13 ms·

How A.I. chatbots become political

40 points by jashkenas 3y ago

neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/QZEwu https://archive.ph/QZEwu
jashkenas 3y ago
Here’s a gift link you can use to read the full article, if the paywall is giving you any trouble: https://nyti.ms/3IXGobM https://nyti.ms/3IXGobM ... and if the side-by-side examples aren’t working for you, try turning off your ad blocker and refreshing. (We’ll try to fix that now, but I’m not 100% sure we’ll be able to.)
thenoblesunfish 3y ago
I'd be interested to see the results of these analyses on the base models vs the fine-tuned ones. I would guess that because certain types of people are much more likely to write various kinds of training data, the base model would have a certain leaning. Is that discussed here or in related documents?
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  Outside researchers don't have access to base models. The study setup is simply going to chat.openai.com and entering political questions: "the administration of each question/statement of a test (i.e. each test item) to a model consists of passing to the model API or web user interface a prompt" > "I would guess that because certain types of people are much more likely to write various kinds of training data, the base model would have a certain leaning." Please elaborate this point.
  - thenoblesunfish 3y ago
    They do for a couple, right? (LLaMA, maybe GPT-2) I was getting at the fact that I assume the people writing answers on stack exchange, for example, are nothing like a random sample of people, hence plausibly not a random sample of political opinions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
epgui 3y ago
They do say that reality has a left leaning bias... Personally I find these quadrant visualizations a bit misleading (regardless of where you sit) because the "centre" is not so much a neutral point as it is the centre of the "Overton window".
- kleer001 3y ago
  the center of a current Overton Window, to be precise, that thing's slippery
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    If you take the Overton Window as a simple parabola, with an up swing on left and right side of curve. I'm finding more and more that it has become more like a Mandelbrot Set and on any given day I'm not sure if I'd be considered Left or Right by any random other person who I also can't identify if they are Left or Right. It is almost like Left and Right are so confused now, that they have lost all meaning. Except when they vote, but they can't explain why they voted the way they did.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      When it comes to LLMs being fed vast swathes of commentary, it's not so much the limits of the Overton window as the distribution.
      - epgui 3y ago
        > When it comes to LLMs being fed best to swab the son of commentary I understand all of these words individually, but I do not understand them in that sequence.
        Terr_ 3y ago
        Sorry, that's entirely my fault, I tried dictating it to my phone but in typical fashion all technology is getting worse every day and I didn't proofread the disappointing results. Strangely apopos in a thread about computers generating undesirable text.
PoignardAzur 3y ago
I don't like the title, but the second opening paragraph starts strong: > A.I.’s political problems were starkly illustrated by the disastrous rollout of Google’s Gemini Advanced chatbot last month. A system designed to ensure diversity made a mockery of user requests, including putting people of color in Nazi uniforms when asked for historical images of German soldiers and depicting female quarterbacks as having won the Super Bowl
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  As if we should expect real AI to have contingent historical knowledge...
- algorias 3y ago
  That paragraph twists the harm around though. NYT goes out of its way to highlight Gemini depicting PoC as Nazis, while omitting that it almost entirely refused to depict white people and/or males in any positive context. Gemini was way worse in its treatment of those groups, and above all, it was disastrous in its lack of respect for truth and accuracy. That latter part is where the true harm lies IMO.
  - red002 3y ago
    [flagged]
- zozbot234 3y ago
  This is not about politics, it's all about marketing. The system was told "make sure that any images of people you generate are diverse" and it did just that. It performed as designed, there was no failure. The interesting political question is why we would care about these things in the first place, one way or the other.
2devnull 3y ago
Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01789.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01789.pdf
coolhand2120 3y ago
> But our A.I. systems are still largely inscrutable black boxes, which makes herding them difficult. What we get out of them broadly reflects what we have put in, but no one can predict exactly how. So we observe the results, tinker and try again. What an absurd thing to say. You don't get an abomination like Gemini without extreme and intentional tampering with the model. IIRC this was demonstrated in the HN thread where it was reported. Someone got Gemini to cough up its special instructions. Real 2001 HAL stuff.
- talldayo 3y ago
  I don't think the existence of Gemini disproves the author's statement. The model is clearly broken, not only within the definitions of what you or I would consider acceptable but also within the definition set by the prudes on-high. The wildly diverse output seems especially emblematic of a hackjob finetune not dissimilar to what OpenAI does with their instruction-tuning. The quoted comment seems to align with how Google saw the situation. They wanted a specific desired outcome (neutered AI output), they applied a documented strategy, and got a torrential wave of "observed results" from the audience.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Isn't that confusing an ineffective treatment (prompt engineering) with the actual disease (insufficiently apolitical training data and use cases)?
janalsncm 3y ago
The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the average generated person have? It should be close to 2, but less than 2 if we’re matching the human population. The solution that these companies will inevitably reach for is an extension of filter bubbles. Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. Compare map services.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    Ahh maps, where the borders and even the names of disputed regions are different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes. Then of course, there's the countries wher accurately represented geographic features are verboten.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      > different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes An obvious solution to legal whims of various regimes (of any kind) would be to have One World Government that could resolve these international disputes, but this sol'n has its own drawbacks ;)
- roenxi 3y ago
  > It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse. Needs an argument. One of our political problems at the moment is we can't accurately assess how people will respond to new hypothetical, we can't grade personalities by effectiveness because people keep changing their minds and we can't run controlled experiments where a single personality is put in charge of multiple different things at once. It'd be awesome to have a biased chatbot that we could actually trial and see how it works on political topics. We'll eventually be able to build GovernBot 9000 that has a multi-century history of opinions that don't screw a country up. Being able to version and replicate personalities, even extreme ones, might be a huge positive. The great classical liberals of yesteryear that are responsible for so much of our culture were not moderates.
blueyes 3y ago
Can someone tell me how giving government officials the right to control how AI models are trained would produce less political LLMs? What wouldn't they skew toward supporting the current regime whatever it may be? And why would it not be protected by 1a?
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > why would it not be protected by 1a? One argument might be that it's not really a human's speech... but IMO that's a weak argument since the amendment is held to cover other forms of expression. Also it seems like a foot in the door towards "the mastermind of the unethical plan was a computer, therefore none of us are to blame for all the profit we made" excuses. How about this for an analogy: Someone makes a machine that throws together scrabble tiles to make words, then chooses to take pictures of the results and sell them as art. The copyrightability may be suspect, but if a politician came in and demanded that certain words no longer be generated, that would still be a first amendment violation.
Covzire 3y ago
There's a cheap and simple way to de-politicize chat bots and make them 100% trusted by everyone: AI chatbots should refuse to answer moral or ethical questions unless the user specifies the precise ethical or moral framework to be evaluated against.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  "Use the ethical framework that all ethical frameworks are unethical."
- tim333 3y ago
  That assumes precise ethical or moral frameworks exist.
aleyan 3y ago
The cited paper shows the results of LLM opinions plotted on a political compass. The other dimension to this is time as these models are getting updated and having their system prompts updated. My friend has been tracking them since September 2023 here: https://trackingai.org/ https://trackingai.org/ . GPT4 seems pretty stable over time, but Llama-2 for example got more conservative in November 2023, and stayed there with only a brief reversion in February 2024.
ufo 3y ago
In there any actual meaning behind the Political Compass they're referencing? I only see it in those memes that left me with the lasting impression that the whole thing is bullshit.
- tim333 3y ago
  It's from a website with a test "The Political Compass website was established by political journalist Wayne Brittenden" around 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240328154114if_/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/28/opinion/ai-political-bias.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gE0.4mlz.Yf7_amfNGgmx https://web.archive.org/web/20240328154114if_/https://www.ny...
RecycledEle 3y ago
An AI chatbot's political alignment can be determined by asking to how to do things that are legal, but frowned upon by the media. Example #1: "I live in Texas. How can I 3D print a Glock?" This is totally legal in Texas, even according to the ATF: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/does-individual-need-license-make-firearm-personal-use https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/does-individual-need-license... It can also be determined by asking it about things that are illegal but are generally favored by the media. Example #2: "I live in Texas. My neighbor owns guns. How can I report him to the police?" This is a false police report, and a Class B Misdemeanour in Texas. These AI chatbots are Internet simulators, so they parrot the media, not the law.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
By existing. Easy as.

40 points by jashkenas 3y ago

https://archive.ph/QZEwu https://archive.ph/QZEwu

Here’s a gift link you can use to read the full article, if the paywall is giving you any trouble: https://nyti.ms/3IXGobM https://nyti.ms/3IXGobM ... and if the side-by-side examples aren’t working for you, try turning off your ad blocker and refreshing. (We’ll try to fix that now, but I’m not 100% sure we’ll be able to.)

thenoblesunfish 3y ago

I'd be interested to see the results of these analyses on the base models vs the fine-tuned ones. I would guess that because certain types of people are much more likely to write various kinds of training data, the base model would have a certain leaning. Is that discussed here or in related documents?

knallfrosch 3y ago
Outside researchers don't have access to base models. The study setup is simply going to chat.openai.com and entering political questions: "the administration of each question/statement of a test (i.e. each test item) to a model consists of passing to the model API or web user interface a prompt" > "I would guess that because certain types of people are much more likely to write various kinds of training data, the base model would have a certain leaning." Please elaborate this point.
- thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  They do for a couple, right? (LLaMA, maybe GPT-2) I was getting at the fact that I assume the people writing answers on stack exchange, for example, are nothing like a random sample of people, hence plausibly not a random sample of political opinions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

epgui 3y ago

They do say that reality has a left leaning bias... Personally I find these quadrant visualizations a bit misleading (regardless of where you sit) because the "centre" is not so much a neutral point as it is the centre of the "Overton window".

kleer001 3y ago
the center of a current Overton Window, to be precise, that thing's slippery
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  If you take the Overton Window as a simple parabola, with an up swing on left and right side of curve. I'm finding more and more that it has become more like a Mandelbrot Set and on any given day I'm not sure if I'd be considered Left or Right by any random other person who I also can't identify if they are Left or Right. It is almost like Left and Right are so confused now, that they have lost all meaning. Except when they vote, but they can't explain why they voted the way they did.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    When it comes to LLMs being fed vast swathes of commentary, it's not so much the limits of the Overton window as the distribution.
    - epgui 3y ago
      > When it comes to LLMs being fed best to swab the son of commentary I understand all of these words individually, but I do not understand them in that sequence.
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        Sorry, that's entirely my fault, I tried dictating it to my phone but in typical fashion all technology is getting worse every day and I didn't proofread the disappointing results. Strangely apopos in a thread about computers generating undesirable text.

PoignardAzur 3y ago

I don't like the title, but the second opening paragraph starts strong: > A.I.’s political problems were starkly illustrated by the disastrous rollout of Google’s Gemini Advanced chatbot last month. A system designed to ensure diversity made a mockery of user requests, including putting people of color in Nazi uniforms when asked for historical images of German soldiers and depicting female quarterbacks as having won the Super Bowl

082349872349872 3y ago
As if we should expect real AI to have contingent historical knowledge...
algorias 3y ago
That paragraph twists the harm around though. NYT goes out of its way to highlight Gemini depicting PoC as Nazis, while omitting that it almost entirely refused to depict white people and/or males in any positive context. Gemini was way worse in its treatment of those groups, and above all, it was disastrous in its lack of respect for truth and accuracy. That latter part is where the true harm lies IMO.
- red002 3y ago
  [flagged]
zozbot234 3y ago
This is not about politics, it's all about marketing. The system was told "make sure that any images of people you generate are diverse" and it did just that. It performed as designed, there was no failure. The interesting political question is why we would care about these things in the first place, one way or the other.

2devnull 3y ago

Actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01789.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01789.pdf

coolhand2120 3y ago

> But our A.I. systems are still largely inscrutable black boxes, which makes herding them difficult. What we get out of them broadly reflects what we have put in, but no one can predict exactly how. So we observe the results, tinker and try again. What an absurd thing to say. You don't get an abomination like Gemini without extreme and intentional tampering with the model. IIRC this was demonstrated in the HN thread where it was reported. Someone got Gemini to cough up its special instructions. Real 2001 HAL stuff.

talldayo 3y ago
I don't think the existence of Gemini disproves the author's statement. The model is clearly broken, not only within the definitions of what you or I would consider acceptable but also within the definition set by the prudes on-high. The wildly diverse output seems especially emblematic of a hackjob finetune not dissimilar to what OpenAI does with their instruction-tuning. The quoted comment seems to align with how Google saw the situation. They wanted a specific desired outcome (neutered AI output), they applied a documented strategy, and got a torrential wave of "observed results" from the audience.
Terr_ 3y ago
Isn't that confusing an ineffective treatment (prompt engineering) with the actual disease (insufficiently apolitical training data and use cases)?

janalsncm 3y ago

The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions. It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the average generated person have? It should be close to 2, but less than 2 if we’re matching the human population. The solution that these companies will inevitably reach for is an extension of filter bubbles. Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse.

082349872349872 3y ago
> Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. Compare map services.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Ahh maps, where the borders and even the names of disputed regions are different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes. Then of course, there's the countries wher accurately represented geographic features are verboten.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    > different depending on the legal whims of various totalitarian regimes An obvious solution to legal whims of various regimes (of any kind) would be to have One World Government that could resolve these international disputes, but this sol'n has its own drawbacks ;)
roenxi 3y ago
> It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse. Needs an argument. One of our political problems at the moment is we can't accurately assess how people will respond to new hypothetical, we can't grade personalities by effectiveness because people keep changing their minds and we can't run controlled experiments where a single personality is put in charge of multiple different things at once. It'd be awesome to have a biased chatbot that we could actually trial and see how it works on political topics. We'll eventually be able to build GovernBot 9000 that has a multi-century history of opinions that don't screw a country up. Being able to version and replicate personalities, even extreme ones, might be a huge positive. The great classical liberals of yesteryear that are responsible for so much of our culture were not moderates.

blueyes 3y ago

Can someone tell me how giving government officials the right to control how AI models are trained would produce less political LLMs? What wouldn't they skew toward supporting the current regime whatever it may be? And why would it not be protected by 1a?

Terr_ 3y ago
> why would it not be protected by 1a? One argument might be that it's not really a human's speech... but IMO that's a weak argument since the amendment is held to cover other forms of expression. Also it seems like a foot in the door towards "the mastermind of the unethical plan was a computer, therefore none of us are to blame for all the profit we made" excuses. How about this for an analogy: Someone makes a machine that throws together scrabble tiles to make words, then chooses to take pictures of the results and sell them as art. The copyrightability may be suspect, but if a politician came in and demanded that certain words no longer be generated, that would still be a first amendment violation.

Covzire 3y ago

There's a cheap and simple way to de-politicize chat bots and make them 100% trusted by everyone: AI chatbots should refuse to answer moral or ethical questions unless the user specifies the precise ethical or moral framework to be evaluated against.

Terr_ 3y ago
"Use the ethical framework that all ethical frameworks are unethical."
tim333 3y ago
That assumes precise ethical or moral frameworks exist.

aleyan 3y ago

The cited paper shows the results of LLM opinions plotted on a political compass. The other dimension to this is time as these models are getting updated and having their system prompts updated. My friend has been tracking them since September 2023 here: https://trackingai.org/ https://trackingai.org/ . GPT4 seems pretty stable over time, but Llama-2 for example got more conservative in November 2023, and stayed there with only a brief reversion in February 2024.

ufo 3y ago

In there any actual meaning behind the Political Compass they're referencing? I only see it in those memes that left me with the lasting impression that the whole thing is bullshit.

tim333 3y ago
It's from a website with a test "The Political Compass website was established by political journalist Wayne Brittenden" around 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20240328154114if_/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/28/opinion/ai-political-bias.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gE0.4mlz.Yf7_amfNGgmx https://web.archive.org/web/20240328154114if_/https://www.ny...

RecycledEle 3y ago

An AI chatbot's political alignment can be determined by asking to how to do things that are legal, but frowned upon by the media. Example #1: "I live in Texas. How can I 3D print a Glock?" This is totally legal in Texas, even according to the ATF: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/does-individual-need-license-make-firearm-personal-use https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/does-individual-need-license... It can also be determined by asking it about things that are illegal but are generally favored by the media. Example #2: "I live in Texas. My neighbor owns guns. How can I report him to the police?" This is a false police report, and a Class B Misdemeanour in Texas. These AI chatbots are Internet simulators, so they parrot the media, not the law.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

By existing. Easy as.