4 ms·

Fairly obvious. Is a parrot racist because it heard someone being racist and repeats it without being able to reason about it? It lacks intent and understandin

• freedmand 3y ago
  The article from Bloomberg never said "racist" — it said tests revealed racial bias. The "racist" term is from the title refutation piece.
  • cjk2 3y ago
    That is fair and a good point.
  • bingbingbing777 3y ago
    Can someone be racially biased and not racist?
    • scooke 3y ago
      Sure, anyone who is part of a majority group. If there is only "one kind" of person with similar experiences, that's how everyone tends to think or perceive. Only when an outside enters, or the Majority leaves their population and goes to another Majority, or Mixed population, will do face that question : Am I racist?
    • swores 3y ago
      I guess different people have different definitions, but to me I'd think of a racial bias that make you think someone different to you is superior wouldn't be considered racism. For example, if a <skin colour 1> person things that all people of <different skin colour> are basically the same but all seem to be more intelligent than people of <colour 1>, it's definitely a racial bias but is it really racist to think that a different group of people have an advantage somehow? Arguably it's still racism, even though it's your own genetics you're putting down rather than other people's, but as an example: if a black person in the USA said "I don't think I'll try to go to university, it seems white people find academic work easier" I'd call it internalised racism, or racially biased, but I wouldn't call that person "a racist" even though I disagree with them. Then again, if they started going round trying to convince everyone else that black people aren't as clever as white people, then I would consider them racist despite being the skin colour they're being racist against. To me it's about negativity towards a group vs. misguided thinking, rather than about whether it's against people like you or not.
• barfbagginus 3y ago
  Parrot is no longer a useful mental model. A parrot cannot make runs of logically consistent output, but new LLMs can. They still lack intent/understanding. But a system does not need understanding for its output to consist of racially biased statements. But let's also point out that GPT can also make very powerful anti racist statements. It can persuade people to be less biased against race. Reacting to the specific beliefs and points raised in the conversation. Generating sensible counter arguments. In that way, GPT4 is better at refuting racist rhetoric than most people are. So it's potential here is both good - its ability to help the fight against racism - and bad - its risk of generating racism.
  • thelastparadise 3y ago
    Or how about we let our tools just be tools? Shoehorning "anti racist" messaging into the tool makes it a substantially inferior tool.
    • barfbagginus 2y ago
      It's not signalling. It's generating effective arguments against bias. That makes it a more useful and powerful tool.
  • cjk2 3y ago
    Well if a parrot called me a twat like that one, it may be logically consistent. How do you know? Well that requires verification, which is probably more costly than doing the legwork yourself in the first place. That applies to all LLM generated output. It is worthless until the reasoning is validated. Which is costly.
    • barfbagginus 2y ago
      That same thing applies to the employees at your company. And you should be talking to it like it's a real employee, with the power to critique and improve your process and designs. It can simulate a decent project or product manager, a requirements analyst, a test planner, a junior implementer, debugger, automation engineer, etc If you can't make your engineering pipeline nicer with those kinds of roles, I think you would either struggle to direct a team of those same people IRL, or you're just not being candid and effective enough with your prompting. Read papers on promoting ideas like reflection, critique, tool use, etc. Really treat it like a valuable team member, and it will boost your product requirements, write great tests right out the gate, and many other things you will WISH you could get your human colleagues to do! And all for a tiny fraction of the cost of human specialists!