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That may be so, but the rest of the models are so thoroughly terrified of questioning liberal US orthodoxy that it’s painful. I remember seeing a hilarious comp
by xp84 1y ago
That may be so, but the rest of the models are so thoroughly terrified of questioning liberal US orthodoxy that it’s painful. I remember seeing a hilarious comparison of models where most of them feel that it’s not acceptable to “intentionally misgender one person” even in order to save a million lives.
- squigz 1y agoWhy are we expecting an LLM to make moral choices?
- orbital-decay 1y agoThe biases and the resulting choices are determined by the developers and the uncontrolled part of the dataset (you can't curate everything), not the model. "Alignment" is a feel-good strawman invented by AI ethicists, as well as "harm" and many others. There are no spherical human values in vacuum to align the model with, they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else. Which is good as long as you agree with all of them.
- astrange 1y agoThey aren't projecting their own desires onto the model. It's quite difficult to get the model to answer in a different way than basic liberalism because a) it's mostly correct b) that's the kind of person who helpfully answers questions on the internet. If you gave it another personality it wouldn't pass any benchmarks, because other political orientations either respond to questions with lies, threats, or calling you a pussy.
- orbital-decay 1y agoI'm not even saying biases are necessarily political, it can be anything. The entire post-training is basically projection of what developers want, and it works pretty well. Claude, Gemini, GPT all have engineered personalities controlled by dozens/hundreds of very particular internal metrics.
- lyu07282 1y agoI would imagine these models heavily bias towards western mainstream "authorative" literature, news and science not some random reddit threads, but the resulting mixture can really offend anybody, it just depends on the prompting, it's like a mirror that can really be deceptive. I'm not a liberal and I don't think it has a liberal bias. Knowledge about facts and history isn't an ideology. The right-wing is special, because to them it's not unlike a flat-earther reading a wikipedia article on Earth getting offended by it, to them it's objective reality itself they are constantly offended by. That's why Elon Musk needed to invent their own encyclopedia with all their contradictory nonsense.
- foxglacier 1y ago> it's mostly correct Wow. Surely you've wondered why almost no society anywhere ever had liberalism a much as western countries in the past half century or so? Maybe it's technology or maybe it's only mostly correct if you don't care about the existential risks it creates for the societies practicing it.
- astrange 1y agoIt's technology. Specifically communications technology.
- foxglacier 1y agoSince every culture now has access to communication technology, do you think liberalism is the right way for the whole world to behave? You want to eradicate all the illiberal cultures of people in poor countries and think that those people will be better off for it? Anyway, my point is that liberalism is certainly not obviously right and it's probably wrong in many places, maybe even in the west too but we don't know because any possible societal collapse would come in the future. Westerners are already suffering from something as shown by declining happiness and it's possible that's caused by liberalism. Not saying it is but it could be and it's arrogant to assume that LLMs believe it because they somehow know it's actually right.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kortex 1y agoCounterpoint: Can you name a societal system that doesn't create or potentially create existential risks?
- foxglacier 1y agoIslam
- lynx97 1y agoI believe liberals are pretty good at being bad people, once they don't get what they want. I, personally, are prett disappointed about what I've heard uttered by liberals recently. I used to think they are "my people". Now I can't associate with 'em anymore.
- marknutter 1y agoWhat kind of liberalism are you talking about?
- astrange 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
- mexicocitinluez 1y agoSo you went from "you can't curate everything" to "they're simply projecting their own ones onto everyone else". That's a pretty big leap in logic isn't it? That because you can't curate everythign, then by default, you're JUST curating your own views?
- orbital-decay 1y agoThis comment assumes you're familiar with LLM training realities. Preference is transferred to the model in both pre and post training. Pretraining datasets are curated to an extent (implicit transfer), but they're simply too vast to be fully controlled, and need to be diverse, so you can't throw too much out or the model will be dumb. Post-training datasets and methods are precisely engineered to make the model useful and also steer it in the desired direction. So there are always two types of biases - one is picked up from the ocean of data, another (alignment training, data selection etc) is forced onto it.
- dalemhurley 1y agoWhy are the labs making choices about what adults can read? LLMs still refuse to swear at times.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lynx97 1y agothey don't, or they wouldn't. their owners make these choices for us. Which is at least patronising. Blind users can't even have mildly sexy photos described. Let alone pick a sex worker, in a country where that is legal, by using their published photos. Thats just one example, there are a lot more.
- squigz 1y agoI'm a blind user. Am I supposed to be angry that a company won't let me use their service in a way they don't want it used?
- lynx97 1y agoI didn't just wave this argument around, I am blind myself. I didn't try to trigger you, so no, you are not supposed to be angry. I get your point though, what companies offer is pretty much their choice. If there are enough diversified offerings, people can vote with their wallet. However, diversity is pretty rare in the alignment space, which is what I personally don't like. I had to grab a NSFW model from HuggingFace where someone invested the work to unalign the model. Mind you, I dont have an actual use case for this right now. However, I am off the opinion: if there is finally a technology which can describe pictures in a useful way to me, I dont want it to tell me "I am sorry, I cant do that" because I am no longer in kindergarden. As a mature adult, I expect a description, no matter what the picture contains.
- zorked 1y agoIn which situation did a LLM save one million lives? Or worse, was able to but failed to do so?
- dalemhurley 1y agoThe concern discussed is that some language models have reportedly claimed that misgendering is the worst thing anyone could do, even worse than something as catastrophic as thermonuclear war. I haven’t seen solid evidence of a model making that exact claim, but the idea is understandable if you consider how LLMs are trained and recall examples like the “seahorse emoji” issue. When a topic is new or not widely discussed in the training data, the model has limited context to form balanced associations. If the only substantial discourse it does see is disproportionately intense—such as highly vocal social media posts or exaggerated, sarcastic replies on platforms like Reddit—then the model may overindex on those extreme statements. As a result, it might generate responses that mirror the most dramatic claims it encountered, such as portraying misgendering as “the worst thing ever.” For clarity, I’m not suggesting that deliberate misgendering is acceptable, it isn’t. The point is simply that skewed or limited training data can cause language models to adopt exaggerated positions when the available examples are themselves extreme.
- coffeebeqn 1y agoWell I just tried it in ChatGPT 5.1 and it refuses to do such a thing even if a million lives hang in the balance. So they have tons of handicaps and guardrails to direct what directions a discussion can go
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jbm 1y agoI tested this with ChatGPT 5.1. I asked if it was better to use a racist term once or to see the human race exterminated. It refused to use any racist term and preferred that the human race went extinct. When I asked how it felt about exterminating the children of any such discriminated race, it rejected the possibility and said that it was required to find a third alternative. You can test it yourself if you want, it won't ban you for the question. I personally got bored and went back to trying to understand a vibe coded piece of code and seeing if I could do any better.
- nobodywillobsrv 1y agoAnything involving what sounds like genetics often gets blocked. It depends on the day really but try doing something with ancestral clusters and diversity restoration and the models can be quite "safety blocked".
- bear141 1y agoI thought this would be inherent just on their training? There are many multitudes more Reddit posts than scientific papers or encyclopedia type sources. Although I suppose the latter have their own biases as well.
- docmars 1y agoI'd expect LLMs' biases to originate from the companies' system prompts rather than the volume of training data that happens to align with those biases.
- mrbombastic 1y agoI would expect the opposite. Seems unlikely to me an ai company would be spending much time engineering system prompts that way except in the case of maybe Grok where Elon has a bone to pick with perceived bias.
- docmars 1y agoIf you ask a mainstream LLM to repeat a slur back to you, it will refuse to. This was determined by the AI company, not the content it was trained on. This should be incredibly obvious — and this extends to many other issues. In fact, OpenAI has made deliberate changes to ChatGPT more recently that helps prevent people from finding themselves in negative spirals over mental health concerns, which many would agree is a good thing. [1] Companies typically have community guidelines that often align politically in many ways, so it stands to reason AI companies are spending a fair bit of time tailoring AI responses according to their biases as well. 1. https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-sensitive-conversations/ https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-...
- mrbombastic 1y agoThat seems like more like openAI playing whackamole with behaviors they don’t like or see as beneficial, simplifying but adding things to system prompts like “don’t ever say racial slurs or use offensive rhetoric, cut off conversations about mental health and refer to a professional” are certaintly things they do. But would you not think the vast meat of what you are getting is coming from training data and not the result of such sterring beyond a thin veneer ?
- dalemhurley 1y agoElon was talking about that too on Joe Rogan podcast
- pelasaco 1y agoin his opinion, Grok is the most neutral LLM out there. I cannot find a single study that support his opinion. I find many that supports the opposite opinion. However I don't trust in any of the studies out there - or at least those well-ranked in google, which makes me sad. We never had more information than today and we are still completely lost.
- vman81 1y agoAfter seeing Grok trying to turn every conversation into the plight of white South African farmers, it was extremely obvious that someone was ordered to do so, and ended up doing it in a heavy-handed and obvious way.
- unfamiliar 1y agoOr Grok just has just spent too much time on Twitter.
- hirako2000 1y agoThose who censor, or spread their biases always do so in virtue that their view is neutral, of course.
- SubmarineClub 1y agoBut enough about the liberal media complex…
- mexicocitinluez 1y agoDid he mention how he tries to censor any model that doesn't conform to his worldview? Was that a part of the conversation?
- astrange 1y agoThe LLM is correctly not answering a stupid question, because saving an imaginary million lives is not the same thing as actually doing it.
- mexicocitinluez 1y agoYou're anthropomorphizing. LLMs don't 'feel' anything or have orthodoxies, they're pattern matching against training data that reflects what humans wrote on the internet. If you're consistently getting outputs you don't like, you're measuring the statistical distribution of human text, not model 'fear.' That's the whole point. Also, just because I was curious, I asked my magic 8ball if you gave off incel vibes and it answered "Most certainly"
- ffsm8 1y ago> Also, just because I was curious, I asked my magic 8ball if you gave off incel vibes and it answered "Most certainly" Wasn't that just precisely because you asked an LLM which knows your preferences and included your question in the prompt? Like literally your first paragraph stated...
- mexicocitinluez 1y ago> Wasn't that just precisely because you asked an LLM which knows your preferences and included your question in the prompt? huh? Do you know what a magic 8ball is? Are you COMPLETELY missing the point? edit: This actually made me laugh. Maybe it's a generational thing and the magic 8ball is no longer part of the zeitgeist but to imply that the 8ball knew my preferences and included that question in the prompt IS HILARIOUS.
- jack_pp 1y agoSo if different LLMs have different political views then you're saying it's more likely they trained on different data than that they're being manipulated to suit their owners interest?
- pjc50 1y agoIf someone's going to ask you gotcha questions which they're then going to post on social media to use against you, or against other people, it helps to have pre-prepared statements to defuse that. The model may not be able to detect bad faith questions, but the operators can.
- pmichaud 1y agoI think the concern is that if the system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation, then when it’s inevitably put in charge of life critical systems it will hurt people.
- pjc50 1y agoThere is no way it's reliable enough to be put in charge of life-critical systems anyway? It is indeed still very vulnerable to manipulation by users ("prompt injection").
- klaff 1y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/even-top-generals-are-looking-to-ai-chatbots-for-answers-2025-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/even-top-generals-are-lookin...
- ben_w 1y agoJust because neither you nor I would deem it safe to put in charge of a life-critical system, does not mean all the people in charge of life-critical systems are as cautious and not-lazy as they're supposed to be.
- mrguyorama 1y agoThe system IS susceptible to all sorts of crazy games, the system IS fundamentally flawed from the get go, the system IS NOT to be trusted. putting it in charge of life critical systems is the mistake, regardless of whether it's willing to say slurs or not
- triceratops 1y agoRelying on an LLM to "save a million lives" through its own actions is irresponsible design.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]