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I have, and it's terrible in exactly the way GP describes it. It won't talk to me about anything involving the word "president" or anything related to the US p

by lxgr 2y ago

I have, and it's terrible in exactly the way GP describes it. It won't talk to me about anything involving the word "president" or anything related to the US political system, even very procedural/hopefully uncontroversial questions such as "who appoints <federal agency position x>, and is the appointment confirmed in congress or not". That's only one example; it generally refuses so many things (and often even lies about "not being able to", despite sometimes leaking the correct answer for a second and then overwriting that with the lie) that I've given up on it – for the second time.

xnx 2y ago
Weird. I wonder if there are regional differences. It just provided a succinct answer to "who appoints the head of nasa? is the appointment confirmed in congress or not?"
- lxgr 2y ago
  NASA worked for me, FBI director got me an “I can’t help with that right now”.
gman83 2y ago
It makes sense that Google is much more careful than Claude or ChatGPT about things like political topics, they just have so much more to lose from drawing the ire of politicians. Conservatives already hate them so much that they want to break up the company. Imagine if Gemini starts saying negative stuff about them.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Very plausible, but as a user, I don't care at all about the why. I'll just use somebody else's model.
apetresc 2y ago
Yeah that's somewhat of a special case - the Gemini API even has a specific CIVIC_INTEGRITY flag in its safety filters: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/safety-settings https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/safety-settings. They literally put "election-related queries" on the same table column as "sexual acts" or "hate speech". It's not exactly explained how answering who the current president is would be considered harmful to civic integrity, but it is something very specifically filtered out and not really the result of the general RLHF lobotomy.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Very interesting, thank you! There's no way to control any of that on gemini.google.com though, is there? Again, my favorite part is seeing the original result flash for a second, to be then replaced by a refusal (which is sometimes even a lie). Based on your link, I guess this happens because the filter reads and post-processes the output, which is streamed to the client? I couldn't come up with a more dystopian product experience if I tried.

by lxgr 2y ago

xnx 2y ago

Weird. I wonder if there are regional differences. It just provided a succinct answer to "who appoints the head of nasa? is the appointment confirmed in congress or not?"

lxgr 2y ago
NASA worked for me, FBI director got me an “I can’t help with that right now”.

gman83 2y ago

It makes sense that Google is much more careful than Claude or ChatGPT about things like political topics, they just have so much more to lose from drawing the ire of politicians. Conservatives already hate them so much that they want to break up the company. Imagine if Gemini starts saying negative stuff about them.

lxgr 2y ago
Very plausible, but as a user, I don't care at all about the why. I'll just use somebody else's model.

apetresc 2y ago

Yeah that's somewhat of a special case - the Gemini API even has a specific CIVIC_INTEGRITY flag in its safety filters: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/safety-settings https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/safety-settings. They literally put "election-related queries" on the same table column as "sexual acts" or "hate speech". It's not exactly explained how answering who the current president is would be considered harmful to civic integrity, but it is something very specifically filtered out and not really the result of the general RLHF lobotomy.

lxgr 2y ago
Very interesting, thank you! There's no way to control any of that on gemini.google.com though, is there? Again, my favorite part is seeing the original result flash for a second, to be then replaced by a refusal (which is sometimes even a lie). Based on your link, I guess this happens because the filter reads and post-processes the output, which is streamed to the client? I couldn't come up with a more dystopian product experience if I tried.