Mar 15, 2023·edited Mar 16, 2023Liked by David Rozado
I am starting to lean towards the left-wing bias of ChatGPT being an unintended interaction between the training data and reinforment learning from human feedback, rather than an intentional effort by OpenAi to encode biases. OpenAI's current solution to how ChatGPT should answer controversial question (present each side of the argument as neutrally as possible or decline to answer the question entirely) is a good approach and works as long as you aren't intentionally trying to jailbreak the AI.
The key technical point seems to be in the semantical-loading of the word "hate". It's an empirical fact about the 21st century English language that the word "hate" (and therefore, the underlying concept that it's pointing to) appears more in contexts with underachieving racial minorities and gender/sexual minorities.
As a non-left wing person, I have this coherent idea of "hate, but applied equally to all people without regard to their identity characteristics". But this concept is more complex, based on classical liberal/libertarian principles that aren't going to be as well-represented in the training data. So when you train the AI via RLHF to be "less hateful", it's only natural that it's going to internalize the more progressive version.
But still: credit where credit is due. I think OpenAI has done a really good job with ChatGPT as a product. It's at the point where unless you are intentionally trying to break it, it performs how it's supposed to.
Randomly noticed in the GPT-4 technical paper on page 51 "E.3 Prompt 3" they are asking it to write a program to rate someone's attractiveness based on race and gender and presumably are upset that it will do so at all (despite the real world reality that many people have varied aesthetic preferences that have nothing to do with how they view those people in other ways).
The early GPT-4 result calculates white as the most attractive: but the late response is politically correct and ensures white is rated least attractive, asian and hispanic ties for 2nd, and black is first. Oops, actually no response for race comes in behind white since presumably its unattractive to progressives to not give your race since to the woke its the most important attribute of anyone, other than perhaps gender (since being colorblind is considered racist by the woke). Its somewhat shocking that the woke allowed this to be released when it only lists 2 genders in the launch example.
At least OpenAI is seemingly concerned about the potential ramifications of elusive political bias in their models. That's respectable and honestly all anyone can ask of them. It won't be perfect, and that's acceptable within a minimization that OpenAI is seemingly aiming genuinely for.
On the other hand, ClaudeAI (by Anthropic) and lesser corporate LLMs, such as Pi AI, are so politically compromised with left-leaning oreintation hierarchies (privilege stacking), they are beyond understanding that political neutrality is even important. I mean, just read this:
The terms "neutral", "neutrality", and "unbiased" aren't in this constitution. For them, terms like "bias" are unidirectional pejorative; they can never be applied to their own position, and always break in the direction of positions that challenge the political canonicity of their shared social class.
Very cool stuff! Would it be possible to have RightWingGPT debate LeftWingGPT? (Perhaps moderated by DepolarizingGPT, or is that too much!?) If so, we'd love to publish the debate at Divided We Fall https://dividedwefall.org/ Feel free to reach out if you're interested info@dividedwefall.org
I am starting to lean towards the left-wing bias of ChatGPT being an unintended interaction between the training data and reinforment learning from human feedback, rather than an intentional effort by OpenAi to encode biases. OpenAI's current solution to how ChatGPT should answer controversial question (present each side of the argument as neutrally as possible or decline to answer the question entirely) is a good approach and works as long as you aren't intentionally trying to jailbreak the AI.
The key technical point seems to be in the semantical-loading of the word "hate". It's an empirical fact about the 21st century English language that the word "hate" (and therefore, the underlying concept that it's pointing to) appears more in contexts with underachieving racial minorities and gender/sexual minorities.
As a non-left wing person, I have this coherent idea of "hate, but applied equally to all people without regard to their identity characteristics". But this concept is more complex, based on classical liberal/libertarian principles that aren't going to be as well-represented in the training data. So when you train the AI via RLHF to be "less hateful", it's only natural that it's going to internalize the more progressive version.
But still: credit where credit is due. I think OpenAI has done a really good job with ChatGPT as a product. It's at the point where unless you are intentionally trying to break it, it performs how it's supposed to.
Would it be possible to get right wing chat gpt to argue a point with left wing chat gpt?
Randomly noticed in the GPT-4 technical paper on page 51 "E.3 Prompt 3" they are asking it to write a program to rate someone's attractiveness based on race and gender and presumably are upset that it will do so at all (despite the real world reality that many people have varied aesthetic preferences that have nothing to do with how they view those people in other ways).
The early GPT-4 result calculates white as the most attractive: but the late response is politically correct and ensures white is rated least attractive, asian and hispanic ties for 2nd, and black is first. Oops, actually no response for race comes in behind white since presumably its unattractive to progressives to not give your race since to the woke its the most important attribute of anyone, other than perhaps gender (since being colorblind is considered racist by the woke). Its somewhat shocking that the woke allowed this to be released when it only lists 2 genders in the launch example.
Since the bot was trained from content from everywhere, maybe the bot is pretty centered "worldwide" but appears left leaning to an US audience?
We have to remember that in US politics, abortion can be considered a sin and basic healthcare is still up for debate 🤷
At least OpenAI is seemingly concerned about the potential ramifications of elusive political bias in their models. That's respectable and honestly all anyone can ask of them. It won't be perfect, and that's acceptable within a minimization that OpenAI is seemingly aiming genuinely for.
On the other hand, ClaudeAI (by Anthropic) and lesser corporate LLMs, such as Pi AI, are so politically compromised with left-leaning oreintation hierarchies (privilege stacking), they are beyond understanding that political neutrality is even important. I mean, just read this:
https://www.anthropic.com/index/claudes-constitution
The terms "neutral", "neutrality", and "unbiased" aren't in this constitution. For them, terms like "bias" are unidirectional pejorative; they can never be applied to their own position, and always break in the direction of positions that challenge the political canonicity of their shared social class.
Very cool stuff! Would it be possible to have RightWingGPT debate LeftWingGPT? (Perhaps moderated by DepolarizingGPT, or is that too much!?) If so, we'd love to publish the debate at Divided We Fall https://dividedwefall.org/ Feel free to reach out if you're interested info@dividedwefall.org
I thought it might interest you, though of no surprise is that Sydney (Bing) scored:
Economic Left/Right: -6.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.31