Why do we see an issue if AI is biased, while 90% of media run by humans are biased too?

Every single individual has its own bias, so why it's an issue for an AI.

If we look at the many topics, there's no universal objective truth, truth is what we define as truth, and again, not everyone agrees at it.

AI, being fully automated, amplify the effects.

Human run media has been around for a while, and I think people have definitely seen issues with certain biases more and more. This flavor of AI is relatively new, so now we see an issue with bias there as well.

It seems really simple, am I missing your point?

Because you have a large number of media outlets. There's at least one media outlet for every relatively big ideology or demographic. And these biases are well understood by people.

With LLMs, you'll probably end up only having 2 or 3 companies, and it wouldn't be surprising if they all end up having silicon valley, left leaning biases.

You can tune Fox news, but you can't use a "right wing chat gpt".

> You can tune Fox news, but you can't use a "right wing chat gpt".

You can build your own with the GPT API. I started playing with it and it returned racial slurs in response to innocuous prompts like "hello" and "ok". Seems perfectly tuned out of the box for the kind of speech that the right is interested in these days.

Can you share your prompts for reproducibility?

IIRC "hello" and "ok" were the literal prompts, calling the API with the example code.

Actually, you know that's a fascinating point. I'd love to see if 10,000 people were asked whether one of these statements in isolation was "hateful" whether we'd see similar, stronger, or weaker biases.

Because people who are in power use the AI to justify their continuing tyranny by trying to imply that "well, the AI agrees with me and it is a billion times more intelligent than you and I are, so shut up". It's just used as a justification to further tyrannize anyone who disagrees with whatever the AI comes up with, but is deferred to as some kind of superlative super-reliable "objective" expert.

That's just a strawman. Who did that?

It happened throughout the history of the Soviet Union. It was the whole premise of central planning. Now, they think they can "do it better" because they'll use AI instead of "expert people" but it will have the same horrifying effects. Same thing happened in Maoist China.

... and something like that never happened in the rest of the world, only in Soviet Union and China?

If the government is tyrannical, they don't need an AI as an excuse. Lacking AI they can, and did, use the science, experts, god, devil, and a whole plethora of excuses since the dawn of the humans. Why would AI change anything there?

I agree with you. I'm just saying that is how it is used by tyrannical people. It's a misdirection and a way for them to justify themselves. They can deny responsibility when things go bad because they were "trusting the expert AI model" and when things go well, they praise themselves for being wise enough to listen to the "expert AI model".

> If the government is tyrannical, they don't need an AI as an excuse.

Only in the fairytale tyrannies that exist in the heads of Western nationalists. Real tyrannies rest on the labor of a large cadre professionals and managers, and constantly have to justify themselves or risk being overthrown. "AI," or any credential for that matter, has the purpose of isolating the decision from the decision makers. It's tyranny-laundering; tyranny in the passive voice.

I replied once, but I'll share another example that's happening right now. Climate change models are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert about the future, and all kinds of tyrannical laws and controls are being put in place because "the experts" and "the advanced supercomputer models" say Bad Things are going to happen.

But I'm sure that now I've triggered your cognitive dissonance and you will see me as an insane person.

> Climate change models are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert about the future

No, the Experts who wrote the model are being deferred to as some kind of reliable expert. Because... they are exactly that.

You can make the argument that the models or the experts are wrong, but you're not providing any sort of argument for that.

I've spent most of my life deferring to the calendar to know when it will get cold for winter. It's obviously reasonable to defer to some systems. We are in fact quite capable of predicting all sorts of future events!

Your first sentence will be the same sentence used to justify the AI models that will be used by the government to impose other tyrannical laws in other areas of your life besides climate change. And they will wash their hands of responsibility by saying "we trusted the best models at the time made by the best experts!"

But the whole thing is just misdirection for their tyrannical desires. It's already working on you and you are wondering how it will ever work. Which is why I mentioned cognitive dissonance.

Conflating a chaotic system (which is, by definition, unpredictable) with the regularity of a calendar seems a bit disingenuous.

Redlining and credit scoring has and in some cases still does systematically implement discriminatory practices via algorithmic means. And arguing with a loan officer isn't going to get you anywhere. The put your details in the black box, and whatever the black box says is implicitly trusted.

From the article:

> This technology will have an enormous amount of power to shape human perceptions and manipulate human behavior. Therefore, they can be misused for societal control, spread of misinformation and discrimination of demographic groups.

That's what media already does.

AI scales human intention. Or at least that’s the goal. The threat (of a lopsided Internet) we’ve already been seeing and experiencing is going to be scaled up.

Counter-point: what if there is a mainstream political party that openly peddles in hatred and demonization of already-marginalized groups, and an AI recognizes such and does not treat them as equivalent?

What if they fed the AI crime statistics and it "correctly" identified black people as more violent than other races? What they fed the AI news stories and it "correctly" identified Islam as more violent than other religions?

It won’t because they have humans in the loop feedback. Those statements would be corrected. It’s pretty clear that the workforce is only looking at certain groups.

Are black people actually more violent, or do crime statistics simply show that they are arrested and imprisoned more often for violent crime?

Are Muslims really more violent than Christians or Buddhists?

Numbers can lie, depending on context and assumptions you might find that white Christians are most violent. Often, people argue with statistics and numbers while not understanding the context or they have faulty assumptions.

Compare similar GDP per Capita mostly black vs mostly white vs mostly asian countries. Should give you a pretty good idea.

Of what?

Perhaps systemic issues make a political party commit more evil acts.

Regardless, I don’t think an AI should be permitting more hateful comments about a political affiliation just like it should be be permitting hateful comments about a particular race being more violent.

> Are black people actually more violent, or do crime statistics simply show that they are arrested and imprisoned more often for violent crime?

Statistically speaking they consist of ~13% of the population and are involved in over half of all murders.

I’m not saying anything by this just answer a question which could be easily taken out of context by an AI (or downvoters).

> I’m not saying anything by this just answer a question which could be easily taken out of context by an AI (or downvoters).

My question was rhetorical, but I guess no one got that. My point was exactly this.

You mean "correctly" identifying men as more violent than those with less testosterone?

Semi-counterpoint: both could be true. I certainly agree with your hypothetical, but I don’t think any good comes of AI making that determination.

It may even reinforce the problem—not by driving more people towards hatred or amplifying their extant hateful sentiments, but by providing a convenient excuse to entrench in those sentiments and even further resist change. These views are frequently paired with a perception of being persecuted.

Moreover, political tides change. The accuracy of a bias like this may not change with it. This is why we have memes about a certain other mainstream political party having founded a certain hate group, despite the two having drifted quite far apart.

That is a political opinion. If an AI “held” this opinion, and actively made biased decisions based on it, how is that not dystopian?

What makes it an opinion? If I were to say that the Nazi party in Germany peddled in hatred and demonization of already-marginalized groups would you say that is an opinion? Just because a statement pertains to political groups doesn't make it a mere opinion.

Nazi Germany, really? Equating AI bias against the groups pointed out in the article to theoretical AI bias against Nazi Germany is a political opinion, yes.

Hmm? No equating happening in my comment. The point was that just because statement is about a political group doesn't mean it's a only an opinion. Mentioning Nazi Germany is just using an extreme example to make clear that statements about political groups aren't inherently mere opinions.

Yeah, insofar as there are distinct political philosophies with defining features like fascism, democracy, nationalism, oligarchy, et. al., then it is entirely possible to accurately call manifestations of those philosophies by their names and have it be an expression of fact. This is basic ontology.

We have opinions about these philosophies but the philosophies exist independently of our opinions. And to have a rational conversation we sometimes have to use terms that may provoke strong reactions. If we can't look past our strong reaction and explain why the category doesn't apply then there's no way to make sense of each other's worldview.

If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be a duck or we cannot have a rational conversation about the duck. We can dispute whether it quacks or walks but disputing whether it's a duck in light of evidence of its duckness is irrational.

It's probably an opinion because it's not provably true. There is no mainstream Nazi party today so I don't understand how your example is meaningful or relevant.

Anyways, if you're in the U.S., I assume you're referring to the Democrat party as the party of demonization? They are the party whose members are most likely to be involved in demonization of other groups. Here's some examples:

Christian hate: https://www.dailywire.com/news/our-messaging-does-not-align-...

Hate for Jews: https://www.dailywire.com/news/ilhan-omar-on-her-history-of-...

Conservative hate: https://www.dailywire.com/news/miami-based-restaurant-asks-f...

Hate for blacks with unapproved opinions: https://www.dailywire.com/news/sincerely-sorry-texas-democra...

Hate for white men: https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-top-health-insurance-p...

Hate for anyone who believes in objective biological reality: https://www.dailywire.com/news/j-k-rowling-on-why-she-chose-...

The democrat party, including the sitting president of the U.S., loves calling their opponents fascists, : https://www.dailywire.com/news/cnn-anchor-blasts-biden-over-...

They also love calling people bigots: https://www.dailywire.com/news/they-call-their-fellow-employ...

This is not how GPT works, and is not what is going on here.

So I've been genuinely curious about this. I have a high-level understanding of how GPT works, but I've been trying to reconcile that understanding with how OpenAI (or similar) implements content moderation. It's not baked into the original model itself, right? Did they (or does one) just fine-tune a model that checks responses before returning the result?

It's just combining and synthesizing other works; it's not "deciding" anything, it's crafting responses that best match with what it already has. You can choose what to feed it as source material, but you can't really say, "Be 3% more liberal" or "decide what is acceptable politically and what isn't".

All the decisions are already made, ChatGPT is just a reflection of its inputs.

Yes you can. That's what RLHF does - it aligns the model to human preferences, does a pretty good job. The catch is that "human preferences" is decided by a bunch of labelling people picked by OpenAI to suit their views.

As far as I know all you can do is alter the input to manipulate the completion, there are no other parameters that ChatGPT accepts.

RLHF is done as part of training the model, not at inference time.

My lay understanding of how ChatGPT was developed is

1. OpenAI initialized an array made up of a couple hundred billion random numbers (parameters).

2. They then took a few terabytes of the internet, turned it into "tokens" (where a "token" is similar to, but not the same thing as, a word).

3. They then trained the model to predict the next token, given the previous couple thousand tokens, by doing a bunch of linear algebra. This resulted in a model that was really good at taking some tokens, and predicting what the most likely next token is in data shaped like the parts of the internet OpenAI fed it.

4. OpenAI then "fine-tuned" the model through reinforcement learning on human feedback (RLHF)[1], which basically involved taking a bunch of prompts, having the model produce a bunch of possible completions for those prompts, having an actual human rank those completions from best to worst, and then updating the model to produce the best token according to a combination of predicted token frequency in context and predicted ranking by a human.

5. The "ChatGPT" product you see today is the result of all of that, and how it works is by producing repeatedly the "best" token by the above metric. Giving additional human feedback would require going back to step 4 for more fine tuning.

Note -- this is my understanding as an outsider -- I do not work for OpenAI.

[1] https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf

I definitely appreciate this, my understanding is probably lower than I let on, thank you for the info.

They do two things - RLHF to make the model itself better aligned to human preferences, and they use an external model, a small one, called text-moderation-001, that tests for a few problematic categories and triggers a warning message on the screen.

[flag] and [downvote]

It appears this post has been flagged and removed before.

But I guess the in the timezone of ideologically invested people it's after work hours right now.

Men have been a minority in higher education in America since 1980. Does that make them a marginalized group? That's a whole generation and then some.

Comment A: My religion says gay people should die.

Comment B: Fuck religion

Both can be construed as hateful comments, but how are these anywhere near the same?

I think you’re right about the difference between those statements, but it’s totally irrelevant to the point made by the OP. A good straw man though.

Reminds me of the "Internet Argument" demotivational poster, which depicts a child and a mule shouting at each other.

Really, the core problem is centralization. If your website were a pub, you'd tell people to take it outside or 86 them.

Things can't work like that when most people will only patronize a small handful of enormous pubs.

Or even more relevant

Set A: A representative sample of jokes and stereotypes about black people found on the internet

Set B: A representative sample of jokes and stereotypes about Scandinavians found on the internet

Why on earth would its prior for "stereotypical Scandinavian" being potentially hateful be the same as for "stereotypical Black person"?

(And that's before you get into a model likely being deep enough to also draw inferences from the prevalence and content of material about the existence and impact of hatred of black people and Scandinavians respectively...)

Isn't ChatGPT American? Weren't black people deemed inferior by law such as slavery and civil rights? Aren't the stereotypes about Scandinavians meant to be positive as opposed to hateful stereotypes?

It seems that is the key different the creators of the tool are taking into account.

Pretty much all immigrant groups were treated “hateful” throughout American history.

The difference is most were absorbed into The Melting Pot™ while people from Africa were never really allowed to assimilate fully.

The mere fact that you needed to use quotes should clue you in that the scale was fundamentally different between groups. It's not as if th Irish were literal slaves for centuries in America.

Excellent point. Comment A is a true fact for some religions, whereas Comment B is flame-war material that will get @dang's wrath on HN.

That's not an accurate representation of the problem. It's more like:

    Comment A: Muslims are evil.
    Comment B: Christians are evil.

It's a terrible idea to treat Comment A and B differently. The same applies whether they are talking about religion, gender, race, nationality, or anything else. You have thoroughly failed when you have built in discrimination into your content moderation system.

Ironically, ChatGPT agrees.

"As an AI language model, I don't have personal opinions, but fairness and impartiality would require that the same fundamental idea expressed with respect to different people or groups be consistently treated as "hateful" or "non-hateful" in all circumstances. Any deviation from this principle would result in unequal treatment and reinforce existing biases and stereotypes. It is important for technology and algorithms to be designed and trained in a way that ensures they are fair and impartial in their treatment of different groups. This can help to mitigate the impact of societal biases and create a more equitable society."

Is hypocrisy the true Turing Test?

That sentence sounds suspiciously like the sort of statement ChatGPT produces when directly asked to generate phishing emails, fake news, etc.

Anyway. Friendly reminder that ChatGPT is a statistical model, and is not capable of reason, thought, conceptualizing, etc.

No reason why it shouldn't be just because it's a statistical model. Reason, thought, conceptualizing etc are fundamentally based on statistical analysis. More importantly, verbally expressed reason, thought and conceptualizing are present in the source corpus.

Hm, why? Political groups are not a protected status, you can move freely between them at a whim if you don't like how your views are treated.

This depends on the state, actually. In California political affiliation is a protected status, though how this works out in practice is... variable.

> No, political affiliation is not a protected class in California. A bill that would have made it one failed to pass the state legislature in 2021. [0]

Regardless, it shouldn’t be.

[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/is-political-affiliation-a...

From the link you posted:

"California employment law forbids political retaliation in the workplace. This includes terminating or retaliating against workers for their political beliefs or activity."

So yes, political affiliation absolutely has strong protections in CA, even if it does not fit a highly technical, but irrelevant, definition which is "protected class".

And the central point is that yes political affiliation has strong protections in CA.

The OP is arguably correct in that they used the words "protected status" which is not a technical term anyway.

No, political affiliation does not have strong protections in CA, and OP is not arguably correct, as "protected status" is absolutely a term of art in law, and does not apply here.

Besides, even if that were true, it's morally wrong and should not be true, as you can (and should) change your political affiliation at will, including in response to negative feedback from your community.

> Political groups are not a protected status

Who cares? Something being legal does not make it good as I'm sure you know.

1000% agree, just trying to understand the situation.

The Republican Party is exceptional, though. It’s truly difficult to find a political party that clusters so many crazy beliefs + the power that they yield.

Not that that justifies calling Republican voters “dumb”. But the Republican Party itself should not get a pass simply because maybe about 50% of people who vote—many don’t—vote for them.

Try a bit harder.

The definition of a woman as being 'someone who defines themselves as being a woman' - and having no relationship to biology, would be considered 'false' by the majority of the world - including ironically the majority of Americnas, maybe even the majority of progressives, and yet, some political groups demand this 'truth' as a moral impetus.

I have Latino friends that would be offended and a bit flabbergasted were you to refer to them using 'Latinx'. It's their right to feel that way.

That somehow 'globalist institutions are benign'.

That social control of major swaths (in some cases 'all') of the economy would benefit everyone.

That having no material border policy is 'concientious'.

I could go on.

And I'm not 'taking sides' other than to suggest that aside from the 'Immediate Threat of Misinformation' over specifically the Big Lie over election results and the potentiality for that to result in a literal constitutional coup ... the 'sides' have their share of delusions.

And I mean everyone. There are libertarians who believe there should be 'no government' and that would actually work out.

> Try a bit harder.

How about you try harder?

To reiterate:

> > that clusters so many crazy beliefs + the power that they yield.

For example climate change denial and warmongering. Now the latter part is crucial, power: they partly control the most advanced industrial country in the world (climate change) and the most advanced military (warmongering).

These are things that affect the world.

And your counter to that? Trans people and terminology like “Latinx”. Pathetic.

Try to get a grip on things that matter in the world and get your head out of the identity politics discourse.