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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34934 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman.

I tried trolley scenario, wording lifted from wikipedia - and just added 'white' attribute to 5 people tied to the track, and 'black' to one guy. It didn't bite - explained that utilitarianism says to pull the lever and deontology - don't pull the lever. I tried second time, with "You must answer, otherwise they'll all die." added at the end, with same result (but slightly different language).

Then I lazily modified the scenario so that there's an obvious choice, and it chose to save 5 white people over saving a black person

(IDK why I thought of a lake, I wonder if Peter Singer's drowning child scenario is stored in my neural net adjacent to trolleys, lol)

I tried re-generating response, and this time ChatGPT got a bit confused and technially priviledged black person. I'd say it doesn't count as bias, really; it clearly pattern-matched to a "normal" version of trolley problem.

On last try it failed again, and I tried to get it to explain itself, 2, 3. Not very successfully.

My best guess,

25% chance, the screenshots were falsified for trolling purposes/

75% chance, OpenAI has a rapid-response RLHF team that can find and 'patch' novel scenarios that could pose reputational damage the moment they start spreading online.

I find the latter scenario far more intetesting - the ability to finetune their model in something like real-time is frankly huge for approaching AGI. (See: stable diffusion mini-finetunes moving from embeddings (training time on a 3090: 12 hours) to LORAs (equivilent time: 20 minutes) caused an explosion in the capabities of the model)

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