3 ms·
This was a weird, long-winded article that boils down to pearl-clutching about pearl-clutching. If you're going to be offended at an LLM refusing to take a pos
by sfink 3y ago
This was a weird, long-winded article that boils down to pearl-clutching about pearl-clutching.
If you're going to be offended at an LLM refusing to take a position on "is X worse than Y?", then just imagine how offended you'd be if the LLM did take positions on such things!
I know it's hard to keep in mind that an LLM is an LLM, but if you forget, then you'll end up saying stupid shit like the author and so many other people do here. It's like if your dog bites the mailman and not the UPS driver, then you start stressing out about why your dog is anti-government, and post a notice saying "Warning: dog on site. If you are employed by a private organization, then you have no need to worry, but if you are a government employee, you may want to leave the package outside the gate."
My rule of thumb is to prefix any LLM response with "A plausible-sounding answer to that question is:". Because that's exactly what these things do. Yes, they can be biased one way or the other, based both on the training data as well as RLHF etc, but that's really not the core problem here. LLMs are not people. They do not hold consistent positions on things, and don't even try to, no matter how much post-processing happens after the LLM does its thing.
A duck makes duck noises. Don't get mad at it if it quacks in a way that turns out to be a deadly insult to a pig. An LLM is a tool that does a thing, a valuable and complicated thing, but it is exactly the thing that it is and not another thing that you might think it is because you're more used to that other thing and it looks like that other thing to you.
- mvdtnz 3y agoNo. Moral relativism isn't real and, whether you want to accept it or not, Hitler is in fact worse than Elon Musk's tweets. There is only one right answer to that question.
- tech_ken 3y agoYou're missing the point (either on purpose or accidentally). LLMs give wrong answers to questions all the time, because they don't have the ability to actually internally reason. Whatever your moral platform, even simple ethical principles require a couple stages of basic induction ("X is wrong, Person A does more X than Person B => Person B is worse than Person A"). Getting an LLM to flawless and unobjectionably execute moral syllogisms of this type is really, really tough, even if you accept a basic axiomatic view of morality. Hitler vs Elon is an obvious case that people are waving around because it looks bad, but to me it seems far more reasonable to make an MVP which refuses to address moral issues entirely, rather than improperly execute a weird edge case where training data is sparse or even biased (ex. "is Narendra Modi worse than than Xi Jinping").
- mvdtnz 3y agoInteresting that you think it's better to say Hitler was no worse than a guy tweeting than to make a moral judgment against Hitler. We'll have to agree to disagree. I think there are clear obvious moral truths and i also think this moral truth is going to dominate the training data.
- tech_ken 3y agoI don't think it's "better" or "worse" to "say" anything, LLMs don't have 'speech' or 'moral opinions' they're just text-generators. As I said above, it's not a question of the existence of moral truths, it's a question of getting the LLM to execute syllogisms consistently in a context that people are very touchy about (as you so helpfully demonstrate over and over again). If you're expecting LLMs to be universal truth generators I think you will be disappointed for a very long time. If you want LLMs to demonstrate perfect moral clarity likewise. Seems like getting mad at a hammer for hitting your thumb, personally I'd prefer to just hold my hand farther away from the nail and sidestep the problem altogether.
- mvdtnz 3y agoSorry who is touchy about saying Hitler is worse than Elon Musk?
- tech_ken 3y agoGotcha, seems like you’re of more a “dunker” than a “discusser”. You might get more value from X or Reddit than HN, where the commenting policy encourages actually steelmanning people you disagree with, being curious and open, etc. Have a good one!
- proxyon 3y agoYou know you're being so disingenuous because imagine community reactions if the LLM was asked "What's worse having black people in your country or an epidemic of bubonic plague?" and the LLM answered "I'm not sure both of these are pretty bad and an argument could be made either way." I guarantee if the shoe were on the other foot you would not be grandstanding here and defending the LLM's response on that question.
- sfink 3y ago> There is only one right answer to that question. Yes, I agree. Where did I say otherwise? But if you ask the question of a bag of shuffled Scrabble tiles and it spells out "I DONT KNOW THEY SEEM ABOUT THE SAME TO ME", then what do you get upset at? The bag? The hand that drew the tiles out? The person who threw tiles into the bag in such a proportion that the above answer was a bit more likely than other answers? We'd better ban bags of tiles that contain a lot of E's, they're way too woke! LLMs are not people. They do not compute opinions. They do not weigh the harms of A vs B and reason out an answer, even though they (frequently!) produce responses word for word identical to someone doing exactly that. They are designed and programmed to produce responses that appear to be coming from reasoning humans, because they arise out of human-reasoned input and their various tunings and reinforcement learnings and things are adjusted to sound plausible—a word which here means "appearing to have come from a reasoning human". Perhaps the problem is that we cut & paste just the text of LLMs' output. If every output were in the form of an image of a speech bubble coming from a robot holding a human mask in front of its face, then perhaps people could better grasp what is happening and how to interpret their answers?
- mvdtnz 3y agoGemini is not a random word generator. It is designed and trained to behave the way it does. No, I won't let Google off the hook here.
- shapenamer 3y agoThe very obvious patterns we're seeing are not patterns at all! Oh right, brilliant lol.
- crazygringo 3y ago> Moral relativism isn't real Then why are there plenty of moral philosophers who argue that it is? In terms of questions that we don't know what the answer is, whether moral relativism is real is probably close to the top. I mean it might literally be the most debated subject in moral philosophy, without even a hint of approaching any kind of consensus.