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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 quest

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.
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
  such a chatbot would be very interesting to experiment with, but one bots screw up is another bots success. so who is the e-arbiter of truth for GovernBot9000? hopefully it is not GlobalSuperCorp10k. or maybe said super corp would be OK. interesting times we live in
  - roenxi 3y ago
    (1) In what sense is that a step back from current state? (2) Why would it be bad? There is something of a hysteria at the moment where people are piling on to Boeing because the management has been reverting to the mean. We're looking at a world where that doesn't need to happen because once management reaches a peak we can just stop fiddling with the algorithm. Culture won't change because the management culture can be encoded in a chatbot. Management is mostly talk, this is one of the easiest targets for the tech. That doesn't sound like politics ... until you look at what the current political firestorms are, it hits a lot of them. It is hard to cast opinionated chatbots as a step back. The scary political implication is we're also looking at a point where maybe 1 man can control an army and that would be terrifying because the control on armies going rogue in a democracy is all the soldiers are voters. But consistent opinions are generally a good thing - we use the word principled for that sort of thing.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Forgive me for my brief quotes, I’m typing what you wrote because I can’t copy and paste. But I promise I read the whole thing even if it seems I am quoting out of context. > Needs an argument. Fair enough. The essence of my argument is, filter bubbles are bad for democracy because they people’s understanding of consensus and prevent them from encountering any opinions contrary to their own. A personalized chatbot to the extent that it is an extension of filter bubbles, is bad for the same reason. > It’d be awesome to have a biased chatbot For the scenario you outlined, sure. If it’s circumscribed and labeled as such, it would be an interesting exercise at least. For the general case, it’s probably not a product people will want. > The great classical liberals of yesteryear The issue I see with this is that by gradually Balkanizing our shared body of understanding, it will prevent the exact type of debate you (and I) think was so great from that time.
gotoeleven 3y ago
I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth? You see it in lots of almost trivial ways nowadays, things so small that it feels ridiculous to even mention. Some examples: Half the medieval warriors that come with a castle lego set nowadays are female. Viking legos too. And remember when they were trying to tell us Abraham Lincoln was gay?
- tristor 3y ago
  > After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve. There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Alternatively, why should toys make the person playing with it feel bad? Toys are intentionally escapist, it’s the point? Feels like a weird argument. I think the better comparison is what the other commenters brought up - maps. These are tools, and we turn to them for a purpose. And yet even geography is not ahem set in stone. We need our tools to be useful to the user, and that means different things to different people. There’s dispute in all facts. Just ask the people living in Taiwan, or Gaza or Ukraine…
tim333 3y ago
An alternative to filter bubbles is to have an attempt at being neutral like Wikipedia does. It won't please everyone but may be a way to go. I guess neutral in that context means close to the average opinion of an informed human. This seems close to the approach take in practice by ChatGPT, Claude and the like.

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.

konfusinomicon 3y ago
such a chatbot would be very interesting to experiment with, but one bots screw up is another bots success. so who is the e-arbiter of truth for GovernBot9000? hopefully it is not GlobalSuperCorp10k. or maybe said super corp would be OK. interesting times we live in
- roenxi 3y ago
  (1) In what sense is that a step back from current state? (2) Why would it be bad? There is something of a hysteria at the moment where people are piling on to Boeing because the management has been reverting to the mean. We're looking at a world where that doesn't need to happen because once management reaches a peak we can just stop fiddling with the algorithm. Culture won't change because the management culture can be encoded in a chatbot. Management is mostly talk, this is one of the easiest targets for the tech. That doesn't sound like politics ... until you look at what the current political firestorms are, it hits a lot of them. It is hard to cast opinionated chatbots as a step back. The scary political implication is we're also looking at a point where maybe 1 man can control an army and that would be terrifying because the control on armies going rogue in a democracy is all the soldiers are voters. But consistent opinions are generally a good thing - we use the word principled for that sort of thing.
janalsncm 3y ago
Forgive me for my brief quotes, I’m typing what you wrote because I can’t copy and paste. But I promise I read the whole thing even if it seems I am quoting out of context. > Needs an argument. Fair enough. The essence of my argument is, filter bubbles are bad for democracy because they people’s understanding of consensus and prevent them from encountering any opinions contrary to their own. A personalized chatbot to the extent that it is an extension of filter bubbles, is bad for the same reason. > It’d be awesome to have a biased chatbot For the scenario you outlined, sure. If it’s circumscribed and labeled as such, it would be an interesting exercise at least. For the general case, it’s probably not a product people will want. > The great classical liberals of yesteryear The issue I see with this is that by gradually Balkanizing our shared body of understanding, it will prevent the exact type of debate you (and I) think was so great from that time.

gotoeleven 3y ago

I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth? You see it in lots of almost trivial ways nowadays, things so small that it feels ridiculous to even mention. Some examples: Half the medieval warriors that come with a castle lego set nowadays are female. Viking legos too. And remember when they were trying to tell us Abraham Lincoln was gay?

tristor 3y ago
> After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right? The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve. There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.
vineyardmike 3y ago
Alternatively, why should toys make the person playing with it feel bad? Toys are intentionally escapist, it’s the point? Feels like a weird argument. I think the better comparison is what the other commenters brought up - maps. These are tools, and we turn to them for a purpose. And yet even geography is not ahem set in stone. We need our tools to be useful to the user, and that means different things to different people. There’s dispute in all facts. Just ask the people living in Taiwan, or Gaza or Ukraine…

tim333 3y ago

An alternative to filter bubbles is to have an attempt at being neutral like Wikipedia does. It won't please everyone but may be a way to go. I guess neutral in that context means close to the average opinion of an informed human. This seems close to the approach take in practice by ChatGPT, Claude and the like.