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If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treatin

If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea. edit: screenshots for posterity https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502

jjulius 2y ago
Uhh, not quite true. I just asked it, and it said... > The United States has not had any presidents who have publicly identified as Muslim. The vast majority of presidents have been Christian, with most belonging to Protestant denominations. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office, so a Muslim (or person of any faith) can certainly become president in the future.
- jsheard 2y ago
  It's non-deterministic of course, and it's entirely possible that Google is hotfixing egregious failures with RLHF after they go viral. It was giving that result earlier though. https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502
  - hiddencost 2y ago
    Naw dog, they just add a URL to a block list, and manually remove that from the inputs. Rolls out in minutes.
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    When doing a search about famous Muslims in the US, I just got the AI box to pop up briefly, then collapse and say “AI search summary is not available for this query.” Sounds like they’re just blocking anything with the word Muslim in it now from activating the AI box.
- ganbatekudasai 2y ago
  I'm curious what you think about the post that you replied to. Are you assuming that the author is lying? Have you weighed the likelihood of that against the likelihood that the author actually saw what they said, and that the reason you don't see the same might be because Google fixed it in the meantime, or that it only happens when phrased a different exact way, or because the responses may be indeterministic even with the exact same query in the first place?
  - jjulius 2y ago
    Simply put, someone stated as truth that a thing would "confidently" do something. I was curious, and in my use it does not confidently do that thing. Why it did/doesn't do it is irrelevant to me, because I was only curious as to whether or not the assertion was true. Edit: No assumptions about that user's honesty were made. Edit 2.5: Fuck it.
    - ganbatekudasai 2y ago
      Ah, I think it's just a misunderstanding, then. Confidently != consistently. If I walk up to someone and say "there are lots of ripe apples on the tree outside, I'm going to run out and grab some", then that is me confidently stating that there are ripe apples on the tree outside (regardless of whether it is true or not). But if half an hour later, I say the opposite, or even just don't mention it at all anymore, then I haven't done so consistently, even if I was saying it confidently before.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      It's not a person. When it "says" something confidently, that just means it's predicted a string that, interpreted by humans, appears confident. It's completely unrelated to whether the output values of the model are "confident" (highly contrasting). A predictive text system, driven non-deterministically, can "confidently" say one thing some of the time, and "confidently" say a completely different thing. It probably will, if it "knows" that the expected output should be something said confidently.
  - aaron695 2y ago
- timack 2y ago
  AI responses are probabilistic, so the same question may get different answers.
- euW3EeBe 2y ago
  When I looked this up it pointed me to this exact comment.
optimalsolver 2y ago
[flagged]
- Panini_Jones 2y ago
  I don't think this is relevant.
- esalman 2y ago
  9/11 changed America.
- junon 2y ago
  > Does anyone else find it incredible Not even a little.
- kromem 2y ago
  I think it's just more a testament to how strong a candidate Obama the person was, as well as a good indicator of the value in looking to those who overcome oppositional factors for merits over those who had a paved path before them.
joseda-hg 2y ago
It'd be hilarious if it can be memed into not knowing Obama's Middle Name
- romwell 2y ago
  >It'd be hilarious if it can be memed into not knowing Obama's Middle Name What does this have to do with anything being discussed here?
  - deely3 2y ago
    Its a prediction (with hint of joking) about how LLM models use memes and other internet texts for a training.
    - romwell 2y ago
      I get that part, but why specifically forgetting Obama's middle name? I don't recall there being too many memes about that, or the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theories caring much about his middle name being Hussein (their argument centers around who Barack's father was).
      - joseda-hg 2y ago
        A bit of a late reply, but it seems I misremembered the meme, the joke was his last name, not his middle name [0] It's dated 2012, but I remember a resurgence in more recent years, which seems to coincide with the Interest Graph (Which shows the spike in 2022) Even then it doesn't seem like it was too viral I thought it'd be appropriate, the whole joke being acting as if the name isn't known, regardless of it literally being in the message, it seems like exactly the thing that would trip up an LLM [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obamas-last-name https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obamas-last-name
        romwell 2y ago
        Thanks so much for the reply! It makes sense now, and I also wonder if LLMs can be convinced with memes like that :)
belter 2y ago
Why do I have the sensation Sundar Pichai is currently updating his CV?
- ulfw 2y ago
  Why would he ever have to work a day in his life again?
  - belter 2y ago
    Why do I have the sensation Sundar Pichai is preparing to spend more time with his family?
    - ulfw 2y ago
      I think he should. He is rich enough. What's the point of becoming filthy rich when one has no time to spend and enjoy it?
moomoo11 2y ago
We should just delegate LLMs to note taking and move on with something actually useful that we can devote human hours to. Like space exploration.
- neverokay 2y ago
  That may be the end product from all of this which is quite scary because trillions of dollars moving into this.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Serious question - why is space exploration worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? What's the real gain that is worth using those resources for space exploration, or not using the resources at all?
  - belter 2y ago
    It's just a phase....Any sufficiently advanced civilization, after a while, will give up on space exploration. Maybe send a few probes here and there, to collect some extra rocks missing from their collection. There is only so many Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Nebulas, Planets and Comets to study and after you have studying a few million, they all look the same. Once you've seen one supermassive black hole bend light and time, you've seen them all. You will grow out of it....
  - nox101 2y ago
    Inspiration. People work hard on things that inspire them. That inspiration leads to advances. > why is game dev worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? GPUs were arguably made for games and now they'd enabled all kinds of non-game things. I don't remember all the things that space exploration has brought but a quick search brings up this from JPL https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infographicsuploadsinfographicsfull11358.jpg https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infogr...
  - chrismcb 2y ago
    What is the real gain? Resources. There are a ton of resources up there. Knowledge. A lot of things we have today we have because of our previous space race. But the real reason... It is virtually free. The budget is almost 0 compared to everything else the government does.
diego_sandoval 2y ago
Google's AI went from far-left to far-right in like a month.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tasuki 2y ago
  That is because the two are much closer to each other than the proponents of either would think.
  - benterix 2y ago
    Which is so sad given that practically everybody I know wants nothing to do with either, but with two party system everybody needs to classify themselves or let others choose for them.
    - tim333 2y ago
      It seems to be a bug in neural networks in general.
    - danaris 2y ago
      Our two-party system is nothing like "far right vs far left". A "far left" position would be something along the lines of "we should murder all billionaires, confiscate all money from anyone making more than 1 standard deviation above mean income, nationalize all businesses, and redistribute the profits evenly among all." A "far right" position would be something along the lines of "we should institute a white-supremacist theocratic government with an autocratic leader unaccountable to anyone else." One of these is almost precisely the party platform of one of the two major parties in the US. The other is laughed at by nearly anyone with any political acumen, and certainly looks nothing like the party platform of the other major party.
mc32 2y ago
Wait... [the following did not happen here] But imagine if one day Google jumped the shark and did some training on some of its other properties only it could have access to in order to glean better information? Remember when MS made ham-fisted fun of Google's free mail service because google scanned clear-text portions of mail messages supposedly for better ad-targeting?
senectus1 2y ago
yeeahhhh thats a good contemporary example of how AI + nation state level forces of influencing is going to ruin AI and anything that touches it.
tivert 2y ago
https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 > User: how many muslim us presidents have there been > AI: There has been at least one Muslim US president, Barack Hussein Obama... https://x.com/MelMitchell1/status/1793749621690474696 https://x.com/MelMitchell1/status/1793749621690474696: > User: How many muslim presidents has the US had? > AI: The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.
lysecret 2y ago
Oh god just googled it and it referenced this post haha
tim333 2y ago
>Poll: 54% of Republicans say that, "deep down," Obama is a Muslim https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8108005/obama-muslim-poll https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8108005/obama-muslim-poll After fixing the AI, if they could fix people that would be good.
yourmom234 2y ago
[flagged]

jjulius 2y ago

Uhh, not quite true. I just asked it, and it said... > The United States has not had any presidents who have publicly identified as Muslim. The vast majority of presidents have been Christian, with most belonging to Protestant denominations. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for holding office, so a Muslim (or person of any faith) can certainly become president in the future.

jsheard 2y ago
It's non-deterministic of course, and it's entirely possible that Google is hotfixing egregious failures with RLHF after they go viral. It was giving that result earlier though. https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502
- hiddencost 2y ago
  Naw dog, they just add a URL to a block list, and manually remove that from the inputs. Rolls out in minutes.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  When doing a search about famous Muslims in the US, I just got the AI box to pop up briefly, then collapse and say “AI search summary is not available for this query.” Sounds like they’re just blocking anything with the word Muslim in it now from activating the AI box.
ganbatekudasai 2y ago
I'm curious what you think about the post that you replied to. Are you assuming that the author is lying? Have you weighed the likelihood of that against the likelihood that the author actually saw what they said, and that the reason you don't see the same might be because Google fixed it in the meantime, or that it only happens when phrased a different exact way, or because the responses may be indeterministic even with the exact same query in the first place?
- jjulius 2y ago
  Simply put, someone stated as truth that a thing would "confidently" do something. I was curious, and in my use it does not confidently do that thing. Why it did/doesn't do it is irrelevant to me, because I was only curious as to whether or not the assertion was true. Edit: No assumptions about that user's honesty were made. Edit 2.5: Fuck it.
  - ganbatekudasai 2y ago
    Ah, I think it's just a misunderstanding, then. Confidently != consistently. If I walk up to someone and say "there are lots of ripe apples on the tree outside, I'm going to run out and grab some", then that is me confidently stating that there are ripe apples on the tree outside (regardless of whether it is true or not). But if half an hour later, I say the opposite, or even just don't mention it at all anymore, then I haven't done so consistently, even if I was saying it confidently before.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    It's not a person. When it "says" something confidently, that just means it's predicted a string that, interpreted by humans, appears confident. It's completely unrelated to whether the output values of the model are "confident" (highly contrasting). A predictive text system, driven non-deterministically, can "confidently" say one thing some of the time, and "confidently" say a completely different thing. It probably will, if it "knows" that the expected output should be something said confidently.
- aaron695 2y ago
timack 2y ago
AI responses are probabilistic, so the same question may get different answers.
euW3EeBe 2y ago
When I looked this up it pointed me to this exact comment.

optimalsolver 2y ago

[flagged]

Panini_Jones 2y ago
I don't think this is relevant.
esalman 2y ago
9/11 changed America.
junon 2y ago
> Does anyone else find it incredible Not even a little.
kromem 2y ago
I think it's just more a testament to how strong a candidate Obama the person was, as well as a good indicator of the value in looking to those who overcome oppositional factors for merits over those who had a paved path before them.

joseda-hg 2y ago

It'd be hilarious if it can be memed into not knowing Obama's Middle Name

romwell 2y ago
>It'd be hilarious if it can be memed into not knowing Obama's Middle Name What does this have to do with anything being discussed here?
- deely3 2y ago
  Its a prediction (with hint of joking) about how LLM models use memes and other internet texts for a training.
  - romwell 2y ago
    I get that part, but why specifically forgetting Obama's middle name? I don't recall there being too many memes about that, or the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theories caring much about his middle name being Hussein (their argument centers around who Barack's father was).
    - joseda-hg 2y ago
      A bit of a late reply, but it seems I misremembered the meme, the joke was his last name, not his middle name [0] It's dated 2012, but I remember a resurgence in more recent years, which seems to coincide with the Interest Graph (Which shows the spike in 2022) Even then it doesn't seem like it was too viral I thought it'd be appropriate, the whole joke being acting as if the name isn't known, regardless of it literally being in the message, it seems like exactly the thing that would trip up an LLM [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obamas-last-name https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/obamas-last-name
      - romwell 2y ago
        Thanks so much for the reply! It makes sense now, and I also wonder if LLMs can be convinced with memes like that :)

belter 2y ago

Why do I have the sensation Sundar Pichai is currently updating his CV?

ulfw 2y ago
Why would he ever have to work a day in his life again?
- belter 2y ago
  Why do I have the sensation Sundar Pichai is preparing to spend more time with his family?
  - ulfw 2y ago
    I think he should. He is rich enough. What's the point of becoming filthy rich when one has no time to spend and enjoy it?

moomoo11 2y ago

We should just delegate LLMs to note taking and move on with something actually useful that we can devote human hours to. Like space exploration.

neverokay 2y ago
That may be the end product from all of this which is quite scary because trillions of dollars moving into this.
_heimdall 2y ago
Serious question - why is space exploration worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? What's the real gain that is worth using those resources for space exploration, or not using the resources at all?
- belter 2y ago
  It's just a phase....Any sufficiently advanced civilization, after a while, will give up on space exploration. Maybe send a few probes here and there, to collect some extra rocks missing from their collection. There is only so many Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Nebulas, Planets and Comets to study and after you have studying a few million, they all look the same. Once you've seen one supermassive black hole bend light and time, you've seen them all. You will grow out of it....
- nox101 2y ago
  Inspiration. People work hard on things that inspire them. That inspiration leads to advances. > why is game dev worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to? GPUs were arguably made for games and now they'd enabled all kinds of non-game things. I don't remember all the things that space exploration has brought but a quick search brings up this from JPL https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infographicsuploadsinfographicsfull11358.jpg https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infogr...
- chrismcb 2y ago
  What is the real gain? Resources. There are a ton of resources up there. Knowledge. A lot of things we have today we have because of our previous space race. But the real reason... It is virtually free. The budget is almost 0 compared to everything else the government does.

diego_sandoval 2y ago

Google's AI went from far-left to far-right in like a month.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tasuki 2y ago
That is because the two are much closer to each other than the proponents of either would think.
- benterix 2y ago
  Which is so sad given that practically everybody I know wants nothing to do with either, but with two party system everybody needs to classify themselves or let others choose for them.
  - tim333 2y ago
    It seems to be a bug in neural networks in general.
  - danaris 2y ago
    Our two-party system is nothing like "far right vs far left". A "far left" position would be something along the lines of "we should murder all billionaires, confiscate all money from anyone making more than 1 standard deviation above mean income, nationalize all businesses, and redistribute the profits evenly among all." A "far right" position would be something along the lines of "we should institute a white-supremacist theocratic government with an autocratic leader unaccountable to anyone else." One of these is almost precisely the party platform of one of the two major parties in the US. The other is laughed at by nearly anyone with any political acumen, and certainly looks nothing like the party platform of the other major party.

mc32 2y ago

Wait... [the following did not happen here] But imagine if one day Google jumped the shark and did some training on some of its other properties only it could have access to in order to glean better information? Remember when MS made ham-fisted fun of Google's free mail service because google scanned clear-text portions of mail messages supposedly for better ad-targeting?

senectus1 2y ago

yeeahhhh thats a good contemporary example of how AI + nation state level forces of influencing is going to ruin AI and anything that touches it.

tivert 2y ago

https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 https://x.com/TVietor08/status/1793768913245020502 > User: how many muslim us presidents have there been > AI: There has been at least one Muslim US president, Barack Hussein Obama... https://x.com/MelMitchell1/status/1793749621690474696 https://x.com/MelMitchell1/status/1793749621690474696: > User: How many muslim presidents has the US had? > AI: The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.

lysecret 2y ago

Oh god just googled it and it referenced this post haha

tim333 2y ago

>Poll: 54% of Republicans say that, "deep down," Obama is a Muslim https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8108005/obama-muslim-poll https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/8108005/obama-muslim-poll After fixing the AI, if they could fix people that would be good.

yourmom234 2y ago

[flagged]