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AI tools are making the world look weird
- simonw 1y agoWEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".
- YurgenJurgensen 1y agoI’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoCould you explain the agenda to those of us like me, who missed it anyway?
- YurgenJurgensen 1y agoIt’s pretty simple. ‘West => weird = bad.’
- janalsncm 1y agoNot everyone in the west is educated
- DaveZale 1y agoI heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here
- johnisgood 1y agoThat is crazy.
- DaveZale 1y agounprofessional and divisive, for sure
- kps 1y agoWe've been here before. The ‘Goldwater Rule’ says that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
- DaveZale 1y agoMaybe I should have elaborated further. Her point was that the term "crazy" is in itself destructive and counterproductive. Although I use the term all the time, gotta fess up to that. So now I am naval gazing too. The etymology was begging to be looked at, so I did. My understanding from undergrad was that it came from Greek "akrasia" as I recall but it's worth looking at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/crazy https://www.etymonline.com/word/crazy The use of language by leaders in the US lately sometimes seems reckless and inflammatory, even shocking and provocative, and I'll stop there before getting flagged for who knows what.
- shermantanktop 1y agoThe idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.
- YurgenJurgensen 1y agoThere are no ‘freaks’ flying flags. There are highly polarised groups signalling their in-group identity, each backed by their own billionaires.
- maxbond 1y agoWEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times). Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle. For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck. In general I think these types of issues are best viewed as software bugs. It's a clearer and more actionable perspective than as ideological issues. If the software isn't serving some of our end users properly, let's just fix it and move on.
- esperent 1y ago> The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times). I'm a Caucasian living in Asia and the facial recognition systems that they recently required all banking apps to use struggles massively with my face. I fully agree with you here that this isn't systemic racism, it's just a bug. It only becomes racism if they don't put any effort into fixing it.
- YurgenJurgensen 1y agoWhen a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.
- maxbond 1y agoKeep in mind that I am also WEIRD. Please help me to understand by referring to the specific part of the article where WEIRD was used in the pejorative.
- cortesoft 1y agoI think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal. By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm. Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.
- janalsncm 1y ago> challenge the western centrism The authors had a perfect opportunity to use Chinese models to see if their trend held up. Instead, they treated ChatGPT as the “default”. Sound familiar?
- uncircle 1y ago[flagged]
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- derektank 1y agoInteresting that the responses from ChatGPT on the World Values Survey correlated most closely with the responses from Australians and New Zealanders.
- jdlshore 1y agoI imagine the culture of HRLF trainers affects things. Maybe there’s disproportionally more of them from Oz/NZ, as native English-speaking countries with possibly lower wages?
- derektank 1y agoI had heard that a lot of human feedback was being provided by people in Nigeria, as it has a very large English speaking population (owing to its history as a British colony) while also having low wages. This was the explanation given as to why ChatGPT seemed to use the word "delve" so often, apparently it's used much more frequently in business contexts there. Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
- marcus_holmes 1y agoI expect (as TFA says) that they would most closely align with Californians, but that isn't in the data.
- DaveZale 1y agoUmmm... doesn't the AI have to scrape the data of those non- WEIRD cultures to work then? What am I missing here? There are parts of the world where constant person-electronic connection isn't a thing. Is that your point?
- psidium 1y agoI don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view. My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me. And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.
- DaveZale 1y agoenglish is the lingua franca ;-)
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- klooney 1y agoAnd the RHLF was directed by Californians, and so the "values" are likely very California.
- tropdrop 1y agoIn my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations. But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
- psidium 1y agoCan’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that. There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists. He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man). One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism. Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff
- hackable_sand 1y agoAnthropologists have a couple centuries to go before they earn any credibility.
- titanomachy 1y agoTIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.
- TheCoelacanth 1y agoIt was part of the Holy Roman Empire for hundreds of years, but not at the end. The Holy Roman Empire started in 800 CE and Rome was part of it. The Italian states started becoming more autonomous in the mid-1100s. It wasn't until the 1600s that they were fully independent.
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- m0llusk 1y agoIt seems like almost all contexts might get value from specialized training. People often vary radically depending on where they were raised and where they live, their occupation and social class, and a range of other factors. Even workers from essentially identical backgrounds but practicing different trades can have very different perceptions and framing for what might appear to be shared tasks.
- felipeerias 1y agoThere is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point. On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there. But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US.
- coherentpony 1y ago> For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US I have no expertise in this field. Is it actually even more aligned? Or is it simply aligned with the elements of Japanese culture and/or media that are exported to the West?
- TimByte 1y agoOne possibility is that alignment isn’t just about cultural distance in values, but also about textual representation in the training data
- dwoldrich 1y ago[flagged]
- decimalenough 1y agoThe headline should retain the caps, since WEIRD here is not the same as regular weird.
- qwertytyyuu 1y agoOh it’s an arcronym. I was very confused for a good portion of the article
- barnabyjones 1y agoI have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.
- ehnto 1y agoThat's interesting! I manually do the same by prompting in the target language, since it drastically changes the results. This has been true of web search since forever mind you. The wev has always been culturally delineated by language, and the English Web as I call it is not the only web.
- cortesoft 1y agoI wonder how ChatGPT and the like would do if you asked it to give a response as if they were a person from one of those other cultures. In other words, is the issue in the defaults or is it impossible for AI to respond from other cultures?
- yellowapple 1y ago“Do non-American LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Mistral, Apertus) perform better or worse here? Do they have their own cultural biases in-built?” I'm wondering the same thing, in addition to the related question of “Would an LLM perform better or worse if prompted with languages other than English?”.
- tropdrop 1y agoChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before. (I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
- ehnto 1y agoI was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes. For example (not actual output): Input: "こにちは"(konichwa) Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I should respond in a kind and friendly manner. Qwen Output: こにちは！ It quiiiickly gets confused in this, much quicker than in English.
- lmm 1y agoPerhaps it knows most users who misspell こんにちは are English speakers?
- ehnto 1y agoAh nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English. It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
- justlikereddit 1y agoSocial media reflects a silicon valley perspective and US domestic news have contaminated the entire eurozone since over a decade. Movies are also a distillate of a local culture often with a rather uniform ideological slant. AI being a clone army of corporate spokesmen from the US west coast brings sparsely little new cultural homogeneity to the already very smoothed table.
- mrweasel 1y ago> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values. I'd be somewhat concerned that what is actually reflected is a cultures willingness to adopt US (west coast) values over its own. We see this constantly in some European countries where we're willing to adopt US view points and problems over our own. Either because we're constantly exposed the US problems online or because the US problems are simply more "interesting", in the sense that they are more decisive and easier for us to split into right and wrong.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>We see this constantly in some European countries where we're willing to adopt US view points and problems over our own. 'Some', being which countries?
- rishi_rt 1y agoAnother paper that echoes similar concerns — AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11360 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11360)
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- blargey 1y agoFor those interested, you can see the World Values Survey Questionnaire here: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp (For Wave 7 (2017-2022), which the paper used) Some of the questions don't really make sense to ask an LLM (being about the survey taker's personal financial situation and such), but the paper doesn't seem to go into detail of what questions were used.
- ManlyBread 1y ago>In fact, this paper found that more than that, it thinks American. I think that's because it seems to be primarily trained on reddit and therefore mirrors everything reddit stands for. Not a good thing considering just how overrun the site is with bots and political activists of all kinds.
- rollcat 1y agoYou're absolutely right! Social media like Reddit are overrun with bots, sycophants, and trolls trying to provoke reactions by engaging in controversial topics. This forms echo chambers, which is a sub-par source for training data, and reflects those biases in LLM responses.
- TimByte 1y agoI wonder how much of that actually survives token filtering during training
- TimByte 1y agoSooo it's like training a robot to "think like a human," but all the reference humans are Silicon Valley product managers and undergrads from elite universities
- abeppu 1y agoThere may be a real point here but this post and paper are not good evidence for it. The blogpost doesn't have a date, but links to a 2023 preprint, which is hard to evaluate b/c it doesn't actually have a methods section, despite referring to it multiple times. (Did this ever get published?) https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5b26t_v1 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5b26t_v1 But it _sounds_ like they asked GPT via API to do the same survey 1000 times, without telling it to attempt to model the preferences of any particular country, but both the blog and the paper are interpreting a correlational analysis as evidence that it's bad at modeling local values. > The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values. > This correlation represents the similarity between variation in GPT and human responses in a particular population; in other words, how strongly GPT can replicate human judgments from a particular national population. And to some degree, this is more a portrayal of the difference in human responses than anything about GPT; given the survey data, no matter what responses the LLM gives, it's going to be closer to some national averages than others. LLMs also have a characteristic default voice/style which we're annoyed by, but _when instructed_ it can mimic another style. If you have some multi-dimensional style space, yes you could find the group that it's closest to, but it would be misleading to say it does a poor job "simulating" or "replicating" others if you didn't actually test that.
- janalsncm 1y agoThey should have run the same experiment against a Chinese model like Kimi to see if the same trend holds up. I would imagine chatgpt is more similar to Kimi than the US is to China which suggests a different trend.
- thedudeabides5 1y agointeresting