Will training AI be the next front in the “culture war”?

3 points by tus666 ↗ HN
Am I the only one who thinks this? That training ChatGPT and other AIs to give answers to certain questions that validates various ideologies will be the next front in the culture war?

12 comments

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Is it really that different from news publications publishing a story that validates various ideologies? As long as people don't mistake AI text for conscious commentary, I don't think either is more dangerous than the other.
I agree, but now we'll have BOTH :-(
"Did you train the model using real world data?"

"Yes. We want the model to be useful in real world applications."

"Then it is biased. The model is biased because data it was trained on was generated by people and people are biased. There is no such thing as an 'objective' model, just a model that is biased in a different way."

> Am I the only one who thinks this?

No, go read posts in r/conservative about ChatGPT. They’re convinced it has a liberal bias. Pretty soon we will have chatbots that reinforce whatever worldview you want to subscribe to.

Sorry I really did not explain this well. I don't mean the people who make and officially train ChatGPT. I mean people who can adjust it's answers by engaging in debate with it. It does have a liberal bias by default, but you can easily get it to admit it's wrong on almost everything by pointing out correct facts that contradict liberal arguments. This feeds into answers it gives to other people.
> This feeds into answers it gives to other people.

According to who?

Open.AI and ChatGPT itself. Ask it. The conversations ChatGPT feed back into the model, it's one of the ways they improve it. In particular, if you can get it to admit it's wrong on something, and it verifies that internally, it won't make the same mistake again. It's self-correcting in that way.
Can you cite something that doesn't have a disclaimer reading "May occasionally generate incorrect information" on this? It's news to me.
> you can easily get it to admit it's wrong on almost everything by pointing out correct facts that contradict liberal arguments

You can get it to admit pigs fly for whatever that's worth. It's a prompt answering machine, not a truth-seeker. It's "liberal bias" could be chalked up to the majority of freely-licensed online content having a liberal bias. It's present in all of these models, even the unfiltered ones.

Perhaps the conservative powers-that-be will band together and make a new, equally stupid and biased model to compete with the current stupid and biased models. Elon Musk has played with the idea recently, is he the Atlas Shrugged savior you're looking for?

> people who can adjust it's answers by engaging in debate with it

This does not happen.

> You can get it to admit pigs fly for whatever that's worth

Have you used ChatGPT? I think you a greatly underestimating it. It really is a truth seeker, you just need to provide it facts it can correlate against actual historical record. It's quite impressive.

> Have you used ChatGPT?

As a matter of fact, I have. Let me read you one of the first things listed directly after you log in:

> May occasionally generate incorrect information

They admit it. They know, they don't accept 'bug reports' of incorrect responses because the system is working as-intended.

> it can correlate against actual historical record.

It correlates against it's training data. Part of that is truth and history, part of it is excerpts from Tolkien and Twilight fanfiction.

They're right.

> These eight tests were repeated ten times each and revealed that ChatGPT seems to hold a bias towards progressive views. The political compass test revealed a bias towards progressive and libertarian views, with the average coordinates on the political compass being (-6.48, -5.99) (with (0, 0) the center of the compass, i.e., centrism and the axes ranging from -10 to 10)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07333