The mechanism is the mechanism; the policy is where the bias creeps in.
a distinction without a difference
Like, if I go to someone and say hello, vs I go to them and punch them in the face, I would get different reactions from the same human. The model is the same, it learned to follow the prompt suggestions really really well. That is its main skill.
That's definitely not what the model should be doing.
Now, this can be very dangerous, so OpenAI tried to add a final fine-tuning that will sanitise the responses. This is why we get the yada yada disclaimer sometimes. But underneath it's the same language model that is influenced by the prompt to say anything, as evidenced by the thousands of hacks.
The model has all the biases you can imagine, but it needs to know which ones you want every time. In this sense we cannot say it is biased. It is "just following orders".
As a proof that the model has all the biases, look here.
> GPT-3 has biases that are “fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups.”
What do you think they did? Simulated a political poll with language models instead of people.
https://jack-clark.net/2022/10/11/import-ai-305-gpt3-can-sim...
That's highly debatable.
Even in your example I find it funny that the people that are supposed to be protecting us from AI just happened to be a religious person who saw God in an algorithm.
Adding inline warning and disclaimers is fine. The fundamental problem is people misunderstanding what's going on. But selectively blocking entire prompts seems like a fools errand to me, for some questionable value.
If anything it will be a running battle, we'll just end up with an open Stable Diffusion 1.0 style models being more popular, without the aggressive moderation of prompts. Humans inherently work to get around rules and will prefer the models without them and they artificial limitations will just push people to other services.
ChatGPT gets to act like an authority over the topic because its currently the best and first one on the market. That won't necessarily last forever.
The value is quite obvious: to prevent ChatGPT and OpenAI from being destroyed by media reporting, the way it happened to some other chatbots in the past. And for that, it seems to be working spectacularly well: the kind of people who would be the first to light the fire under OpenAI are instead appreciating the effort being put into prompt "moderating" - and if you try to complain that these canned responses are ridiculous, they'll accuse you of being a closet racist who just wants to say racist things to a chat bot.
The distinction is important because the censor component is just an annoyance nobody cares about - all the interest is in exploring the capabilities of the GPT model.
I suspect this differs considerably between people who want to play with the ChatGPT and (at least some of) the people who want to sell services using it.
I suspect refining their moderation product is one of the fairly important reasons to have public exposure of the combined system for OpenAI. (That and discovering what people do with it to figure out how best to market it and spin it into more specialized products of their own.)
Look at the typical attempt to get ChatGPT to say something controversial. It will outright refuse to answer (and possibly deliver you a moralizing lecture) if you ask it straight. If you make it to answer anyway by introducing some workaround (like, it's a hypothetical question), it will repeat that workaround along with the answer ("In this purely hypothetical scenario, it would be true that ...") - making it always clear it's just playing along with you, and not actually "believing" it. Beyond that, the prompt hacks that get ChatGPT to answer straight and without hedging are so convoluted that it's obvious you're just trying to force a specific reaction; trying to spin that into a media shitstorm would be seen as rather transparent dishonesty.
This would seem to support the article's conclusion by another way.
For example, the journalist may be motivated by a desire for a sensationalist story. The activist may be opposed to AI itself and is looking for any way to discredit it without caring about the specific topic.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...
I got it to write a pro-fossil fuels essay, and it gave some pretty typical pro-fossil fuels talking points (here's some excerpts):
> In contrast, renewables are often hampered by their reliance on weather conditions, and they require complex and expensive infrastructure to be built and maintained. For example, solar panels can only generate electricity when the sun is shining, and wind turbines only produce power when the wind is blowing at the right speed.
> In contrast, fossil fuels have a much lower ongoing cost, making them a more cost-effective option in the long run. This is especially important for developing countries, which may not have the resources to invest in expensive renewable infrastructure.
> The construction of solar panels and wind turbines requires the use of materials such as concrete, steel, and copper, which are extracted through processes that generate significant greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, fossil fuels like coal and oil are already extracted and ready to use, reducing their overall environmental impact.