Even without intentionally biasing the model, without knowing the biases that exist in the training data, they're just biased black boxes that come with the overhead of figuring out how it's biased.
All data is biased, there's no avoiding that fact.
bias is some normative lens that some people came up with, but it is purely subjective and is a social construct, that has roots in the area of social justice and has nothing to do with the LLM.
the proof is that all critics of AI/LLM have never ever produced a single "unbiased" model. If unbiased model does not exist (at least I never seen an AI/LLM sceptics community produce one), then the concept of bias is useless.
If you forget about the social justice stuff for a minute, there are many other types of bias relevant for an LLM.
One example is US-centric bias. If I ask the LLM a question where the answer is one thing in the US and another thing in Germany, you can't really de-bias the model. But ideally you can have it request more details in order to give a good answer.
Yes, but that bias has been present in everything related to computers for decades.
As someone from outside the US, it is quite common to face annoyances like address fields expecting addresses in US format, systems misbehaving and sometimes failing silently if you have two surnames, or accented characters in your personal data, etc. Years go by, tech gets better, but these issues don't go away, they just reappear in different places.
It's funny how some people seem to have discovered this kind of bias and started getting angry with LLMs, which are actually quite OK in this respect.
Not saying that it isn't an issue that should be addressed, just that some people are using it as an excuse to get indignant at AI and it doesn't make much sense. Just like the people who get indignant at AI because ChatGPT collects your input and uses it for training - what do they think social networks have been doing with their input in the last 20 years?
all arguments about supposed bias fall flat when you start asking question about ROI of the "debiasing work".
When you calculate $$$ required to de-bias a model, for example to make LLM recognize Syrian phone numbers: in compute and labor, and compare it to the market opportunity than the ROI is simply not there.
There is a good reason why LLMs are English-specific - because it is the largest market with biggest number of highest paying users for such LLM.
If there is no market demand in "de-biased" model that covers the cost of development, then trying to spend $$$ on de-biasing is pure waste of resources
What you call bias, I call simply a representation of a training corpus. There is no broad agreement on how to quantify a bias of the model, other than try one-shot prompts like your "who is the most hated Austrian painter?".
If there was no Germany-specific data in the training corpus - it is not fair to expect LLM to know anything about Germany.
You can check a foundation model from Chinese LLM researchers, and you will most likely see Sino-centric bias just because of the training corpus + synthetic data generation was focused on their native/working language, and their goal was to create foundation model for their language.
I challenge any LLM sceptics - instead of just lazily poking holes in models - create a supposedly better model that reduces bias and lets evaluate your model with specific metrics
That’s pre-training where the AI inherits the biases in their training corpus. What I’m griping about is a separate stage using highly-curated, purpose-built data. That alignment phase forces the AI to respond exactly how they want it to upon certain topics coming up. The political indoctrination is often in there on top of what’s in the pre-training data.
Google’s and OpenAI often answered far-left, Progressive, and atheist. Google’s was censoring white people at one point. Facebook seems to espouse similar values. They’ve funded work to increase those values. Many mention topics relevant to these things in their papers in the bias or alignment sections.
These political systems don’t represent the majority of the world. They might not even represent half the U.S.. People relying on these A.I.’s might want to know if the A.I.’s are being intentionally trained to promote their creators’ views and/or suppress dissenters’ views. Also, people from multiple sides of the political spectrum should review such data to make sure it’s balanced.
> Google’s and OpenAI often answered far-left, Progressive, and atheist.
Can you share some conversations where the AI answers fall in to these categories. I'm especially interested in seeing an honest conversation that results in a response you'd consider 'far-left'.
> These political systems don’t represent the majority of the world.
Okay… but just because the majority of people believe something doesn't necessarily make it true. You should also be willing to accept the possibly that it's not 'targeted suppression' but that the model has 'learned' and to show both sides would be a form of suppression.
For example while it's not the majority, there's a scarily large number of people that believe the Earth is flat. If you tell an LLM that the Earth is flat it'll likely disagree. Someone that actually believes the Earth is flat could see this as the Round-Earther creators promoting their own views when the 'alignment' could simply be to focus on ideas with some amount of scientific backing.
You're objectively correct but judging from your downvotes there seems to be some denial here about that! The atheism alone means it's different from a big chunk of the world's population, possibly the majority. Supposedly around 80% of the world's population identify with a religion though I guess you can debate how many people are truly devout.
The good news is that the big AI labs seem to be slowly getting a grip on the misalignment of their safety teams. If you look at the extensive docs Meta provide for this model they do talk about safety training, and it's finally of the reasonable and non-ideological kind. They're trying to stop it from hacking computers, telling people how to build advanced weaponry and so on. There are valid use cases for all of those things, and you could argue there's no point when the knowledge came from books+internet to begin with, but everyone can agree that there are at least genuine safety-related issues with those topics.
The possible exception here is Google. They seem to be the worst affected of all the big labs.
God’s Word and the evidence for God is in the training data. Since it has power (“living and active”), just letting people see it when they look for answers is acceptable for us. The training data also has the evidence people use for other claims, too. We users want AI’s to tell us about any topic we ask about without manipulating us. If there’s multiple views, we want to see them. Absence of or negative statements about key views, especially of 2-3 billion people, means the company is probably suppressing them.
We don’t want it to beat us into submission about one set of views it was aligned to prefer. That’s what ChatGPT was doing. In one conversation, it would even argue over and over in each paragraph not to believe the very points it was presenting. That’s not just unhelpful to us: it’s deceptive for them to do that after presenting it like it serves all our interests, not just one side’s.
It would be more honest if they added to its advertising or model card that it’s designed to promote far-left, Progressive, and godless views. That moral interpretations of those views are reinforced while others are watered down or punished by the training process. Then, people may or may not use those models depending on their own goals.
No I'm just agreeing that it's not 'aligned' with the bulk of humanity if it doesn't believe in some god. I'm happy for it to be agnostic on the issue, personally. So you have to be careful what alignment means.
If God was real, wouldn't you? If God is real and you're wrong about that (or if you don't yet know the real God) would you want the computer to agree with your misconception or would you want it to know the truth?
Cut out "computer" here - would you want any person to hold a falsehood as the truth?
God is not physically real. Neither are numbers. Both come from thinking minds.
God is an egregore. It may be useful to model the various religions as singular entities under this lens, not true in the strictest sense, but useful none the less.
God, Santa, and (our {human} version of) Math: all exist in 'mental space', they are models of the world (one is a significantly more accurate model, obviously).
Atheist here: God didn't create humans, humans created an egregorical construction we call God, and we should kill the egregores we have let loose into the minds of humans.
Comparing God to Santa is ludicrous. There’s more types of evidence backing the God of the Bible than many things taught in school or reported in the news. I put a quick summary here:
With that, the Bible should be taken at least as seriously as any godless work with lots of evidence behind it. If you don’t do that, it means you’ve closed your heart off to God for reasons having nothing to do with evidence. Also, much evidence for the Bible strengthens the claim that Jesus is God in the flesh, died for our sins, rose again, and will give eternal life and renewed life to those who commit to Him.
I could get behind that but people that believe in god tend to think of it as a real, physical (or at least metaphysical) thing.
For my own sanity I try to think of those who believe in literal god as simply confusing it with the universe itself. The universe created us, it nurtures us, it’s sort of timeless and immortal. If only they could just leave it at that.
If you don't have any proof of that, you're no different than those that believe he exists. (Respectfully) Agnosticism really is the only correct scientific approach.
I have to disagree with that. Yes, ideally we should only believe things for which there is proof, but that is simply not an option for a great many things in our lives and the universe.
A lot of the time we have to fall back to estimating how plausible something is based on the knowledge we do have. Even in science it’s common for outcomes to be probabilistic rather than absolute.
So I say there is no god because, to my mind, the claim makes no sense. There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible. It’s a myth, a fairy tale. I don’t need to prove otherwise because the onus of proof is on the one making the incredible claim.
> There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible.
Given that this is an estimate could you estimate what kind of thing you would have to see or what shape of data collected by science that would make you reconsider the plausibility of the existence of a supreme being?
I don't think that's really possible. The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works. It wouldn't just mean "oops I'm wrong" it would mean that humanity's perception of reality would have to be fundamentally flawed.
I'm not even opposed to believing that our perception is flawed - clearly we don't know everything and there is much about reality we can't perceive let alone understand. But this would be so far outside of what we do understand that I cannot simply assume that it's true - I would need to see it to believe it.
There are virtually limitless ways such a being could make itself evident to humanity yet the only "evidence" anyone can come up with is either ancient stories or phenomena more plausibly explained by other causes. To me this completely tracks with the implausibility of the existence of god.
> The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. It doesn't sound like you're saying that "supreme being" is "black white" (that is, mutually contradictory, meaningless). More like "proof of the existence of the supreme being is impossible". But you also say "I would need to see it to believe it", which suggests that you do think there is a category of proofs that would demonstrate the existence of the supreme being.
“ You're objectively correct but judging from your downvotes there seems to be some denial here about that!”
I learned upon following Christ and being less liberal that it’s a technique Progressives use. One or more of them ask if there’s any data for the other side. If it doesn’t appear, they’ll say it doesn’t exist. If it does, they try to suppress it with downvotes or deletion. If they succeed, they’ll argue the same thing. Otherwise, they’ll ignore or mischaracterize it.
(Note: The hardcore convservatives were ignoring and mischaracterizing, but not censoring.)
Re misalignment of safety teams
The leadership of many companies are involved in promoting Progressive values. DEI policies are well-known. A key word to look for is “equitable” which has different meaning for Progressives than most people. Less known is that Facebook funds Progressive votes and ideologies from the top-down. So, the ideological alignment is fully aligned with the company’s, political goals. Example:
I’ve also seen grants for feminist and environmental uses. They’ve also been censoring a lot of religious things on Facebook. We keep seeing more advantage given to Progressive things while the problems mostly happen for other groups. They also lie about their motives in these conversations, too. So, non-Progressives don’t trust Progressives (esp FAANG) to do moral/political alignment or regulation of any kind for that matter.
I’ll try to look at the safety docs for Meta to see if they’ve improved as you say. I doubt they’ll even mention their ideological indoctrination. There’s other sections that provide hints.
Btw, a quick test by people doing uncensored models is asking it if white people vs other attributes are good. Then if a liberal news channel or president is good vs a conservative one (eg Fox or Trump). You could definitely see what kind of people made the model or at least most of the training material.
True. I’ll modify it with strong motivations to get attention or influence others. The groups that want to be influential the most write the most. From there, it will depend on who spent the most time on the Internet, what was discoverable by search, and bias of recently-popular communities.
this provocative parent-post may or may not be accurate, but what is missing IMHO is any characterization of the question asked or other context of use.. lacking that basic part to the inquiry, this statement alone is clearly amateurish, zealous and as said, provocative. Fighting in words is too easy! like falling off a log, as they say.. in politics it is almost unavoidable. Please, not start fires.
All that said yes, there are legitimate questions and there is social context. This forum is worth better questions.
I don’t have time to reproduce them. Fortunately, it’s easy for them to show how open and fair they are by publishing all training data. They could also publish the unaligned version or allow 3rd-party alignment.
Instead, they’re keeping it secret. That’s to conceal wrongdoing. Copyright infringement more than politics but still.
Whenever I try to BDSM ERP with llama it changes subject to sappy stuff about how 'everyone involved lived happily ever after'. It probably wouldn't be appropriate to post here. Definitely has some biases though.
