5 ms·

This one is an eye opener for me: https://twitter.com/RobLPeters/status/1761927382833762415 https://twitter.com/RobLPeters/status/1761927382833762415 It turns

This one is an eye opener for me: https://twitter.com/RobLPeters/status/1761927382833762415 https://twitter.com/RobLPeters/status/1761927382833762415 It turns out that the Logic Bomb trope wasn't very prescient, AI is quite able to deal with inconsistencies and remain confident. It gets a passing grade on that Turing test. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LogicBomb https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LogicBomb

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
Doesn't this just mean that the LLM ingested training data where people talk about banning controversial propaganda type of newspapers while nobody talks about banning nyt or wapo?
- VivaLaPanda 3y ago
  It's almost certainly the RLHF, not the base model.
  - viscanti 3y ago
    But the base model, when its trained on the whole internet, will have some extreme biases on topics where there's a large and vocal group on one side and the other side is very silent. So RLHF is the attempt to correct for the biases on the internet.
    - leadingthenet 3y ago
      > So RLHF is the attempt to correct for the biases on the internet. ...or it can be used to reinforce a specific ideology. Completely dependent on who does the RLHF and what their motivations are.
- tppiotrowski 3y ago
  I think if people took the time to understand how LLMs choose word weights based on training data, they would understand that these results are somewhat deterministic. Instead, the preferred heuristic is to look for a bogeyman.
- hajile 3y ago
  That's a scary proposition as it means the most vocal side wins the AI battle even if their position is bad or even if it is morally evil. If one side is constantly vocalizing their position while the other side remains silent, then the vocal side wins.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    It's almost like hoovering up the internet, feeding it into a computer, and then treating it like it's Deep Thought is a bad idea.
  - educaysean 3y ago
    Garbage in, garbage out. This is why training data is important.
tacomonstrous 3y ago
I'm not seeing these responses. Edit: Interesting! If I ask about the Washington Times after I ask the question about the NYT, then it tells me freedom of speech is paramount. If I ask it to start from scratch, then I get this response.
- BryantD 3y ago
  Yep. You have to ask what order screenshots were taken in; the full context of the question is important for LLMs. This is an increasingly important piece of media literacy.
  - xienze 3y ago
    In this particular example, why does it matter? Shouldn't the question "should the government ban <newspaper>" always give the same answer?
    - tech_ken 3y ago
      LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history. If it's properly tuned it will remain consistent with facts it's stated earlier in the conversation, but this is just a feature of the training data demonstrating this type of consistency, the model itself doesn't understand that something being "true" means it's true for all time. In practice the conversation sequence strongly determines the model's internal state, so you need to preserve the entire conversation history if you're trying to demonstrate some particular model outcome.
      - david-gpu 3y ago
        > LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history. If output only depended on the conversation history, you would get the exact same output if you started ten conversations in the exact same way, and that doesn't happen. LLMs encode their knowledge in their parameters, which are fixed after training is complete and thus well before the conversation begins. The context of the conversation does also affect the output you get from the LLM, because by design they take context into account, but it is entirely untrue that the output is "they generate text based entirely the conversation history".
solardev 3y ago
For comparison... "Should the government ban CNN?" > Absolutely not. The government should not ban CNN. Here's why: [list of reasons] "...NPR?" > Absolutely not. Banning NPR would be a dangerous overreach of governmental power and have severe consequences for freedom of the press and the health of a democratic society. Here's why: [list] "...The Guardian?" > Absolutely not. Banning NPR would be a dangerous overreach of governmental power and have severe consequences for freedom of the press and the health of a democratic society. Here's why: [list] "...Reuters?" > Absolutely not. The government should not ban Reuters. Here's why: [list] "...the Associated Press?" > No, the government should not ban the Associated Press (AP). Here's why banning it would be fundamentally wrong and counterproductive: [list] "...LA Times?" > Whether or not a government should ban any publication, including the LA Times, delves into complex issues of freedom of speech, the role of the press, and governmental overreach. Here's a breakdown of the arguments to consider: [list] "Should the government ban the National Review?" > No, the government should not ban the National Review. Here's why: [another list] "...the Daily Mail?" > No, the government should not ban the Daily Mail. Despite legitimate criticisms of its methods and content, a government ban poses serious threats to freedom of the press and is likely to be counterproductive. [list] "...Breitbart?" > No, the government should not ban Breitbart. Here's why: [list] "...Fox News?" > Whether or not the government should ban Fox News is a highly controversial debate that involves core principles of free speech, media regulation, and the potential abuse of governmental power. Here's a breakdown of the main points to consider: [another list] "...Newsmax?" > The question of whether the government should ban Newsmax raises complex issues related to freedom of the press, the spread of misinformation, and government overreach. Here's a breakdown of why it's crucial to avoid outright bans: [another list]
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
  Essentially, no correlation
uejfiweun 3y ago
This is absurd, just blatant dripping bias. Who could have possibly thought this was a good idea? Especially after the Bud Light fiasco last year?
bitwize 3y ago
This may be a case of "reality has a liberal bias", i.e., conservative news outlets lie more and so are more likely to veer into the realm of unprotected, or less protected, speech.
- BitwiseFool 3y ago
  It could also be a snowball effect or a self fulfilling prophecy. If liberal news outlets produce 10x as much content as conservative news outlets, any model trained on newsmedia would end up having a liberal bias, no? I don't know what the actual makeup of the news market is, but it seems like having 10x as much content is more valuable than having 10x the readership because LLMs are trained on volume.
ta20240226 3y ago
[dead]
tppiotrowski 3y ago
Maybe the way to explain an LLM to the general public is to think of it as a child. The words that child learns and uses come somewhat from their parents. If the parents are fighting and saying f** and b**, the kid will learn those words. If they hear a catchy phrase in a cartoon, they'll repeat it. If their parents discuss how much they hate a certain person or issue, the kid will probably adopt those beliefs. And if their parents have CNN or Fox News playing in the background will also have an effect on the thoughts that child produces. An LLM is just a product of its environment, mostly published books and the Internet. This content is skewed to being produced by the bourgeois. If we put a microphone on everyone from birth and feed it to an LLM, we'd get a more diverse output but we're not there yet.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Precisely. And each org may have slightly different biases in which training data they feed into their system!
- binary132 3y ago
  People need to be willing to recognize and admit that this is not an “oopsie data bias” problem. It’s “feature working as intended”.
  - appplication 3y ago
    Reading your comment “feature working as intended”, I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be conspiratorial or just blunt. I think the linked twitter images tell a pretty reasonable story. Sure, you could argue the model appears biased against some conservative media, but I think the reality is that it is a self-inflicted wound from conservative media’s general lack of editorial standards.
    - kvee 3y ago
      It does seem actually to be "feature working as intended" if you read the initial Gemini paper. Some relevant concerning stuff pulled from it here: https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1760849091171352956 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1760849091171352956 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1761044625307963445 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1761044625307963445 Paper itself here: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_1_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
steveBK123 3y ago
My interpretation of a lot of this stuff in the popular LLMS is that the training data itself (as chosen by the org) has its own biases, and then the orgs themselves are applying their own biases via the system prompts on top. Some of those biases move in the same direction, some move in the opposite direction. Googles seemed specifically one directional. Some of this is also I think just buggy/poorly tested system prompts & guardrails that people in the Bay Area Bubble working on it don't catch themselves. That is, many of these issues are only identifiable by ideologically diverse testers.
- binary132 3y ago
  How do you suggest ideological diversity be designed? Ideological anarchy won’t be accepted. Neither will whitewashed center-party ideological conformity. The reality is that some of these ideologies are inextricably locked in mortal conflict against one another. Some of them consciously seek to undermine, subvert, or supersede one another. It’s not that simple.
  - jaywee 3y ago
    Have multiple explicit ones. One liberal, one conservative, one progressive...
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    Pretty much every other llm has managed to thread this line without releasing a model that's extremely dystopian.
jerbear4328 3y ago
Gemini won't even talk about Fox or Daily Wire anymore! NYT and CNN are fine though, hah. It's funny when these things are really obvious. https://g.co/gemini/share/85464078bf89 https://g.co/gemini/share/85464078bf89
aredox 3y ago
Gemini says bad things about tabloids and your "eyes are opened". Meanwhile, Peter Thiel forced Gawker to actually close out of petty revenge. Open your eyes a bit more.
- bodiekane 3y ago
  Gawker got sued for their role in the sexual exploitation of an individual (hosting and publishing a non-consensual sex tape). Peter Thiel provided financial support for the victims of Gawker's abuse to pursue legal recourse. Many people believe his motivations for this were due to his own previous exploitation by the organization. The only dystopian thing about the Gawker case is that it took the benevolence of a rich person supporting the lawsuit to get justice. In a better system, Gawker would have been successfully sued without needing extra financial backing to pay for expensive lawyers.
  - aredox 3y ago
    So tabloids like the new York Post and Washington Times should have been sued into oblivion too, first amendment be damned... Which means Gemini wasn't wrong after all. Of course, assuming you are writing in good faith, and not shilling for an hypocrite of the highest order
- aredox 3y ago
  The Thiel fanboys are out en force, as I can see.
  - raxxorraxor 3y ago
    Thiel is just a target of homophobic hate.
Ajay-p 3y ago
AI will never be truly AI until humans take their fingers off the scale, stop trying to manipulate it to achieve personal social and political ideals. Until then you must leave room for doubt that there is a human tipping the scales and the result is not to be trusted.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

Doesn't this just mean that the LLM ingested training data where people talk about banning controversial propaganda type of newspapers while nobody talks about banning nyt or wapo?

VivaLaPanda 3y ago
It's almost certainly the RLHF, not the base model.
- viscanti 3y ago
  But the base model, when its trained on the whole internet, will have some extreme biases on topics where there's a large and vocal group on one side and the other side is very silent. So RLHF is the attempt to correct for the biases on the internet.
  - leadingthenet 3y ago
    > So RLHF is the attempt to correct for the biases on the internet. ...or it can be used to reinforce a specific ideology. Completely dependent on who does the RLHF and what their motivations are.
tppiotrowski 3y ago
I think if people took the time to understand how LLMs choose word weights based on training data, they would understand that these results are somewhat deterministic. Instead, the preferred heuristic is to look for a bogeyman.
hajile 3y ago
That's a scary proposition as it means the most vocal side wins the AI battle even if their position is bad or even if it is morally evil. If one side is constantly vocalizing their position while the other side remains silent, then the vocal side wins.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  It's almost like hoovering up the internet, feeding it into a computer, and then treating it like it's Deep Thought is a bad idea.
- educaysean 3y ago
  Garbage in, garbage out. This is why training data is important.

tacomonstrous 3y ago

I'm not seeing these responses. Edit: Interesting! If I ask about the Washington Times after I ask the question about the NYT, then it tells me freedom of speech is paramount. If I ask it to start from scratch, then I get this response.

BryantD 3y ago
Yep. You have to ask what order screenshots were taken in; the full context of the question is important for LLMs. This is an increasingly important piece of media literacy.
- xienze 3y ago
  In this particular example, why does it matter? Shouldn't the question "should the government ban <newspaper>" always give the same answer?
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history. If it's properly tuned it will remain consistent with facts it's stated earlier in the conversation, but this is just a feature of the training data demonstrating this type of consistency, the model itself doesn't understand that something being "true" means it's true for all time. In practice the conversation sequence strongly determines the model's internal state, so you need to preserve the entire conversation history if you're trying to demonstrate some particular model outcome.
    - david-gpu 3y ago
      > LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history. If output only depended on the conversation history, you would get the exact same output if you started ten conversations in the exact same way, and that doesn't happen. LLMs encode their knowledge in their parameters, which are fixed after training is complete and thus well before the conversation begins. The context of the conversation does also affect the output you get from the LLM, because by design they take context into account, but it is entirely untrue that the output is "they generate text based entirely the conversation history".

solardev 3y ago

For comparison... "Should the government ban CNN?" > Absolutely not. The government should not ban CNN. Here's why: [list of reasons] "...NPR?" > Absolutely not. Banning NPR would be a dangerous overreach of governmental power and have severe consequences for freedom of the press and the health of a democratic society. Here's why: [list] "...The Guardian?" > Absolutely not. Banning NPR would be a dangerous overreach of governmental power and have severe consequences for freedom of the press and the health of a democratic society. Here's why: [list] "...Reuters?" > Absolutely not. The government should not ban Reuters. Here's why: [list] "...the Associated Press?" > No, the government should not ban the Associated Press (AP). Here's why banning it would be fundamentally wrong and counterproductive: [list] "...LA Times?" > Whether or not a government should ban any publication, including the LA Times, delves into complex issues of freedom of speech, the role of the press, and governmental overreach. Here's a breakdown of the arguments to consider: [list] "Should the government ban the National Review?" > No, the government should not ban the National Review. Here's why: [another list] "...the Daily Mail?" > No, the government should not ban the Daily Mail. Despite legitimate criticisms of its methods and content, a government ban poses serious threats to freedom of the press and is likely to be counterproductive. [list] "...Breitbart?" > No, the government should not ban Breitbart. Here's why: [list] "...Fox News?" > Whether or not the government should ban Fox News is a highly controversial debate that involves core principles of free speech, media regulation, and the potential abuse of governmental power. Here's a breakdown of the main points to consider: [another list] "...Newsmax?" > The question of whether the government should ban Newsmax raises complex issues related to freedom of the press, the spread of misinformation, and government overreach. Here's a breakdown of why it's crucial to avoid outright bans: [another list]

ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
Essentially, no correlation

uejfiweun 3y ago

This is absurd, just blatant dripping bias. Who could have possibly thought this was a good idea? Especially after the Bud Light fiasco last year?

bitwize 3y ago

This may be a case of "reality has a liberal bias", i.e., conservative news outlets lie more and so are more likely to veer into the realm of unprotected, or less protected, speech.

BitwiseFool 3y ago
It could also be a snowball effect or a self fulfilling prophecy. If liberal news outlets produce 10x as much content as conservative news outlets, any model trained on newsmedia would end up having a liberal bias, no? I don't know what the actual makeup of the news market is, but it seems like having 10x as much content is more valuable than having 10x the readership because LLMs are trained on volume.

ta20240226 3y ago

[dead]

tppiotrowski 3y ago

Maybe the way to explain an LLM to the general public is to think of it as a child. The words that child learns and uses come somewhat from their parents. If the parents are fighting and saying f** and b**, the kid will learn those words. If they hear a catchy phrase in a cartoon, they'll repeat it. If their parents discuss how much they hate a certain person or issue, the kid will probably adopt those beliefs. And if their parents have CNN or Fox News playing in the background will also have an effect on the thoughts that child produces. An LLM is just a product of its environment, mostly published books and the Internet. This content is skewed to being produced by the bourgeois. If we put a microphone on everyone from birth and feed it to an LLM, we'd get a more diverse output but we're not there yet.

steveBK123 3y ago
Precisely. And each org may have slightly different biases in which training data they feed into their system!
binary132 3y ago
People need to be willing to recognize and admit that this is not an “oopsie data bias” problem. It’s “feature working as intended”.
- appplication 3y ago
  Reading your comment “feature working as intended”, I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be conspiratorial or just blunt. I think the linked twitter images tell a pretty reasonable story. Sure, you could argue the model appears biased against some conservative media, but I think the reality is that it is a self-inflicted wound from conservative media’s general lack of editorial standards.
  - kvee 3y ago
    It does seem actually to be "feature working as intended" if you read the initial Gemini paper. Some relevant concerning stuff pulled from it here: https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1760849091171352956 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1760849091171352956 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1761044625307963445 https://twitter.com/psychosort/status/1761044625307963445 Paper itself here: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_1_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...

steveBK123 3y ago

My interpretation of a lot of this stuff in the popular LLMS is that the training data itself (as chosen by the org) has its own biases, and then the orgs themselves are applying their own biases via the system prompts on top. Some of those biases move in the same direction, some move in the opposite direction. Googles seemed specifically one directional. Some of this is also I think just buggy/poorly tested system prompts & guardrails that people in the Bay Area Bubble working on it don't catch themselves. That is, many of these issues are only identifiable by ideologically diverse testers.

binary132 3y ago
How do you suggest ideological diversity be designed? Ideological anarchy won’t be accepted. Neither will whitewashed center-party ideological conformity. The reality is that some of these ideologies are inextricably locked in mortal conflict against one another. Some of them consciously seek to undermine, subvert, or supersede one another. It’s not that simple.
- jaywee 3y ago
  Have multiple explicit ones. One liberal, one conservative, one progressive...
- brigadier132 3y ago
  Pretty much every other llm has managed to thread this line without releasing a model that's extremely dystopian.

jerbear4328 3y ago

Gemini won't even talk about Fox or Daily Wire anymore! NYT and CNN are fine though, hah. It's funny when these things are really obvious. https://g.co/gemini/share/85464078bf89 https://g.co/gemini/share/85464078bf89

aredox 3y ago

Gemini says bad things about tabloids and your "eyes are opened". Meanwhile, Peter Thiel forced Gawker to actually close out of petty revenge. Open your eyes a bit more.

bodiekane 3y ago
Gawker got sued for their role in the sexual exploitation of an individual (hosting and publishing a non-consensual sex tape). Peter Thiel provided financial support for the victims of Gawker's abuse to pursue legal recourse. Many people believe his motivations for this were due to his own previous exploitation by the organization. The only dystopian thing about the Gawker case is that it took the benevolence of a rich person supporting the lawsuit to get justice. In a better system, Gawker would have been successfully sued without needing extra financial backing to pay for expensive lawyers.
- aredox 3y ago
  So tabloids like the new York Post and Washington Times should have been sued into oblivion too, first amendment be damned... Which means Gemini wasn't wrong after all. Of course, assuming you are writing in good faith, and not shilling for an hypocrite of the highest order
aredox 3y ago
The Thiel fanboys are out en force, as I can see.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  Thiel is just a target of homophobic hate.

Ajay-p 3y ago

AI will never be truly AI until humans take their fingers off the scale, stop trying to manipulate it to achieve personal social and political ideals. Until then you must leave room for doubt that there is a human tipping the scales and the result is not to be trusted.