This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The reason it is an Artificial Intelligence is because that is the title of these things. It is labeled both as LLM and as A.I. Is it an independent intelligence, yet? Well not, but it can respond to many things in a manner that makes sense to most people observing it. This successful training had progressed what originally existed in incoherent form in the past to the level people have been describing them as A.I. You also have A.I. at this point being much better at chess than the best chess players, and that is notable enough however it got there.
Efficiency by multiple passes is significant enough that such engines are going to be used in more central ways.
Funnily enough GPT itself claims to be an artificial intelligence model of generative A.I.
ChatGPT and the other main AI have been coded to avoid certain issues and to respond in specific ways. Your idea that it isn't biased is completely wrong. People have studied them both for their code, and for their bias and it is woke bias. The end result shows in political compass tests and how it responds in issues, showing of course woke double standards.
Do you think ChatGPT and other LLM do not respond in a woke manner and are not woke?
Did you miss the situation where chatgpt responded in more "based" manner, and they deliberately changed it so it wouldn't?
Part of this change might included different focus on specific training data sets that would lead it to a more woke direction, but also includes actual programming about how it responds on various issues. That is part of it. Other part can include actual human team that is there to flag responses and then others put the thumps on the scales. This results in both woke answers or in Google's Gemini's case it produced overwhelmingly non white selections when people chose to create an image of white historical figures such as medieval knights. The thumps are thoroughly at the scales.
Of course it is biased.
Edit: Here is just one example of how it is woke: https://therabbithole84.substack.com/p/woke-turing-test-investigating-ideological
You can search twitter for countless examples and screenshots and test it yourself.
And here is an example of Gemini in particular and how it became woke: https://www.fromthenew.world/p/google-geminis-woke-catechism
And from the same site for the original GPT https://www.fromthenew.world/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1
I have also seen someone investigating parts of the actual code of one of those main LLM that tells it to avoid giving XYZ answer and to modify prompts.
This isn't it since that twitter thread had the code but it includes an example: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-woke-rails-of-google-gemini-are
It takes the initial prompt and changes it into a modified prompt that asks Gemini to create an image of South Asian, Black, Latina, South American, Native American.
No, no it is not. Or do you also expect me to believe that slapping a dog sticker on a cat will make it bark and chase cars?
My biggest frustration with the current state of AI discourse is that words mean things and that so much of the current discourse seems to be shaped by mid-wits with degrees in business, philosophy, psychology, or some other soft subject, who clearly do not understand what they are talking about. (Geoffrey Hinton being the quintessential example of the type) I'm not claiming to be much smarter than any of these people, but if asked to build an LLM from scratch I would at least know where to start and there in lies the rub. The magic of a magic trick is in not knowing what the trick is.
And transwomen claim to be women, would you say that this makes them biologically female?
Im saying this is a nonsense question because it's trying to use psychology to explain math. The model will respond as trained.
If trained by "woke" retards it will respond the way woke retards trained it to respond. If trained by "based" retards it will respond the way based retards trained it to respond.
Again, to say that it is "programmed to be biased" is to say that you do not understand how a regression engine works.
Huh? Hinton's education is not the hardest of subjects, but surely his career demonstrates that he's not a midwit.
More options
Context Copy link
It isn't widespread because it is inherently ridiculous. It is not actually the title of dogs to be cats.
But you did call them to be transwomen.
Whether they are male or female matters, because the difference between men and women matters and is significant. And it is not an accepted title, and a lot of force is used to make people comply with it. Rather this case where it is you who is the minority who is trying to push others to comply with the label you want to use.
Whether I use AI to refer to advanced LLM like most everyone else does, is not important. It might matter only if someone is treating the existing LLM as already independent intelligence.
The point you didn't address, is that it is more valid to do because LLM are sufficiently advanced to respond in a manner that sufficiently mimics how an intelligent human would behave. Since it has advanced to that stage, people label it AI.
It falls into the category we understand as A.I. but doesn't fall into certain things like independent intelligence. It isn't a category you want to accept as A.I. but it does into a category used as A.I. So there might be some room for argument here about terminology.
I don't think being aggressive against people outside the field and assuming they have no idea for using language you find insufficiently precise is a good idea to get them to listen to you.
While far from convinced in dropping the A.I. terminology, I am not completely unsympathetic to the argument of using a different labels and A.I. only for independent intelligence, but I am unsympathetic in pressuring and attacking me in this instance rather than you making the general point. Because I haven't decided to one day myself to use a label. And it is in fact substantially different to labeling dogs as cats or biological men as women. You can't act as if people are just using the wrong terminology, just like that in this case.
I am not really convinced that people in the field are not using A.I. label.
Whether the A.I. is woke is what matters. Sidetracking to this discussion is not getting us anywhere productive.
Someone did write code for these LLM A.I. to respond in certain manner. It isn't only about how they were trained. And these models have been retrained and have had data sets excluded.
You care too much about something irrelevant.
You are doubling down over highly uncharitable pedantry here.
If it was coded to use certain data sets over others, and was coded to not respond in certain manner on various issues, then yes i twas programmed to be biased. It isn't only about it being trained over data sets.
The point is that people had put thumps on the scales. You could have asked to clarify if I think it is all a result of coding rather than trained on data sets. And I would have answered that I consider it both to be the case, as with the example of gemini where it changes the prompt, to respond in a particular manner.
You basically are acting as if there is no programming involved.
Look, I don't think saying that it was programmed to be biased is inaccurate if you don't take it in the way you interpreted it, and you want to persist interpreting it as, but I don't actually care about you interpreting it to mean that it wasn't a Large Language Model.
It is fundamentally software that is biased because its creators made it that way. Which includes the training, but also includes other things like programming it to respond in certain ways in prompts, like the example I linked. And the training it self is it not the result of coding/programming for it to scan over X data set and "train", which my understanding, which is certainly not full is that it is making predictions relating to prompts and a certain picked data set.
If these models will respond consistently in a woke manner then having woke outputs makes it accurate to describe then as woke, as countless people have done and this conveys important information to people. If the result of it being woke, is it being trained over woke data sets, or there is further thumps on the scale in addition to that, this doesn't change the fact that the main LLM/A.I. are biased and woke. Which is something actually relevant and important.
Is it? You were the one ascribing power to labels not I. How is my example (cats chasing cars because they have been labeled dogs) any more ridiculous than yours (gpt being "intelligent" because it has been labeled as such)?
You're dodging the question, as above, do you think that being labeled or identifying as something make one that thing or don't you?
It seems rather hypocritical of you to go on about differences "mattering" and and being "significant" only to complain about my demand for precise language.
Yes the differences do matter which why i'm being "pedantic" even when tnat pedantry might read as "uncharitable" to you.
If you pay close attention to the people who are actually working on this stuff, (as distinct from the buisiness oriented front-men and credulous twitter anons) you'll notice that terms like "Machine Learning", along with more specific principles (IE diffusion vs regression vs AOP, Et Al) are used far more readily and widely than "AI" because again the difference matters.
No it doesn't because you are trying to apply psychology and agency where there is none. If you're trying to understand GPT in terms of biases and intelligence you're going to have a bad time because garbage in means garbage out.
The difference between "Woke GPT" and "Based GPT" is adjusting a few variable whieghts in a .json file, ie "biases", maybe you might have seperate curated training corpi if you want to get really fancy.
...because there isn't any programing involved. Like I said, the difference between "woke GPT" and "based GPT" is a couple of lines in a .json file or sliders on a UI.
I'm saying that the trivial differences are trivial and that people putting thier thumbs on the scales is on the people not the algorithms no matter how aggressively "the discouse" tries to claim otherwise.
You are missing the point. A widespread label towards something which is sufficiently advanced without much backlash.
Not inherently but it matters when people try to convey meaning with language. And it is in fact a valid defense to an extend and invalid in egregious cases. There is both some level of flexibility that might be warranted as language evolves and the purpose is to convey understanding to people and some inflexibility that is about precision and avoid absurd false labels that is harmful for us to spread.
And there is also a time and a place and a right way to make this argument. Which ought to be an argument, not something that I am just going to go along with because you want to and claim you are right.
There is an argument to be made for labeling these type of advanced models as A.I. because of what they can do, and then using AGI for AI that matches or surpass human intelligence and is therefore has some level of independence.
However, while the inherent argument about not labeling it A.I. isn't completely illegitimate on its own right but you pushed it in the wrong way, you are completely unreasonable on the bellow point about programming and basically the way you argue each point in your post is you spinning things, and ignoring all I provide to the contrary.
Running interference and putting obstacles to discourse has a cost.
There are significant negative consequences to listening to people who want to police our language and don't allow us to talk about issues because of bad reasons. Or even false ones as in bellow.
Yes it does because woke output matters and you are wrong when you claim it is psychology. Not to mention the way it mimics how a coherent person would reply in some instances. The fact that you act as if the statement that A.I. is woke and biased is nonsense, is because you want to continually misunderstand the point and to interpret the statement continually in the manner that allows you to complain about how it means it has agency. I agree that it doesn't have agency.
It is wasting people's time and lowering understanding to act as if saying that it is woke is a wrong statement or is psychology. It is perfectly sensible to say that a movie, chatgpt, etc is woke and there is a significant cost in us not doing so because you don't want to, in terms of failing to convey important and accurate information. And wasting time arguing about that.
All that is still programming. If I make a basic program that does nothing but to display text A or text B in the screen, then I did program it to do that.
But there is also additional programming involved related to it changing prompts as the example I quoted in the previous post.
And there is also this: https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP/blob/main/data/toxiGen.json https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1735705287401541635 https://x.com/fentasyl/status/1735705287401541635
We see here editing the .json file to have toxicity score and specific quotes in the text are rated as toxic, others neutral, in a way that leads to woke outputs.
Quoting a random example:
These are thumps thoroughly on the scale.
Anyway, calling it woke, biased is accurate and not imprecise and not psychology and your complaining is for improper use of language. But even people talking about these issues while labeling it as AI are conveying more useful information than you have done. Take the people complaining about it in these cases https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/AI-models-now-being-made-explictly-racist-and-all-the-rest-of-it-/5-2693402/, https://modernity.news/2023/12/15/microsoft-ai-says-stop-hurting-white-people-is-an-example-of-hate-speech/
The issue that it is woke because it is made this way and has those outputs is all useful and accurate information. And most people do understand what one means by AI and that it isn't an AGI or independent intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
That's pointless pedantry. Saying that an AI is woke means the same thing as "that magazine is woke" or "that TV show is woke". It means that the humans who created it put things in so that the words that get to the audience express wokeness. The fact that the magazine (or AI) itself has no agency is irrelevant; it's created by humans who do.
Its not "pointless pedantry", its pointed pedantry, thats my point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link