalues.github.io/ https://sapplyvalues.github.io/ & other tests forked from it were always recommended instead of the "classic" test which was purported to have some unspecified bias.