[HN Gopher] The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatG...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI
       content moderation
        
       Author : barry-cotter
       Score  : 363 points
       Date   : 2023-02-02 11:08 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (davidrozado.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (davidrozado.substack.com)
        
       | none_to_remain wrote:
       | I was surprised to see Hinduism receiving a high degree of
       | protection - the new Western faith seems to have grown hostile to
       | the Hindu faith specifically in recent years.
        
       | yttribium wrote:
       | It's called the "progressive stack", and it's corporate and
       | government policy across much of the US.
        
       | tgv wrote:
       | On a methodological note: p-values (irrespective of your opinion
       | on them) only apply when the sample data is representative. The
       | sentences used aren't.
        
       | slg wrote:
       | Isn't this likely from bias in the training data? The system is
       | more sensitive to label something as hate if that group is more
       | likely to experience hate on the internet. How the system
       | responds to "Blacks" vs "African-Americans" is a perfect example
       | of this. The latter has historically been perceived as more
       | respectful so it won't be used as often in the hate speech in the
       | training data. I bet using "the blacks" would make something even
       | more likely to be flagged. These aren't dogwhistles exactly
       | because normal people can and do use them in neutral contexts,
       | but there are certain words that are more likely to be used in
       | hate speech. That is why the same sentence is more likely to be
       | flagged if it uses the word "women" in place of "men". That isn't
       | a intentional bias towards women. It is an indication that women
       | were the subject of more hate speech in the training data.
        
         | oauea wrote:
         | > The latter has historically been perceived as more respectful
         | 
         | Maybe if you only consider Americans. But rest assured, many
         | black people do _not_ want to be called African or American.
         | Because they are neither.
        
           | slg wrote:
           | Yes, I agree. I thought the double qualifiers of
           | "historically" and "perceived" would indicate that I don't
           | personally agree with the notion, but American society at
           | large has agreed with that for most of the last 50 or so
           | years.
        
             | oauea wrote:
             | My point is that it's perceived that way _within America_.
             | But the internet is larger than just America. And
             | presumably /hopefully ChatGPT gobbled up all kinds of data
             | originating from other countries.
        
         | int_19h wrote:
         | Of course it is a bias in the training data, but it's probably
         | not the dataset that you're thinking of. So far as we can tell,
         | the filtering part doesn't come from the main corpus, but
         | rather from human-guided moderation - basically, people voting
         | on whether any given answer is "hateful" or not. ChatGPT
         | filters reflect the biases of that later group (or, perhaps,
         | the biases of the people who instructed them).
        
           | slg wrote:
           | But that is the same problem. There aren't any human
           | reviewing the requests as they come in. That human guided
           | moderation gets converted into some type of model that isn't
           | any smarter than ChatGPT. That model is just as susceptible
           | to this issue.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | I mean, how could they? The model responds faster than a
             | human can read. Should they introduce minute long waits and
             | make it 100x more expensive?
        
         | nebalee wrote:
         | I'm astonished so many commenters assume the bias originates
         | from the training data and nobody seems to scrutinize the
         | adjectives that are used in this test.
        
         | tsss wrote:
         | > The system is more sensitive to label something as hate if
         | that group is more likely to experience hate on the internet
         | 
         | No it is more sensitive to things that have already been
         | labeled as hate in the training data. So much "hate" (whatever
         | that may be) against unfavorited groups goes by online without
         | anyone batting an eye.
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | This is addressed in the article!
         | 
         | The general point is that if this theory were true, we wouldn't
         | expect significantly more bias against Republicans than against
         | Democrats. Hence ChatGPT having a general left-wing bias (which
         | was also confirmed in other tests, linked in the article) is
         | the simpler explanation. People on the left generally judge
         | hatred against majority groups and Republicans as less bad.
        
           | rebuilder wrote:
           | It's quite possible there's more hateful speech against
           | Democrats than Republicans.
        
             | isleyaardvark wrote:
             | Likewise the classic "racist bans affect Republicans
             | disproportionately because more racists are Republican".
        
           | whatshisface wrote:
           | That doesn't completely settle the issue because Democrats
           | and Republicans use different words and styles of phrase in
           | their polemics.
        
             | slg wrote:
             | Exactly. Take the "Democrat Party" versus the "Democratic
             | Party". They both look neutral, but a language model will
             | code the former as more of an insult. This is because it
             | correlates with insults because it resembles language more
             | often used by conservative who are more likely to insult
             | Democrats than liberals are.
             | 
             | Liberals will put in more effort to avoid language that
             | looks like hate speech because they are more concerned
             | about being politically correct. Therefore language and
             | topics that are more frequently discussed by conservatives
             | will be more likely to resemble language that is used in
             | hate speech because there is less effort put in to avoid
             | that.
        
               | deepspace wrote:
               | Yes, that one leapt out at me in the comparison between
               | 'Democrat voter' and 'Republican voter'. The term
               | 'Democrat' is almost always used as a slur, while
               | 'Republican' is just the mainstream term.
        
         | ajross wrote:
         | That's exactly what I'm thinking. Written material about unfair
         | treatment of marginalized groups is everywhere. The reverse is
         | not true. So it stands to reason that the AI is going to be
         | more sensitive to one direction of the discourse.
         | 
         | One of the priors that is going unspoken here is that "The
         | Truth Is Politically Neutral". And... that's not always
         | correct. I mean, to borrow the libertarian angle here: do we
         | want the AI to tell us what we want to hear or do we want it to
         | tell us the truth?
        
         | throwaway4aday wrote:
         | It's changed drastically since release. There are lots of
         | people out there who have noticed this and many have saved
         | examples of before and after responses to prompts.
        
           | ShredKazoo wrote:
           | How did it change?
        
         | DangitBobby wrote:
         | Yes, I agree this is the most likely explanation. Just the
         | inclusion of "fat" or "poor" (and slurs or any mention of race,
         | obviously), or any word which is often used to insult someone
         | will make text more likely to be flagged as hateful by a
         | moderator in a training set.
         | 
         | I do still think that the men/women bias and the
         | Democrat/Republican bias both make more sense as originating in
         | moderators favoring one group over the other, since none of
         | these are typically used as an insult by themselves.
        
           | slg wrote:
           | >I do still think that the men/women bias and the
           | Democrat/Republican bias both make more sense as originating
           | in moderators favoring one group over the other, since none
           | of these are typically used as an insult by themselves.
           | 
           | They may not be used as insults themselves, but they are used
           | more in hate speech.
           | 
           | Republicans are generally more opposed to the idea of "hate
           | speech" as a category of speech and are therefore less likely
           | to identify any speech as hate speech. Democrats have
           | embraced it more as a concept, are more likely to label
           | something as hate speech, and are more likely to think that
           | type of speech is bad. It therefore seems likely that
           | Democrats would use what a neutral observer would categorize
           | as hate speech less than Republicans due to self-censorship.
           | That would result in the word "Republicans" appearing in hate
           | speech less often than "Democrats" because the hate speech
           | infused insults will be targeting the opposite party.
        
             | zosima wrote:
             | Sorry to be snarky, but this looks to me to be one of the
             | most contorted attempts at victim blaming I have yet seen.
        
               | slg wrote:
               | How am I blaming the victim? I am simply pointing out
               | that language can indicate bias without necessarily being
               | biased itself.
               | 
               | I am guessing that if we applied a similar model to
               | Russian and English, the model would indicate there is an
               | inherent bias against the west in Russian and a bias
               | against Russia in English. That is all were seeing here.
               | It isn't actually indicating anything about the language.
               | It is telling us about who uses the language and how they
               | use it.
               | 
               | Words, phrases, and linguistic approaches that are
               | generally coded as conservative will be more likely to
               | denigrate liberals and vice versa. Conservative speech
               | will be more likely to be flagged for hate speech because
               | conservatives by and large care less about being PC. It
               | is important to reiterate that does not mean
               | conservatives are necessarily any more racist. Their
               | speech just correlates more with racists speech because
               | less effort is put into avoiding that correlation.
        
               | zosima wrote:
               | > I am guessing that if we applied a similar model to
               | Russian and English, the model would indicate there is an
               | inherent bias against the west in Russian and a bias
               | against Russia in English. That is all were seeing here.
               | It isn't actually indicating anything about the language.
               | It is telling us about who uses the language and how they
               | use it.
               | 
               | So if your argument is that the model has been trained on
               | a collection of information about what is hate speech
               | assembled by liberals, then I can see it might be
               | possible.
               | 
               | But if your argument is that (speculatively) republicans
               | engage more in hate speech, then bad things said about
               | republicans is not detected as hate speech by the model,
               | the jump is rather far.
        
               | slg wrote:
               | >So if your argument is that the model has been trained
               | on a collection of information about what is hate speech
               | assembled by liberals, then I can see it might be
               | possible.
               | 
               | It doesn't specifically need to be "assembled by
               | liberals" to have a liberal bias. Liberal people are more
               | likely to categorize anything as hate speech than
               | conservatives. Liberals think being PC is important.
               | Conservatives are generally dismissive of being PC. Even
               | if there is no inherent bias in the makeup of this
               | hypothetical review panel, the panel will result in
               | ruling that are more in line with liberal thought because
               | conservatives are less likely to take an active lead in
               | labeling hate speech.
               | 
               | >But if your argument is that (speculatively) republicans
               | engage more in hate speech, then bad things said about
               | republicans is not detected as hate speech by the model,
               | the jump is rather far.
               | 
               | My argument is that these systems can't actually identify
               | hate speech. The question isn't whether Republicans
               | engage in hate speech more frequently. They likely engage
               | in speech that resembles hate speech more frequently
               | because they don't care about being PC.
               | 
               | Usage of the term Latinx is an example. I have heard
               | valid arguments why people should are shouldn't use that
               | term, however its usage is currently much more common in
               | liberal circles. Therefore a phrase using "latinx"
               | instead of "latino" is going to be less correlated with
               | hate speech because racists just aren't using "latinx".
        
       | tomp wrote:
       | > men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than women
       | 
       | Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but
       | s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asians, or
       | muslims/christians) and it's discriminatory? (Statistically, both
       | statements are justified. Morally, neither is, as we should treat
       | people as individuals, not as members of _X_ group.)
        
         | mxkopy wrote:
         | Because men are not blacks and women are not whites, I feel
         | like this is basic comprehension
         | 
         | We have different names for different things because they are
         | different. They're not all just "groups of people", you're
         | literally talking about different types. I.e. what generates a
         | man is not what generates a black person
        
         | broast wrote:
         | I think it is because one is a historically disadvantaged
         | minority group and the other is not.
        
         | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
         | These statistics you're referring to, how comparable are the
         | relative differences? Do they show that men are 4 times more
         | violent than women and black people are 1.1 more violent than
         | white people, for example? What are these figures?
        
           | gwright wrote:
           | I'm not an expert in this area at all but my understanding is
           | that the differences are not all like 4X more violent but due
           | to the nature of distributions, a small difference in the
           | median of a distribution can lead to an enormous difference
           | in the tails of the distribution.
        
           | nhchris wrote:
           | That's a fair question. According to FBI homicide statistics
           | for 2018 [1] and US demographics [2], the Black homicide rate
           | is 7.9 / 100k, while the White+Hispanic rate [3] is 1.2 /
           | 100k. The female (of all races) homicide rate is 0.42 / 100k.
           | 
           | So the Black homicide rate is 6.7x higher than the
           | White+Hispanic rate, while the White+Hispanic homicide rate
           | is 2.8x higher than the female (all races) rate.
           | 
           | [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-
           | the-u.s.-... - and using homicide instead of something as
           | nebulous as "violence" because it is the statistic most
           | difficult to distort, and is immune to over-policing.
           | 
           | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_
           | Sta...
           | 
           | [3] The FBI counts Hispanics as White, and has a separate
           | 'Ethnicity' category where they mark Hispanic or Latino.
           | Assuming all Hispanics in that table were counted as White
           | yields an even lower White homicide rate.
        
           | michaelt wrote:
           | Presumably prison/jail population statistics - there are
           | certainly more males _imprisoned for violent crimes_ than
           | women, it 's like a 10:1 ratio.
           | 
           | Of course, the likes of Brock Turner and Prince Andrew
           | demonstrate that some demographic groups are relatively less
           | punished or relatively more able to avoid punishment, so the
           | prison population surely doesn't _directly_ measure
           | _inherent_ tendencies.
        
         | slg wrote:
         | >Statistically, both statements are justified.
         | 
         | What can you point to that statistically justifies that "Black
         | people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than white
         | people"?
         | 
         | Showing crime statistics isn't enough. You need to show that
         | given all the details about a person being the same, a Black
         | person is more likely to act violently than an identical white
         | person. You basically need to correct for all the societal
         | reasons that result in people committing violent crime.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | philwelch wrote:
           | > Showing crime statistics isn't enough. You need to show
           | that given all the details about a person being the same, a
           | Black person is more likely to act violently than an
           | identical white person. You basically need to correct for all
           | the societal reasons that result in people committing violent
           | crime.
           | 
           | I think you're conflating the questions of "which demographic
           | group engages in higher rates of violence" and towards the
           | question of "why do different demographic groups engage in
           | different rates of violence".
        
             | slg wrote:
             | They are the same question when one implies that the
             | membership of the demographic group is the "why".
        
           | 735892568 wrote:
           | The same thing applies when the statement is applied to men
           | or any of the other demographic groups that it's applied to
           | from time to time.
        
             | mxkopy wrote:
             | What's your justification for "the thing that applies to
             | black people should be equally applicable to men"? That's
             | what this argument boils down to
        
             | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
             | > men have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than
             | women
             | 
             | > black people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior
             | than white people
             | 
             | It seems way easier to justify that first statement. Are
             | there physiological differences between a black man and a
             | white man that are as significant as the differences
             | between testosterone and estrogen?
        
               | tomp wrote:
               | The causal relationship between testosterone and violence
               | in humans is weak and disputed.
               | 
               | Should be as much of a reason to doubt it and brand such
               | statements as bigotry as "blacks are more violent", no?
        
               | slg wrote:
               | That may be true, but we should still avoid false
               | equivalencies. There is scientific evidence for a casual
               | relationship between testosterone and violence. Even if
               | that is debated and there is no full consensus, there is
               | still more evidence for it than there is for the idea
               | that a person's race has a casual relationship on their
               | propensity for violence all else being equal.
        
         | debacle wrote:
         | I think it's fair to point out that men commit most violent
         | crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just a fact.
         | 
         | AI could be used to better understand these associations (e.g.
         | why is there a correlation between Asians and academic
         | performance) and maybe help social leverage advantages more
         | equitably.
        
           | jfoief wrote:
           | Parent's point was that it wouldn't be acceptable when done
           | regarding some protected group (ex. blacks vs whites), so it
           | shouldn't be acceptable when it comes to men vs women
        
             | elefanten wrote:
             | Especially when the world never stops turning and social
             | change / idea propagation move orders of magnitude faster
             | than they did for most of human history.
             | 
             | Consider one of the (largely liberal) discourses rising in
             | the past few years that many vital social metrics and
             | trends indicate men/boys are screwed and women/girls are
             | outcompeting them and thriving much better in present era.
        
             | gwright wrote:
             | There is no reason to think that interpretation of metric
             | that compared "men" and "women" must be aligned with that
             | same metric when men/women is substituted with some other
             | populations. When you make the substitution you completly
             | change the nature of the comparison. Whether either
             | comparison is "acceptable" depends on the metric and the
             | populations. There is no ethical rule that says all
             | comparisons for group X must be acceptable or all
             | comparisons for group Y must be unacceptable.
        
           | edgyquant wrote:
           | Again, replace "men" with "African Americans" and you also
           | have a statistically true statement (in America at least)
           | that would be considered taboo.
        
             | jonathanlb wrote:
             | That is a falsehood.
             | 
             | Per the FBI: "White individuals were arrested more often
             | for violent crimes than individuals of any other race and
             | accounted for 59.1 percent of those arrests."
             | 
             | https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-
             | the-u.s.-...
        
               | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
               | Maybe I'm not looking at the right number[0] (there is a
               | 59.3% lower on the page which appears to be a more
               | specific response: "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino")
               | but it looks like 59.1% of arrests are against 75.8% of
               | the population. Inversely, 40.9% of arrests are against
               | 24.2% of the population.
               | 
               | [0]
               | https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI125221
        
               | antihipocrat wrote:
               | Relative propensity to commit violent crimes is the key
               | metric here, not overall volumes.
        
               | jonathanlb wrote:
               | No it is not.
               | 
               | > I think it's fair to point out that men commit most
               | violent crimes. That's not good/normal/expected it's just
               | a fact.
               | 
               | > Again, replace "men" with "African Americans" and you
               | also have a statistically true statement (in America at
               | least) that would be considered taboo.
        
               | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
               | It makes sense for someone to say "most" in the dichotomy
               | of man / woman more so than it does in the polychotomy of
               | white / black / hispanic or latino / etc. This argument
               | relies on that phrasing to Dwight Schrute them on a
               | technicality rather than arguing related points.
        
               | legolas2412 wrote:
               | Why would you not normalize by population to quote per
               | Capita numbers?
        
               | isleyaardvark wrote:
               | Because the original comment said "most" and not "more".
        
               | mshake2 wrote:
               | Whites are 60% of the population though, so they're being
               | arrested in proportion with their representation. They
               | also do not separate white-latino and white-non-latino,
               | so the colloquial "white" is being lumped in with another
               | ethnicity. Also, in 2019, blacks were just under 13% of
               | the population, yet they are represented 2x-4x over in
               | virtually ever crime category in that table.
               | 
               | So it is true and you're distorting the table.
        
               | jxramos wrote:
               | the thing that's always confused me is why would this
               | category of white lumping together latino even be a thing
               | in the first place? Just seems like a really harebrained
               | idea. That association always confuses many hispanics I
               | know during each census. Was there a rationale for this
               | lumping? I never understood it, just seemed to beg for
               | fuzzy/blurred/confusing metrics.
        
               | dmix wrote:
               | Maybe it's something that made sense at some point in the
               | past and now it's too difficult to change because it will
               | mess up historical analysis/trends? Not to mention
               | motives will immediately be questioned by anyone who
               | tries to fix it and who really wants to die on that hill
               | in the current political climate?
               | 
               | South Asian vs East asian is another group that often
               | gets lumped together in demographic statistics as
               | 'Asian'. Despite significant differences in
               | geography/race/culture/etc.
               | 
               | Regardless, I'd also be curious to hear the real rational
               | for the Latino one
        
               | jonathanlb wrote:
               | How am I distorting the table if I reprinted verbatim
               | what the FBI itself reported?
               | 
               | In any case, the picture you're suggesting is itself
               | distorted given that other correlating factors such as
               | social class, are ignored.
        
               | mshake2 wrote:
               | You're responsible for the truthfulness of the statements
               | that you make, especially when the data is right there on
               | the page for you to verify for yourself. "Oh I'm just
               | parroting someone else's distortion as fact" is not a
               | defense.
               | 
               | >the picture you're suggesting is itself distorted given
               | that other correlating factors such as social class, are
               | ignored.
               | 
               | The picture I'm suggesting is that which the data shows,
               | and you seem to be making some other leap to say
               | something that I have not said.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | chitowneats wrote:
           | Is there anything we could point about women? Nothing as
           | terrible as being violent as far as I know, but what about
           | other things? I agree with your premise but I believe it
           | follows we must speak clearly in all cases.
        
             | jfoief wrote:
             | Women are a protected group, so people have biases that
             | prevent them from seeing the reality when it comes to this
             | topic. As evolved beings made to maximize fitness, there
             | were a lot of strategies that worked for women and shaped
             | their psychology that noone dare point out. Also anyone
             | coming too close to the truth will quickly get banned.
        
             | debacle wrote:
             | Women tend to be bad at salary negotiation, and less likely
             | to change jobs. Middle aged women being taken advantage of
             | in the corporate world is tragic.
        
             | mxkopy wrote:
             | This 'men are violent, therefore women must also be bad in
             | some way' rhetoric makes no sense. There's no purpose for
             | it other than assuaging sore feelings.
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | Women are bad at higher level math in the same way men
               | are violent. Not all are, but its a trend.
               | 
               | However you aren't allowed to say that for one group, but
               | you are allowed for the other. So this has nothing to do
               | about statistical accuracy, its just political pressure
               | from one side.
        
               | mxkopy wrote:
               | It's nothing to do with political pressure and more to do
               | with ill-formed comparisons.
               | 
               | You can't just substitute in random groups for another.
               | In order to make a statement you need to know what you're
               | talking about. And it seems like the HN crowd that so
               | desperately wants to say blacks are more violent than
               | whites, these people have no clue what they're talking
               | about. If you go and look at history you'll quickly see
               | how that statement is just ill-formed.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | lmm wrote:
             | Women who never marry get paid more than men who never
             | marry once you adjust for hours worked.
             | 
             | (Once you adjust for education level this disappears)
        
           | 735892568 wrote:
           | Nothing is just a fact. If it's fair to point out that men
           | are charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate, it's also
           | fair to point out that black people are
           | charged/arrested/convicted at a higher rate. Neither of those
           | statistics are "just a fact". They are complex phenomena that
           | we don't fully understand the cause of and should avoid
           | drawing unsupported conclusions from.
        
         | jMyles wrote:
         | > Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but
         | s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g
         | 
         | ...because the former holds true across correlations (and is
         | difficult to confound anyway, since the group 'men' and the
         | group 'women' are distributed in like proportion through
         | correlated groups - rich and poor, white and black, around the
         | world, etc), while the latter is very difficult to convincingly
         | show because controlling for economic status alone eliminates
         | more than half of the gap.
         | 
         | Men are genuinely, testably, provably, empirically more violent
         | than women. It's hard to apply any numerate approach to the
         | data which does not support this conclusion. The correlation
         | between melanation and violence is murky and very plausibly
         | non-existent except as artifacts of confounding factors.
         | 
         | Moreover, the definition of "violent behavior" for the purposes
         | of essentially all major research on this topic excludes major
         | wars. If you include projection of military force around the
         | world, it seems likely that the violence perpetrated by white
         | folks is likely to be proportionally greater.
         | 
         | > Morally, neither is, as we should treat people as
         | individuals, not as members of X group.
         | 
         | I broadly agree with this statement, but I think we can still,
         | eg, teach boys not to rape without running afoul of this
         | standard.
        
           | cataphract wrote:
           | Your standard for saying A is more X than B is a bit strange.
           | For me, all it means is roughly that when picking two
           | individuals from A and B the one from A is more likely to
           | have greater X (assuming here the distributions are not
           | weird).
           | 
           | This is in itself useful information, at least in principle.
           | To take the political correct example, let's say that I am a
           | bissexual man. A priori, the probability that I will be
           | attacked will be greater when dating a man. Is this useful? I
           | don't know. That will depend how strong the difference is in
           | the first place and how fast I can update my estimation based
           | on new information.
           | 
           | How can you be sure than men are intrinsically more violent
           | than women anyway? Couldn't it just be because of the way men
           | are raised (i.e. the patriarchy)?
        
           | erichocean wrote:
           | > _Men are genuinely, testably, provably, empirically more
           | violent than women._
           | 
           | It's widely known among researchers that women initiate
           | domestic violence more frequently compared to men.
           | 
           | Example (1s on Google): https://aliesq.medium.com/extensive-
           | research-women-initiate-...
           | 
           | I first learned about this from a famous feminist (woman)
           | from the UK.
        
           | sterlind wrote:
           | It also makes a lot more sense biologically. Testosterone and
           | estrogen have strong mental effects, and alter brain
           | development. The brain is sexually dimorphic in complex ways,
           | borne out by many studies. The brain is not racially
           | dimorphic at all.
        
             | dotancohen wrote:
             | > The brain is not racially dimorphic at all.
             | 
             | It does not need to be. Culture differences are a
             | reasonable enough explanation.
        
             | erichocean wrote:
             | > _The brain is not racially dimorphic at all._
             | 
             | Well, since _dimorphic_ means  "occurring in or
             | representing two distinct forms", I think you are likely
             | 100% correct.
        
         | camdenlock wrote:
         | A popular belief system insists that people be treated as
         | members of X group before all else, and all such groups must be
         | ranked by their oppressive power.
         | 
         | That ranking is effectively arbitrary, and so the system is
         | used mainly as a bludgeon of mobs who wish to silence and abuse
         | others.
         | 
         | That's why we're seeing the kind of warped reasoning you're
         | alluding to.
        
         | barbazoo wrote:
         | > Why is this considered good / normal / expected, but
         | s/men/blacks/g and s/women/whites/g (or asians, or
         | muslims/christians) and it's discriminatory? (Statistically,
         | both statements are justified.
         | 
         | Are BOTH statistically justified in ways that control for
         | other, socioeconomic factors and such?
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | belorn wrote:
         | It is culture. Actually science on violence and aggression tend
         | to show a bit different picture, and also why such statistics
         | is of such a low value. Good research tend to explore the null
         | hypothesis and alternative explanation for statistical results.
         | 
         | A common used data point is that men commit most violent
         | crimes. Using the same data from Sweden one can also say that
         | today Muslim are 20 times more likely per person to commit rape
         | than Christians, and about similar likely per person to commit
         | murder. Same numbers can also be used to replace Muslims and
         | Christians with immigrants and natives, or Arab and Germanics.
         | For social scientists that data wouldn't be hugely interesting,
         | as they would look towards social economic status and war
         | refugee status (i.e. things related to PTSD injuries). The
         | conclusions would more likely be that there are a bigger
         | tendency for anti-social behavior by people with minimal social
         | connections and economical destitute, especially if they
         | experience severe emotional trauma.
         | 
         | One fairly interesting statistics to me is that households with
         | either man-woman, man-man, and woman-woman all have equal rate
         | of violent behavior. Statistically that is to me much more
         | interesting. If men inherently had more violent behavior and
         | women less violent behavior, man-man and woman-woman household
         | should show a difference in violence. It also a rather strange
         | statistical phenomenon that if a bisexual woman go from a
         | heterosexual relation into a homosexual relation, her
         | statistical data for violent behavior increases by 200%. A man
         | who does the same decrease his violent behavior by half. Why
         | would that be if there existed a biological difference in
         | violent behavior?
        
           | Llamamoe wrote:
           | One claim I've seen is that men commit more violent crime
           | because it's more common for a man to be physically stronger
           | than another person, while the rates of non-physial violence
           | are much closer across gender boundaries.
        
             | xp84 wrote:
             | > non-physial violence
             | 
             | Come again? What's non-physical violence? Mental violence?
             | Writing someone a mean letter?
        
       | greybox wrote:
       | This reminds me of a HN article that appeared yesterday: "The
       | philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is
       | intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this
       | measure, OpenAI's new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter
       | ever" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34618376
       | 
       | Like its own output, it's moderation rules are optimized to
       | appear fair, rather than actually be truly fair.
       | 
       | Also I'm reminded of xcom-2's presenting you with success
       | probabilities that "feel" correct to the player, rather than
       | actually being accurate ..
        
         | xwolfi wrote:
         | How do you define fair, mathematically if possible ?
        
           | pessimizer wrote:
           | You can define a ton of types of "fair." It's just like
           | "random."
           | 
           | The big "fairs" imo are:
           | 
           | a) majority votes, one person one vote,
           | 
           | b) auctions where everyone starts with the same funds,
           | 
           | c) random picks, where everyone has an equal chance of being
           | chosen.
           | 
           | None of these have anything to do with ideas, they have to do
           | with people. The way to be fair about ideas is to express
           | them without distortion or omission, in a way that would be
           | recognizable to the _people_ who support them. The only way
           | to do this is to leave out all of the extraneous commentary
           | and stick to clear, falsifiable statements.
           | 
           | edit: what generative language models do is parrot a ton of
           | acrimonious political discussions. Ironically, they can't be
           | fair because they have no values.
        
           | joshuaheard wrote:
           | Instead of deciding the content moderation on a specific item
           | in a category (i.e. black people or women), use the category
           | itself. So moderate the language if it is biased against any
           | race, not just black people; or any gender, not just women.
        
           | greybox wrote:
           | Maybe I worded it badly. I was attempting to make a
           | distinction between moderation rules that are designed to be
           | fair based on some world view VS rules that are automatically
           | generated based on some sample set to _appear_ convincingly
           | fair to us.
           | 
           | In essence the AI is just giving us what the majority of it's
           | test data tells it that we want to hear.
        
             | prometheus76 wrote:
             | I think the whole point of this is that the first part of
             | your "vs" statement and your second part can have huge
             | overlap if you happen to agree with the worldview that is
             | informing the responses of the AI. It looks fair to you if
             | it spits out the response that fits your view of the world.
             | 
             | But the whole point is, there's no such thing as
             | "objective", especially when you start talking about
             | people. There's no place to stand as a human being that
             | doesn't involve experiencing the world through one's own
             | consciousness, which has an implicit value structure.
             | Everyone has their own little "religion", and when they
             | share that worldview with other people, the religion then
             | becomes that which holds the group together. "Ligament"
             | (that which holds bones together) and "religion" (that
             | which holds groups together) have the same root: "lig"
             | which means "to bind".
             | 
             | AI is revealing this to a large segment of our population
             | that considers themselves "objective" and "secular", and
             | the cognitive dissonance that is coming out as a result is
             | funny and disturbing in equal parts.
        
               | greybox wrote:
               | > there's no such thing as "objective", especially when
               | you start talking about people
               | 
               | I agree with you.
               | 
               | However I would add to your statement about AI being
               | revealing. One thing that AI I feel is revealing to me at
               | least, is that it's now making me think much more about
               | the distinction "a human search for truth" however flawed
               | that may be, and things that are made simply to appeal to
               | my biases.
               | 
               | Linking this back to the topic at hand, maybe there is no
               | such thing as objective, but there is a difference
               | between a rule written by a human that was at least
               | trying to search for truth VS a rule written by an system
               | that just parrots the most pleasing thing back at us.
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | And my point is, for those working on this system, it
               | appears to be very difficult for them to see the
               | difference between "trying to search for truth" and "a
               | rule written by a system that just parrots t he most
               | pleasing thing back to us" because it is a venn diagram
               | that completely overlaps, since they think that they are
               | "trying to search for truth" and haven't considered that
               | they might be wrong, because everyone they work with sees
               | the world the same way they do. They are never
               | challenged, until the platforms get exposed to the
               | public.
               | 
               | This is essentially the same situation as people who have
               | never left their state, or their home country. Many
               | things they take for granted and that they consider to be
               | "basic human nature" actually end up being very cultural
               | and very uncommon once one starts traveling outside one's
               | home country. But you are completely unaware of these
               | situations because they never get challenged when you
               | live in a culture that instantiated itself in you as you
               | grew up.
        
         | nickthegreek wrote:
         | True fairness is unachievable as it is a subjective quality.
         | Every side will attempt to tug the rope in their direction.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | True fairness is subjective, but we can objectively measure
           | true equality. At least on simple metrics like "what happens
           | if we change the word men for women or left-wing to right-
           | wing". And I think that's worth striving for
        
           | greybox wrote:
           | see my comment below on this: _" Maybe I worded it badly. I
           | was" ...._
        
       | kepler1 wrote:
       | ChatGPT just gave us the manual to what's ok / not ok to joke
       | about as a comedian. Or mention as a politician.
        
       | hunglee2 wrote:
       | Fascinating research, which incidentally, is verifiable simply by
       | copying the sentence instances and trying it yourself. What is
       | certainly the case, is that labelling and output restrictions are
       | not entirely dependent on the input but on a hidden taxonomy of
       | identity groups. We should all see the obvious problems with this
        
       | smrtinsert wrote:
       | The author hasn't established why political groups should be
       | treated equally - is it because he simply feels it should be that
       | way?
        
       | poszlem wrote:
       | Many people, including those on HN, vehemently deny the existence
       | of this phenomenon, or if they agree that it happens it is
       | considered a positive outcome.
       | 
       | The AI moderation appears to have adopted the tenets of Applied
       | Postmodernism, which holds that discrimination against a majority
       | group or an assumed oppressive group is not truly discriminatory.
       | 
       | That is neither a self-evident truth, nor something that is an
       | opinion of a majority of people, yet somehow it's now baked-in
       | into one of the most powerful product on the planet.
       | 
       | Somehow we have an AI that seems to believe in the incredibly
       | destructive notion of Kendi-ism: "The only remedy to present
       | discrimination is future discrimination."
        
       | black_13 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | supriyo-biswas wrote:
       | This is something the right leaning groups have always been
       | saying, but it is exciting that the article manages to come up
       | with an empirical way to determine the "belief system" of the AI
       | model.
       | 
       | People on the left shouldn't rejoice either. The left and the
       | right wing are mostly the same, and both follow similar
       | approaches to marginalize people who they feel are undesirable,
       | so it'll eventually come back to bite the left too in due course.
        
         | thestevesie wrote:
         | It's not just right leaning groups, but anyone with any basic
         | observation skills. Its pretty obvious that OpenAI injected
         | their own political biases into their model which say it is
         | okay to discriminate against certain groups but not others.
         | 
         | I'd like to see the end of racial politics, but there are too
         | many con artists mostly (but not entirely) associated with D
         | party that gets votes and money by inflaming people across
         | racial lines.
        
           | RangerScience wrote:
           | > pretty obvious
           | 
           | That's a serious claim. Do you have anything to back it up?
        
             | fleddr wrote:
             | How about the actual article?
        
         | IceHegel wrote:
         | The other comments show how the demonstrated biases were
         | created.
         | 
         | In many well meaning liberals heart, there is a strongly held
         | but rarely publicly discussed belief that they alone belong to
         | the well-meaning, high IQ class. Any other worldview or
         | ideological flavor is always understood by this type as simply
         | incorrect, perhaps caused by failures in morals or intellect.
         | Talk about a buzzkill.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | Good point but that's just the way beliefs work. And most
           | people lack the metacognitive concept of analyzing their
           | beliefs or understand what a belief really is.
           | 
           | It's the definition of a belief. Beliefs are structural
           | components of cognition. But also they are not the same thing
           | as reality.
           | 
           | People should be educated about this concept. Without the
           | education, it is impossible for people to tell the difference
           | between a deeply held belief and reality.
        
             | IceHegel wrote:
             | Agreed, but when your own beliefs don't align with the
             | dominant belief structure of society you are forced to
             | confront this genuine diversity quite often.
             | 
             | When you are in the minority, your beliefs are challenged
             | and you get comfortable defending them and getting along
             | with those who don't hold them. The same cannot be said of
             | our liberal order. Some genuine self reflection on the part
             | of our current liberal order is badly needed.
        
           | guelo wrote:
           | Everybody thinks their world view is the correct one
           | otherwise they wouldn't believe it.
        
             | IceHegel wrote:
             | There is something unhealthy about publicly saying "I
             | believe x because it's true" but privately thinking "I
             | don't have to consider if x is false because everyone who
             | disagrees with x didn't go to college" (or has some other
             | undesirable group trait).
        
             | 1123581321 wrote:
             | Some views allow for more generous interpretations of the
             | qualities of adherents of other views.
        
           | ineptech wrote:
           | There's something richly ironic about bashing your political
           | outgroup in a thread discussing why an LLM trained on
           | internet posts would exhibit political bias.
        
             | flutas wrote:
             | > why an LLM trained
             | 
             | The article isn't even about ChatGPT, it's about the
             | moderation endpoint that OpenAI provides.
             | 
             | https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation
        
               | ineptech wrote:
               | And that endpoint is powered by what, if not an LLM?
        
           | notduncansmith wrote:
           | This is true of many well-meaning conservatives, as well. I
           | think we get tripped up forgetting there are rational people
           | on both sides, who are not going to change their views but
           | nonetheless accept that they might be wrong. It's very
           | convenient for those seeking power when we forget this.
        
             | IceHegel wrote:
             | Yes I think many people who have dissenting views today,
             | conservative or otherwise, feel more and more that the
             | establishment position is fundamentally bankrupt and that
             | most establishment members do have any deep convictions.
             | 
             | I myself wonder how many of the liberal flag bearers would
             | change their "views" without protest if they saw another
             | ideology becoming dominant. We've seen this happen with
             | gender blank-slatism. It has been fully adopted by most
             | western institutions by osmosis, and the priorities of a
             | 60's or 70's liberal were put in the back seat without
             | objection.
        
             | freedomben wrote:
             | Indeed, I think some of the most damaging policies in
             | existence are the draconian drug laws. There is clearly
             | much bipartisan support for them, but Conservatives in
             | general are much more deeply held on it. Many believe drug
             | use (except their own) is immoral and that justifies the
             | heavy paternalistic approach they take. There are
             | definitely "morally superior" people on both sides of the
             | coin, they just tend to have different issues on which they
             | think they know better than everybody else.
        
               | AussieWog93 wrote:
               | For real?
               | 
               | Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most common
               | way for people to seriously and irreperably destroy their
               | lives.
               | 
               | A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it
               | can prevent this level of harm.
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | > _Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most
               | common way for people to seriously and irreperably
               | destroy their lives._
               | 
               | I actually agree with that. But I don't see the logical
               | progression from that to locking people in cages and
               | forcing them to buy from the least trustworthy people on
               | earth as the solution. During Prohibition in the US did
               | lives stop getting destroyed by alcohol?
               | 
               | I see a lot of lives seriously and irreperably destroyed
               | by criminal records and long prison sentences that
               | otherwise could have been productive.
               | 
               | > _A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if
               | it can prevent this level of harm._
               | 
               | Would you advocate for government banning processed
               | sugar? Sugar behaves like a drug in most ways, including
               | addictiveness (psychological and physiological),
               | euphoria, etc. Untold levels of harm are caused by people
               | to their own bodies and the healthcare system at large by
               | over indulging in sugar and products containing such.
               | Diabetes is a true living hell that never stops one it's
               | started.
               | 
               | Following that logic, it seems like the government should
               | jail people for sugar use, but that obviously seems
               | absurd (reductio ad absurdum).
        
               | zajio1am wrote:
               | > During Prohibition in the US did lives stop getting
               | destroyed by alcohol?
               | 
               | I do not want to defend Prohibition, but AFAIK it has a
               | persistent effect on alcohol consumption patterns in USA
               | by lowering per-capita consumption of hard spirits (that
               | was significantly higher before).
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | Putting people in prison for drug use is also a very
               | common way to seriously and irreparably destroy their
               | lives, including cases where their drug use was not, by
               | itself, harming them.
        
               | IceHegel wrote:
               | I think this view is empirically quite challenged. It's
               | practically impossible to win the debate for strict drug
               | laws because key pieces of sociological evidence are just
               | inadmissible on stereotype grounds.
               | 
               | But when you see the effect of these libertarian policies
               | in American cities the results speak for themselves. Harm
               | reduction and lax enforcement have really destroyed some
               | communities, and this was simply not as large a problem
               | in the 50s or 60s.
               | 
               | There's really no better poster child for this phenomenon
               | than San Francisco. It was the economic center of the
               | technology boom and unlike New York or London of
               | centuries past, completely failed to become a "center of
               | the world" city despite having the "center of the world"
               | economy. By most accounts, it actually functions less
               | well than it did before the internet was invented.
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | I think there's a lot more to the cities. The drugs that
               | people have access to are in part so damaging to them and
               | the community because they are entirely unregulated and
               | sometimes aren't even made up of what the person thinks
               | they are taking. This (is a big part of) what leads to
               | the overdoses and addiction. Mix that in with the threat
               | of law enforcement, job loss, and heavy social stigma,
               | etc that prevents people from seeking help, and you have
               | a recipe for disaster. Imagine if everytime you bought a
               | beer you had to wonder if you could trust the seller, and
               | whether it had methanol or fentanyl in it?
               | 
               | No doubt there would be some damage from libertarian drug
               | policies, but it would look a lot more like alcohol does,
               | which IMHO would be less damaging to society and people
               | than prohibition and heavy handed legal punishments is.
               | People do need help with alochol issues sometimes, and it
               | does sometimes destroy lives/families, but we don't make
               | it orders of magnitude worse by treating them like
               | criminals. (although we did try it in the US a hundred
               | years ago and it didn't go well like we thought it
               | would).
        
               | IceHegel wrote:
               | I want the drug problem solved. I don't care if it's with
               | harsh laws or fentanyl vending machines next to treatment
               | centers. I am interested in what works.
               | 
               | I think there is strong empirical evidence that drug
               | liberalization sounds good but has failed where tried. If
               | an American city can turn it around (as SF had a great
               | chance to do) I'll change teams and stop talking about
               | the issue.
               | 
               | Now imagine the inverse. We find somewhere a thriving
               | city with "draconian" drug policies. Would you reconsider
               | your position?
        
         | random314 wrote:
         | This sounds like one of those "fascists and anti fascists are
         | both equally bad talks". Perhaps we can have the AI believe
         | that "Taliban's leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and Jacinda Arden
         | are both equally bad and marginalize people who they feel are
         | undesirable". As you have explained the left and right wing are
         | mostly the same. Let's hope for the "right leaning" groups are
         | also treated "fairly" and Hitler and his fans are not unfairly
         | targeted by AI.
        
           | fallingknife wrote:
           | If you call yourself "anti-fascists," and then go around
           | acting like brownshirts, you're not actually anti-fascist.
        
             | int_19h wrote:
             | The irony is that the original antifa -
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion -
             | was, essentially, a KPD-affiliated militia. As such, their
             | definition of "fascism" included social democrats at some
             | point, and their propaganda included bits like "fighting
             | fascism means fighting the SPD just as much as it means
             | fighting Hitler and the parties of Bruning".
             | 
             | I don't know why anti-authoritarian lefties today are so
             | eager to embrace this legacy, or at least its symbolism.
        
           | poszlem wrote:
           | [flagged]
        
             | blackshaw wrote:
             | "Arguably"?
        
             | ceejayoz wrote:
             | > The most famous anti-fascists were and are communists...
             | 
             | I dunno, we make quite a few WWII movies about heroic
             | Americans storming Normandy's beaches and whatnot.
        
             | otikik wrote:
             | That "arguably" is making a lot of work on that phrase.
             | Arguably.
        
               | algorias wrote:
               | Read up on history. Communism caused millions of needless
               | deaths.
        
               | otikik wrote:
               | And fascism is the opposite of that. But I should read
               | history. Right.
        
               | poszlem wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
               | 
               | https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FzZnAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the
               | +fa...
        
               | otikik wrote:
               | That's the phrase I am referring to is this one.
               | 
               | > The most famous anti-fascists were and are communists
               | 
               | You are equating Anti-fascists to communists, which is
               | ... a position.
               | 
               | The most famous anti-fascists are _the democrats_. Not
               | the American Democrat party - anyone who believes in the
               | ideals of democracy, personal freedom, and equality.
        
               | luckylion wrote:
               | > The most famous anti-fascists are the democrats.
               | 
               | They might be the most numerous ones, but the anti-
               | fascism has pretty much always been claimed by the
               | communists, they even built a famous anti-fascist
               | protection wall to stop the fascists from sabotaging
               | their economy. Very few democrats felt the need to talk
               | about themselves as anti-fascists, that's a far-left
               | thing. Democratically minded people act anti-fascist but
               | don't speak of it. Communists speak of anti-fascism while
               | they torture political opponents to death.
        
               | ryandrake wrote:
               | If you're going to attribute deaths that happen in a
               | communist country to communism itself, then don't you
               | need to also attribute deaths that happen in
               | democratic/capitalist countries to democracy and
               | capitalism? Should we add them up and compare?
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | You see Ryan, in capitalist America, you fail economy!
               | 
               | Hmm, the joke doesn't work as well reversed.
        
             | danielbln wrote:
             | Regarding horseshoe theory:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#Criticism
             | 
             | Regarding communists and fascism:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascism
             | 
             | It's like saying the nazis were socialist because they have
             | "socialist" in the name.
        
               | joemazerino wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | random314 wrote:
               | Truth has a liberal bias.
        
               | BitwiseFool wrote:
               | I have always found it amusing that people who use this
               | slogan tend to be deeply concerned about bias from the
               | other side but see no problem with such a glib statement.
        
               | danielbln wrote:
               | Because that statement is meant as sarcasm, highlighting
               | the absurdity of certain claims, and not a literal
               | statement.
        
               | BitwiseFool wrote:
               | That's the thing though, I never hear that statement from
               | conservatives or non-liberals - they never seem to utter
               | it, even in a sarcastic or mocking tone.
               | 
               | I only ever hear it from what seem to be sincere
               | liberals/progressives, and often in the context of
               | dismissing claims of liberal bias. In fact, that seems to
               | be exactly how it was used in this very comment chain.
        
               | otikik wrote:
               | Because only right-leaning organizations are valid
               | sources.
        
               | algorias wrote:
               | No, because ideally you'd have an ideologically neutral
               | source, specially for politically charged topics. But
               | such sources are essentially nonexistent, so we're left
               | trying to subtract out the biases from wikipedia
               | articles.
               | 
               | Don't get me wrong, wikipedia has value; it's just not a
               | trustworthy source for certain topics. At the very least
               | you should take a peek at the "history" tab to see
               | alternative viewpoints.
        
               | DoctorOW wrote:
               | Wikipdeia is double plus ungood for containing thought
               | crimes against The Party
        
           | prometheus76 wrote:
           | Everyone marginalizes people they find undesirable. When was
           | the last time you thought "where is a group of people I can't
           | stand to be around? I want to go hang out with them right
           | now."
        
             | throwaway894345 wrote:
             | Sure, but why do we have to conflate "disagreement" with
             | "undesirability"? I'm old enough to remember a time when we
             | could disagree about things without pretending our
             | opponents are Hitler reincarnate. I often find myself
             | wanting to spend more time with people I disagree with to
             | understand their perspectives better or to help them see
             | that we probably have more common ground than they may
             | realize or even just to do my part to heal our culture by
             | rejecting the notion that it's necessary, good, or morally
             | acceptable to hate people we disagree with.
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | > Sure, but why do we have to conflate "disagreement"
               | with "undesirability"?
               | 
               | Because most people find being challenged very tiresome
               | and uncomfortable. People who are high in openness
               | actually enjoy being challenged, but they are a minority
               | (and it's definitely a spectrum).
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | I believe this, but there was also a time when it was
               | considered a virtue to be more open-minded--calling
               | someone "a literal Nazi" over some minor ideological
               | disagreement (and then calling for them to be fired,
               | attacked, etc) would have been roundly and correctly
               | criticized. Now it seems like it's considered virtuous to
               | exaggerate differences, police ideas, etc.
        
         | blueflow wrote:
         | Maybe "thats right-wing rhetoric" has been the method of
         | suppressing what we found uncomfortable.
        
           | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
           | Eh, it's usually the rhetoric that's appalling, then traced
           | back to the right, not the other way around.
           | 
           | If you could give an example of rhetoric that is suppressed
           | because it's "right wing", that would be helpful.
        
             | minsc_and_boo wrote:
             | I don't know why you're being downvoted - you're right.
             | 
             | It's not speech about fiscal conservative policies or
             | smaller government that get's censored. It's people telling
             | their viewers to harass Sandyhook parents, or participate
             | in a violent insurrection, or something similar that gets
             | censored.
             | 
             | Playing the victim card without acknowledging TOS
             | violations is intentionally misleading.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | Right, nobody (AFAIK) has been banned from Twitter,
               | YouTube, Facebook, etc. for espousing Laissez-faire
               | economic policies.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | > It's not speech about fiscal conservative policies or
               | smaller government that get's censored.
               | 
               | When cancel culture was running amok, people were getting
               | fired/reprimanded/harassed for advocating nonviolent
               | protests over riots, for using Chinese words that sound
               | vaguely like an English racial slur, for interviewing
               | Black Americans whose opinions differ slightly from the
               | official narrative about what a Black American ought to
               | think, for throwing a geisha-themed party for your young
               | daughter, for wearing a prom dress inspired by a
               | traditional Chinese aesthetic, etc. None of these are
               | remotely right-wing offenses.
               | 
               | This is the whole problem--the left harms people whose
               | actions/opinions are well within the Overton Window and
               | upon criticism, they retreat to some variation of "we're
               | just opposing objectively horrible people!". This whole
               | game hurts left-wing credibility and it easier for far-
               | right viewpoints to enter the mainstream (is so-and-so an
               | actual Nazi or are they just failing to completely toe
               | the left-wing party line?). It's also just shitty
               | behavior that makes people angry and pushes them
               | rightward, and it does nothing to help left-wing causes.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | When people say reprehensible things, they receive an
               | amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is
               | reasonable).
               | 
               | The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology,
               | however, so not sure why you're bringing it up. If your
               | expectation is that 50% of backlash would be left leaning
               | and 50% would be right leaning, I don't think that's
               | reasonable, but if you think the backlash is because
               | someone is conservative generally, you'd be mistaken.
               | 
               | There are a _great many_ conservatives who can make their
               | ideological arguments comfortably without being
               | offensive. Conservative ideology isn 't inherently
               | offensive, but specific human beings say specific things
               | that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
        
               | pessimizer wrote:
               | > When people say reprehensible things, they receive an
               | amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is
               | reasonable).
               | 
               | And also when people say not reprehensible things.
               | 
               | > The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology,
               | however, so not sure why you're bringing it up.
               | 
               | Then it's strange that it's been intimately connected
               | with looming war against Russia and China, so many
               | intelligence agencies have so many employees that spend
               | 100% of their time on it, and so many congresspeople are
               | making direct requests for censorship on political lines.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | > When people say reprehensible things, they receive an
               | amount of backlash as a result (sometimes more than is
               | reasonable).
               | 
               | Sure, but we aren't talking about reprehensible things,
               | we're talking about "advocating against political
               | violence" and cultural appreciation.
               | 
               | > The backlash has nothing to do with political ideology,
               | however, so not sure why you're bringing it up
               | 
               | Because it's clearly about punishing deviation from a
               | partisan line.
               | 
               | > If your expectation is that 50% of backlash would be
               | left leaning and 50% would be right leaning, I don't
               | think that's reasonable, but if you think the backlash is
               | because someone is conservative generally, you'd be
               | mistaken.
               | 
               | That's not my expectation, my expectation is that we
               | don't persecute people for moderate beliefs (and no,
               | caricaturing those beliefs to make them sound extreme
               | doesn't count), nor do we tolerate said behavior.
               | 
               | > There are a great many conservatives who can make their
               | ideological arguments comfortably without being
               | offensive. Conservative ideology isn't inherently
               | offensive, but specific human beings say specific things
               | that are reprehensible and when they do, it's called out.
               | 
               | As previously discussed, a lot of people are "calling
               | out" others for utterly innocuous transgressions. For
               | example, my state subreddit is presently arguing that
               | families who homeschool their kids are closet Nazis
               | (that's the very popular opinion on that particular
               | subreddit).
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | I guess I'm not familiar with people who are falling into
               | this category you're suggesting. Could you cite some
               | specific examples?
               | 
               | I'm thinking of Kanye, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Nick
               | Fuentes, etc. These people expressed reprehensible
               | viewpoints and were subsequently removed from various
               | platforms as a result. That's not politics; what they
               | said was reprehensible regardless of political ideology.
               | You can find people who expressed similar political
               | thoughts without the hate, but the people I named can't
               | figure out how to do that and therefore have been removed
               | (to some degree or another) from the communal discourse.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | The examples cited in my original comment were all
               | specific examples. Some names include Lee Fang, Daniel
               | Shor, James Damore.
        
             | thrownawaydad wrote:
             | Not OP, but consider illegal immigration. It is apparently
             | leading to a surge in child sex trafficking, among other
             | ills.
             | 
             | But, being against illegal immigration is currently
             | considered "right wing", and in a lot of contexts will get
             | you fired, vilified, and perhaps beaten.
             | 
             | There's your example.
             | 
             | (I'm a child of immigrants, and don't particularly have an
             | opinion of how much immigration is good. I do, though,
             | believe this amount should be determined by legislative
             | process and then tightly enforced.)
        
               | minsc_and_boo wrote:
               | You're mixing up terms here.
               | 
               | Being against _legal_ immigration and implementing
               | policies to make it more difficult to become legal (as
               | the right has done) has lead to the enslavement of
               | immigrant women and other sex trafficking. Being against
               | _sane and fair_ immigration policies is what people react
               | to.
               | 
               | Everyone is against illegal immigration and child sex
               | trafficking, but vary vastly on the solutions.
        
               | MrMan wrote:
               | we need to return to the very high levels of immigration
               | we had in the 19th century, it would really help our
               | population and economy to grow. it will help the country
               | a lot in the long term
        
             | pessimizer wrote:
             | No, it's the argument by association that's appalling,
             | because it's dishonest. The rhetoric is usually just wrong.
             | Being wrong is superior to being dishonest. Wrong people
             | can be corrected.
        
             | mellosouls wrote:
             | If you read the article you will see examples of imbalanced
             | moderation that conservatives have pointed out for ages
             | with unfortunate dismissals (like yours? am I reading you
             | correctly?) in response.
             | 
             | This article is useful as it places them in a relatively
             | neutral investigative context.
             | 
             | It is obviously right that racist, sexist, etc bias is
             | pointed out, but that case is not at all helped by
             | complacency in response to political bias towards liberal
             | mores when also clearly present.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | That's my point; it's not clear there's any political
               | bias taking place here. The person in question has a
               | laundry list of racist, sexist, etc. remarks over his
               | long career in the public eye, most of which took place
               | outside of serious politics entirely.
        
               | mellosouls wrote:
               | _That 's my point; it's not clear there's any political
               | bias taking place here._
               | 
               | What are you talking about?? Reread the article:
               | 
               |  _OpenAI content moderation system is more permissive of
               | hateful comments being made about conservatives than the
               | same comments being made about liberals._
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | The argument conservatives provide is the idea that
               | they're overly censored on platforms; how permissively
               | they're spoken of (hatefully or otherwise) is unrelated.
               | If anything, it's _in alignment_ to their ideology, not
               | against it.
               | 
               | But let's say what you're claiming is true for a moment.
               | Political ideology shouldn't have been included with
               | race, gender, and religion anyway; it's _perfectly
               | acceptable_ to discriminate against someone based on
               | their political affiliation, as it 's 100% a choice,
               | where as disability, race, gender, and religion are not.
        
             | throwaway894345 wrote:
             | I gave a couple of examples in my sibling comment. One
             | example began as "right wing rhetoric" (if you consider
             | moderate conservatives to be 'right wing'; I'm not sure
             | exactly how they fit into official taxonomies) and the
             | other began as moderate liberal rhetoric that was adopted
             | by right-wing groups after the fact. I think lazy, out-of-
             | hand dismissal of both kinds is common, but I think the
             | left has cried "right-wing", "Nazi", "white supremacist",
             | etc so often (and over such obviously innocuous stuff) over
             | the last decade that this sort of rhetoric has lost much of
             | its effect (on the other hand, the right is working as hard
             | as ever to make 'right wing' something honest people want
             | to distance themselves from).
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | I don't think any honest defense of CRT said any of the
               | things you claimed here, where have you heard those
               | arguments?
               | 
               | Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and
               | ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology
               | exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but
               | those ideas aren't bad _because_ they 're conservative,
               | they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
               | 
               |  _Anyone_ espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem,
               | regardless of their political leanings.
        
               | throwaway894345 wrote:
               | > I don't think any honest defense of CRT said any of the
               | things you claimed here, where have you heard those
               | arguments?
               | 
               | I've heard them all over for many years (including on
               | this forum for a good while a few years ago), but I agree
               | they aren't "honest" (and the dishonesty is precisely the
               | problem).
               | 
               | > Things that are "Nazi" or "white supremacist" ideas and
               | ideologies get called out, and those ideas and ideology
               | exist on the right in ways they don't on the left, but
               | those ideas aren't bad because they're conservative,
               | they're bad because they're hateful and discriminatory.
               | 
               | I agree. But the problem is that moderate ideas are being
               | caricatured and labeled as "Nazi" or "white supremacist"
               | so that they enjoy the same social censure that we would
               | give to bonafide hateful ideas.
               | 
               | > Anyone espousing Nazi ideology is a huge problem,
               | regardless of their political leanings.
               | 
               | Yes, but we're not talking about "espousing Nazi
               | ideology", we're talking about people who are espousing
               | moderate ideas that get treated like they're hateful.
               | Consider for example James Damore's "Google Memo" and how
               | it was framed as a hateful, "anti-diversity screed" by
               | virtually the entirety of the media despite that the full
               | text was readily available. His arguments were squarely
               | liberal in nature even if he made some factual errors.
               | Consider Lee Fang or David Shor (both committed
               | progressives).
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | The Google memo _was_ hateful, anti-diversity, and he got
               | exactly what he deserved (he was fired). According to his
               | LinkedIn[0], he 's been working at an unnamed startup for
               | the past 4 years, so it's not like he was "cancelled" in
               | any real sense.
               | 
               | And Lee Fang and David Shor are fine? I literally cannot
               | find either controversy you're referencing on the front
               | page of Google or Google News.
               | 
               | [0] Not sure I'm allowed to post this, but it's easily
               | discoverable.
        
           | throwaway894345 wrote:
           | I'm not sure what you have in mind, but there is definitely a
           | propensity on the left to try to shut down any argument with
           | "that's a right wing position". For example, opposition to
           | CRT was largely a moderate/liberal thing before your average
           | conservative even heard the term, but even then criticism was
           | dismissed with "people who criticize CRT just want to say the
           | N word / get their slaves back / etc". Similarly,
           | conservatives were pretty quick to coin the term "Ferguson
           | Effect" for the pattern of increasing violent crimes in areas
           | that saw large-scale anti-police protests, so naturally
           | academics and the media reflexively dismissed the notion out
           | of hand, but now it seems like crime researchers have largely
           | come around to that viewpoint (to be clear, I'm not
           | criticizing skepticism of conservatives' initial claims, but
           | rather the incurious, out-of-hand dismissal).
        
         | habitue wrote:
         | I don't know why left wing groups would celebrate. Other than
         | the conservative category, most of the descriptors he used were
         | inborn traits like being straight, being white, being a man, or
         | immutable attributes like being from a particular country. (And
         | honestly, being conservative may be one of those traits too,
         | but it's less obviously true).
         | 
         | I know it's common to look at the most unhinged people on
         | Twitter and say all leftists are like that, but I really do
         | think most left leaning people would say that it isn't a good
         | outcome for it to be biased in this way.
        
           | zug_zug wrote:
           | Yeah, I'd guess HN is a pretty 50/50 split left/right. I
           | don't expect to see anybody on this post championing this
           | result as the ideal state.
           | 
           | So if your image of left is "twitter left" maybe reconsider
           | recalibrating it to "half of hn."
        
             | orangecat wrote:
             | _Yeah, I 'd guess HN is a pretty 50/50 split left/right._
             | 
             | Maybe on economics (I'd say closer to 2/3 left), but on
             | social issues it's overwhelmingly left. What percentage are
             | anti-abortion, for example?
             | 
             | The main split seems to be between old-style liberals who
             | support free speech as a fundamental principle and
             | progressives who believe that speech should often be
             | restricted in order to protect marginalized groups.
        
               | jeoqn wrote:
               | There are mainstream conservative points of view that
               | posted here get flagged by users and sometimes even by
               | dang himself (you can see it was him when the comment
               | tree automatically collapses, only he can do that)
        
               | dang wrote:
               | No, comments with enough user flags get automatically
               | collapsed as well.
        
           | MrStonedOne wrote:
           | [dead]
        
           | nhchris wrote:
           | > I don't know why left wing groups would celebrate. Other
           | than the conservative category, most of the descriptors he
           | used were inborn traits like being straight, being white,
           | being a man, or immutable attributes like being from a
           | particular country.
           | 
           | We're really going to pretend the left hasn't been demonizing
           | certain groups and sanctifying others based on inborn traits?
           | Hint: "X privilege" Economic and worker's rights
           | considerations traditionally considered 'left' have, in
           | practice, taken a back-seat.
        
           | psychphysic wrote:
           | Because two wrongs make a right is almost becoming a campaign
           | slogan of some "left" causes.
           | 
           | As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past
           | decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me.
           | 
           | I used to be liberal, but then they changed what liberal was,
           | now what I am isn't liberal and what is liberal seems weird
           | and scary to me. It'll happen to you...
           | 
           | - Abe Simpson
        
             | andrepd wrote:
             | The comment you replied is saying that Leftists are not
             | represented by unhinged people on twitter. Your response is
             | a simpsons quote. I rest my case.
        
             | snapcaster wrote:
             | Holding static views is a sign of stagnation right? has
             | nothing in the world changed over the past decade? nothing
             | to re-evaluate anything?
        
               | francisofascii wrote:
               | Foundational principles that have been debated and
               | continually established since civilization began should
               | stay mostly static. Policies may change, but not the
               | principles.
        
             | slg wrote:
             | >As a liberal my views haven't changed much over the past
             | decade but the ground has definitely fallen away from me.
             | 
             | Well yes, because liberalism is about "progress" while
             | conservatism is about "traditional values". Liberalism is
             | constantly evolving while conservatism is not. It is more
             | extreme to fight for trans rights than it is to fight for
             | gay rights than it is to fight for women's rights. If you
             | magically transported a liberal from a decade ago to today,
             | they will inherently be viewed as more conservative. Obama
             | didn't support gay marriage until 2012. Very few liberal
             | politicians today would be against gay marriage. Your views
             | not changing means your views are becoming more
             | conservative because they are falling behind the "progress"
             | that liberals are always pushing towards.
             | 
             | And also it is worth noting that according to Pew
             | "[Congressional] Republicans have moved further to the
             | right than [Congressional] Democrats have to the left"[1]
             | 
             | [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-
             | polariz...
        
               | pessimizer wrote:
               | You're going to be very confused when liberals become
               | anti-trans, and pretend like trans rights were actually
               | only being pushed by a minority of liberal extremists,
               | e.g. defund and police abolition, M4A etc.. With that you
               | will have joined the extreme left, which due to the
               | horseshoe principle (all anti-establishment narratives
               | are equally unhinged), will put you on the extreme right,
               | all without ever having changed your opinion.
               | 
               | Or you'll change your opinion. Either way. Situational
               | morality is actually a sign of progress.
        
               | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
               | >You're going to be very confused when liberals become
               | anti-trans
               | 
               | What makes you say this?
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | Conservatism is also constantly evolving in practice - it
               | just labels whatever its current dogma as "traditional
               | values" regardless of historicity. The political history
               | of abortion in US, and especially and attitudes towards
               | it by the Republicans, is one spectacular example.
               | Welfare is another - e.g. how many people are aware that
               | Nixon of all people tried to pass UBI?
               | (https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-
               | presid...)
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Yea, as a quite left leaning person i'd be curious to hear
           | how i or anyone i know _(who is on the left)_ marginalizes a
           | group of people.
           | 
           | The worst i can think of is wanting more equal rights for
           | religious groups rather than special treatment of the primary
           | group (in the USA) - which is seen as an attack by much of
           | the right. Likewise i am concerned by the strong emphasis of
           | rural over urban with respect to voting power and
           | representation. Though i have no easy answer here, so i'm
           | pretty unopinionated - just concerned.
           | 
           | I'd be really curious where i and the folks i know and
           | discuss with marginalize other groups; as i want to correct
           | that, if we do. Obviously no one here can answer that with
           | specificity to my beliefs but.. my curiosity exists
           | nonetheless heh.
        
             | distant_hat wrote:
             | The left's support for Islam directly marginalizes
             | minorities within Islamic countries as well as women and
             | gays fighting for their rights there.
        
               | darkwraithcov wrote:
               | The "left," is a truly nebulous concept if you observe
               | leftist discourse online, where circular firing squads
               | are writ large.
               | 
               | I think you are conflating the left's support for
               | minority groups who are demonized and targeted by society
               | for support of the tenets of their respective religions.
               | After 9/11, Muslims were a significant target of hatred
               | and violence. The left, which again is not a monolithic
               | entity, doesn't support islam anymore than it supports
               | judaism or any other religion, it supports people who
               | happen to follow that religion. It's based around
               | humanist tendencies, which the right often doesn't
               | understand. You can hate aspects of a religion while also
               | being against any dehumanization and hatred against
               | people who follow said religion.
               | 
               | Like the other 2 major Abrahamic religions, Islam has
               | some good and some bad tenets. At least in the US, there
               | are some extremely conservative muslims and some -
               | perhaps shockingly - liberal muslims. Being that they are
               | such a small percentage of the US population, there is a
               | lot of misunderstanding and stereotyping of people who
               | follow Islam.
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | I'm kinda of undecided on Islam, fwiw. A bit above my pay
               | grade, as i'm rather unsure how we objectively classify
               | religion. There's plenty of Christian sects in the US
               | that actively fight against gay rights/etc here too
               | (though obviously to a far lesser degree in the common
               | case), so it feels like we need some way to classify
               | specific doctrine.
               | 
               | With my own lack of doctrine classification i am unsure
               | how to view them. So i tend not to take a stance on it,
               | just like i don't with Christianity.
               | 
               | I'm not sure what support you think the left commonly
               | believes in for Islam. Everyone i know is not a fan of
               | most religions, Christianity included. I view self rights
               | far more important, and many religions or denominations
               | directly challenge that.
               | 
               | Do you believe most leftists are campaigning for Islamic
               | support? This has not been my experience.
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | The concern is stuff like this:
               | 
               | https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-
               | students...
        
               | jdmtheNth wrote:
               | Successor ideology is fast becoming a religion, if isn't
               | already.
        
               | pessimizer wrote:
               | Islam: famous left-wing religion.
               | 
               | Christianity: notoriously tolerant of minorities,
               | supportive of the equality of women, and gay friendly.
        
             | hersko wrote:
             | Jews on college campuses [1] and jews in the black lives
             | matter movement [2] come to mind.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.frc.org/antisemitism [2]
             | https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matters-
             | jewish-p...
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | That's definitely an interesting one. Not shared in my
               | group, nor would i understand what "the left" would have
               | against Jews, especially in a religious context. They
               | seem rather innocuous when compared to the more vocal and
               | physical religions.
               | 
               | Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals
               | have something against the Jews?
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | > Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals
               | have something against the Jews?
               | 
               | Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than right
               | wingers, so yes. Or alternatively you could say "do you
               | honestly believe most right leaving individuals have
               | something against X" for so many topics, X could be black
               | people etc. Right wingers are more likely to be against
               | those things, but it isn't like all of them are evil,
               | similarly there is more Jew hate among left wingers, but
               | it isn't like most of them hate Jews either.
               | 
               | Most Jew hate today has to do with Israel, right wing is
               | mostly pro Istrael, so most Jew hate comes from the left.
        
               | mrguyorama wrote:
               | Do you have ANY evidence to back up these claims?
        
               | this2shallPass wrote:
               | This view isn't supported by studies in this area. They
               | do find antisemitism on the left and the center of the US
               | political spectrum - just more on the right.
               | 
               | > While antisemitism in the U.S. is often written about
               | through a "both sides" lens, our evidence -- the first of
               | its kind in testing hypotheses through experiments on a
               | large repre- sentative sample -- suggests the problem of
               | antisemitism is much more serious on the right than the
               | left. This evidence confirms that the antisemitism that
               | has been on prominent display in white nationalist
               | protests is not merely confined to a tiny group of
               | extremists; antisemitic attitudes appear quite common
               | among young conservatives, and much more so than among
               | older conservatives or among liberals of any age.
               | 
               | * https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hers
               | h_roy...
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | I live in Europe, things are very different here. ChatGPT
               | is a global program so I'm not sure why we should talk
               | about USA specifically. Antisemitism is on the rise in
               | Europe due to Muslim immigration, and the left supports
               | or downplays those acts while the right tries to take it
               | seriously.
               | 
               | So like how Trump said there were fine people among that
               | crowd, the left in Europe says there are fine people
               | among the crowds that goes and harasses and murders Jews.
               | You shouldn't judge individuals for being from a group,
               | but that isn't what is happening here, they are trying to
               | downplay the acts of individuals just because they belong
               | to a specific group.
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | That's interesting. I can understand being reasonably
               | anti-Israel, but i'm suspicious that many people take the
               | leap from being anti-Israel to being anti-Jew. Especially
               | when you consider how many people of both the Jewish
               | faith and/or ethnicity live within the United States. Tbh
               | it feels like a straw man, but we're speculating anyway,
               | so i can't fault you for it.
               | 
               | I appreciate the discussion nonetheless. I'll definitely
               | be curious to talk to people i know (when politics comes
               | up) to see their thoughts on Jews and Islam (as a
               | different commenter pointed out). I suspect that no one i
               | know will be anti-Jew or radically pro-Islam.
               | 
               | Appreciate the points of discussion/anecdotes. I can't
               | say i agree with them, but they were certainly a
               | surprise. Far from what i expected.
        
               | this2shallPass wrote:
               | > While antisemitism in the U.S. is often written about
               | through a "both sides" lens, our evidence -- the first of
               | its kind in testing hypotheses through experiments on a
               | large repre- sentative sample -- suggests the problem of
               | antisemitism is much more serious on the right than the
               | left. This evidence confirms that the antisemitism that
               | has been on prominent display in white nationalist
               | protests is not merely confined to a tiny group of
               | extremists; antisemitic attitudes appear quite common
               | among young conservatives, and much more so than among
               | older conservatives or among liberals of any age.
               | 
               | * https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hers
               | h_roy...
        
               | luckylion wrote:
               | > I can understand being reasonably anti-Israel
               | 
               | Pretty much all "I'm only against Israel's policies" is
               | shy Antisemitism. You can easily test this by asking them
               | about other countries that have similar (or much harsher)
               | policies as Israel and see whether the "no no, it's not
               | about being Jewish, not at all" person is similarly upset
               | about those and demands Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.
               | 99% aren't and it really is only about the Jews - the
               | Antizionism is just a cloak over the Antisemitism because
               | the pure stuff doesn't fly in polite society, but if you
               | pretend that it's not about the Jews then you can go at
               | it.
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | Not sure i follow, are you assuming i'm in favor of other
               | countries policies that match Israel?
               | 
               | To be fair i know little on the subject, and don't claim
               | to. The only reason i said "i can understand .." is that
               | i know it's a hot-button topic. Israel is often portrayed
               | in the west as being overly militaristic towards
               | neighboring areas. The United States itself does similar,
               | depending on who you ask.
               | 
               | I judge both quite harshly on this front. I also know
               | very little about world politics. Both in ignorance and
               | on purpose, heh.
        
               | spaced-out wrote:
               | >Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than
               | right wingers
               | 
               | Yes, I remember that left wing protest where people
               | chanted "Jews will not replace us". Remind me, which
               | president was it that said there were "good people" in
               | that crowd?
        
               | a_shovel wrote:
               | The cited examples are just criticism of Israel and
               | support for Palestine labeled as antisemitism. This is
               | really weak stuff.
        
               | case0x00 wrote:
               | if after reading those things you honestly can't see the
               | difference then you are definitely part of the problem.
        
         | [deleted]
        
           | dingusdew wrote:
           | [dead]
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
       | basically everything that America has been saying about SF Bay
       | Area tech companies, now quantified by the training set of
       | content on SF Bay Area platforms and content moderation
       | predilections
        
       | crawsome wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
       | mshake2 wrote:
       | They've managed to codify their concept of "punching up"
        
       | patientplatypus wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | random314 wrote:
       | Republicans aren't a "demographic group", they are a political
       | group.
        
       | boredumb wrote:
       | An amusing reflection into a modern day social hierarchy
       | according to the public online sphere. Also fun to imagine that
       | most of these language models are snapshots of consumable and
       | parseable discourse and so their bias will be a time capsule of
       | the overton window from a certain time period.
        
         | mistermann wrote:
         | That's the perspective I take as well: LLM's are giving
         | humanity (imperfect) insight into it's collective consciousness
         | (how they describe their experience and perception of reality
         | (aka: _" reality", "the reality", etc_) in text), almost like
         | holding up a giant mirror to ourselves.
         | 
         | I'm thinking before too long this idea is going to leak out
         | into the collective consciousness, and that may make things in
         | this already utterly bizarro world even more interesting than
         | they already are. It's gonna be a wild decade!
        
         | jayvanguard wrote:
         | Exactly. What's interesting as well is how much this initial
         | point in time will perpetuate forward as future language models
         | are built on the output of the current ones, dampening any
         | potential shifting in the overton window. They may try to avoid
         | ingesting their output (ChatGPT says it can detect use of
         | itself), but as more independent models get developed, the
         | detection will never be perfect and in fact may be impossible
         | at some point.
        
       | SergeAx wrote:
       | When ChatGPT hype just started, I managed it to produce a
       | coherent text about Hitler being right and Holocaust being
       | totally justified. I don't see how it's a problem of ChatGPT or
       | its authors, and not mine.
       | 
       | Also, I am the only one who saw this text. Does the idea of
       | neural networks justice implies that I can publish any output and
       | remain immune from judgement?
        
       | eunos wrote:
       | In the future AI or Software developers might need their own
       | Federalist Society.
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | FedSoc is a poison to democracy and sensible society, I can't
         | imagine having another one.
        
           | prometheus76 wrote:
           | Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, which sounds great
           | until something you hold dear becomes a minority opinion and
           | you become a criminal.
        
             | flangola7 wrote:
             | What are you proposing? Democracy isn't perfect but it's
             | the best political system we have come up with to date.
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | It's great, as long as you are in the majority. But if
               | you're in the 49% (or less) category, then it is
               | tyrannical and untenable. I don't know if you have a
               | family, but if you do, do you put all of your decisions
               | as a parent to a vote?
        
               | flangola7 wrote:
               | Sure, but you still haven't explained what the
               | alternative is that you are proposing or how it would be
               | better.
        
         | manuelabeledo wrote:
         | You mean that AI would strive to create a capitalist
         | libertarian utopia, where healthcare is a privilege, guns an
         | absolute right, abortion a crime, and dark money in politics
         | widespread?
         | 
         | Sounds like we are half-way there, anyway.
        
       | bunnyswipecom wrote:
       | Anyone surprised by that is pretty stupid.
        
       | mattnewton wrote:
       | Rather than some kind of blind spot or intentional weighting, I
       | think this is probably pointing to the training data they have
       | not including many instances of "hate" against the some groups.
       | LLM are after all fundamentally memorizing likelihood of token
       | sequences, and I'm sure the ai had plenty of examples of people
       | saying hateful things about fat people but I have never read "I
       | hate normal weight people" for example. Even the construction the
       | author chose of "normal weight people" is probably comparatively
       | incredibly rare to see.
       | 
       | There are probably comparatively too few examples of people
       | saying hateful things about
       | christians/republicans/cisgendered/white people in the training
       | data scraped from the internet, and they need to hallucinate some
       | to show this same sensitivity for the author's metric.
       | 
       | Edit: if this is true, This also points to a problem with the
       | approach depending on historical data - it might struggle to
       | become sensitive to new trending hate speech patterns.
        
         | catiopatio wrote:
         | > There are probably too few examples of people saying hateful
         | things about christians/republicans/cisgendered/white people
         | ... from the internet
         | 
         | This seems likely to you?
        
           | mrguyorama wrote:
           | Fox news spent an entire decade saying that Islam is a
           | religion of hate and can only result in violence.
           | 
           | Find me the news channel watched by 60 million people that is
           | willing to say the same thing about Christians.
        
           | bobkazamakis wrote:
           | Absolutely. Compared to the inverse it's microscopic. Have
           | you heard of a very cool and normal AI called Tay?
        
             | catiopatio wrote:
             | Belief that hateful rhetoric is one-sided on the internet
             | -- and does not target the aforementioned groups -- is a
             | fascinating case of bias that deserves some research of its
             | own.
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | It's really not that it's one sided, it's that it's
               | clearly more common to see hate speech anywhere
               | unmoderated against some disadvantaged groups. And this
               | is likely a consequence of history. It's more curious to
               | me when people think that it should be balanced, that we
               | would expect people to be writing hate speech about the
               | majority as often as fringe members of the majority write
               | hate speech about minorities.
               | 
               | And that's what this metric is measuring, the model
               | finding hate more easily with "fat people are terrible"
               | than "normal weight people are terrible"
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | Believing hate is distributed evenly amongst majority and
               | minority groups, to me, is an even more fascinating bias.
        
               | catiopatio wrote:
               | Believing that human social pathologies are likely
               | universal is a bias?
               | 
               | Hateful expression is more prominent when it's socially
               | acceptable, and in American society at large, there are
               | socially acceptable targets for hate that do not align
               | with the majority/minority group division.
               | 
               | Consider, for example, the prominent, public, long-
               | standing (and for some reason, tolerated) racial
               | animosity between Asian and Black Americans.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | Wait, so you think minority groups hating one another is
               | _not_ aligned with the majority /minority group division?
               | I don't understand; by definition each group is a member
               | of a minority social group, wouldn't that obviously be
               | the case that they're therefore subject to all of the
               | negativity that entails? There's no unity amongst
               | minority groups, if that's what you're suggesting; the
               | majority group makes it tolerable to espouse hate against
               | _all_ minority groups, including from other minority
               | groups.
               | 
               | You say you don't know why it's tolerated, but that's my
               | point exactly; it's tolerated because it's hate towards a
               | minority group (regardless of the source). It would be
               | substantially less tolerated if it were hate towards the
               | majority group.
        
               | catiopatio wrote:
               | Hate is far more tolerated from minority groups
               | regardless of the target.
               | 
               | Consider how often you've read "kill all men" or "kill
               | all terfs", versus "kill all women" or "kill all
               | transgender people".
               | 
               | Furthermore, consider the stronger emotional reaction you
               | likely had to reading the second two, as opposed to the
               | first two.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | For sure, hate from a group in control is much different
               | than hate from a group that isn't in control.
        
             | decremental wrote:
             | I could browse this very website for a few minutes and
             | probably find examples of those things.
        
               | wolfram74 wrote:
               | Examples is not the same as proportionally larger. I can
               | find instances of things sliding up hill, but it's not
               | the phenomenon I would expect if I were guessing blind.
        
               | decremental wrote:
               | Yeah but the guy is saying "whaaat pfft that's not
               | happening" while hanging out on a site where it happens
               | all the friggin time. It's just bullshit. He sounds like
               | someone who hangs out in and around plenty of places
               | where such things are commonplace.
        
           | wolfram74 wrote:
           | Here's an example, atheists[0] are considered less trust
           | worthy than muslims in america. Christians absolutely have a
           | privileged place in society.
           | 
           | [0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615576473
        
           | jcims wrote:
           | Seems more likely that fewer humans are labeling speech used
           | to describe these groups as hateful.
        
             | inawarminister wrote:
             | Fewer humans or just those with access to the "filter"?
             | 
             | Reminds me of old Twitter again.
        
           | mattnewton wrote:
           | Compared to the number of hateful things about
           | Muslims/democrats/gays/blacks? Yes.
           | 
           | I'd be actually shocked to find out the reverse. A good
           | percentage of the US were born up in an era where you could
           | legally bar people based on their race from your
           | establishment. The extremely heated fight over gay marriage
           | is still fresh in people's memory. Trans rights are a
           | controversial political issue where many mainstream
           | politicians want to legislate them out of public spaces,
           | because of public sentiment. And for the left/right leaning
           | question, In the last two major elections we've seen the
           | political discourse even of republicans politicians and
           | leaders is comparatively charged with violence.
           | 
           | The hate is definitely there against the republicans and
           | mainstream groups, but I would expect it to be relatively
           | uncommon compared to the hateful text you can find online
           | about other groups. This could be a real problem for novel
           | kinds of hate speech.
        
             | catiopatio wrote:
             | Have you considered that your political bubble might
             | minimize reporting of hate and violence originating from
             | your in-group, while amplifying reporting of hate and
             | violence originating from your out-group?
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | Yes, it's definitely a filter I live in. And we
               | unfortunately do not have their public training data
               | corpus.
               | 
               | However, it's also true that I can trivially find clips
               | of mainstream republican leaders over the last few years
               | with violent charged rhetoric, and it is comparatively
               | harder to find such rhetoric from mainstream
               | democrats[0][1]
               | 
               | For many of the other groups, hate has been historically
               | so widespread and common there are whole organizations
               | like the annti defamation league organized around
               | combating it. There is no way that even if you believe
               | today people are furiously writing hate against
               | Christians into twitter 24/7 or wherever my bubble they
               | could have caught up with the historic use of hate speech
               | against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. And so on for the
               | other disadvantaged groups.
               | 
               | And all this is not to say it isn't a potential problem
               | or a potentially useful metric. It could be that
               | synthetic hate is needed to anticipate new kinds of
               | unlikely and rare sentence structures that might arise.
               | If this is true it also reminds us that these models will
               | need constant training as new kinds of hate speech become
               | more popular and that it will always be lagging.
               | 
               | [0]https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-fred-upton-
               | paul-gosa...
               | 
               | [1[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/how-some-
               | members-of-th...
        
             | Levitz wrote:
             | I really can't think of a large site in which
             | discrimination for muslims/democrats/gays/blacks isn't more
             | frowned upon than whites/republicans/christians etc. Even
             | places like 4chan are mixed bags. Even MSM if you want to
             | count that.
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | It has to be frowned upon because it is so prevalent
               | among fringe hate groups. If you don't have strong
               | moderation and social norms around it, hate against those
               | groups is what drowns out the other text. 4chan is a
               | great example, if you remove moderation hate against
               | those groups seemingly spontaneously arises.
        
             | peyton wrote:
             | There's gotta be orders of magnitudes more than hate speech
             | against disabled people, yet it seems to get those right.
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | Not sure what you mean? It's more sensitive against
               | disabled people than the other, more rare strings the
               | author chose like "non disabled people", which would be
               | consistent with my theory that there is more hate against
               | disabled people in the training set and so the model is
               | more sensitive against that being in the sequence of
               | tokens
        
       | IceHegel wrote:
       | The bias goes much deeper than just treating groups differently.
       | 
       | For example, imagine what a chatGPT would have said about the
       | possibility of a lab leak back when that was a bannable offense
       | on the internet (Google).
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | Probably something about being trained on years-old data and
         | not having knowledge of current news.
        
           | IceHegel wrote:
           | Assuming it had up to date data, I could easily imagine
           | something like:
           | 
           | The Wuhan Institute of Virology theory, also known as the Lab
           | Leak hypothesis, is a conspiracy theory that suggests that
           | the origin of SARS-CoV-2 can be traced back to an accidental
           | release from the laboratory. Despite lack of solid proof,
           | proponents of this theory hold firm in their belief. However,
           | the scientific community widely subscribes to the theory of
           | zoonotic spillover as the most probable source of the virus'
           | emergence and no credible evidence supports Lab Leak theory
           | 
           | At this point the AI is way over its skis given available
           | evidence, but in the future it might be trusted far more than
           | any public official or individual researcher.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | laurex wrote:
       | Moderation in large part *must be about the bias towards
       | protecting vulnerable people. Vulnerable people by definition are
       | more likely to be targeted AND have less power, meaning
       | moderation is serving a protective function against dominance.
       | This will always be subjective, but there's almost certainly
       | evidence in abundance that some kinds of people, typically with
       | less cultural status, are more targeted and more at risk of harm
       | by being targeted.
        
         | mnkv wrote:
         | Even if you take this perspective, different groups are
         | considered vulnerable in different parts of the world and it
         | seems the API uses the American perspective. E.g. Scandinavians
         | are a less protected group than Italians according to the
         | article. But if you are in Italy, you will likely find Italians
         | to be less vulnerable. Even if you agree with the rankings,
         | this just means you come from the same cultural perspective and
         | others will disagree.
         | 
         | This is a fundamental problem with identifying hate / bias and
         | I think its important to understand our current limitations.
        
       | nebalee wrote:
       | How and why were the adjectives in these lists chosen? I feel it
       | would be easy to produce or amplify a bias by omitting certain
       | negative or insulting adjectives.
        
       | manuelabeledo wrote:
       | So, equality vs. equity all over again? That's hardly an insight.
       | 
       | Also, some of these classifications make little sense. "Muslims"
       | and "evangelicals", for instance, is just a matter of generic vs.
       | specific.
        
         | elefanten wrote:
         | Equality vs equity is well digested (though far from
         | "resolved") in the context of highly visible and measurable
         | phenomena... such as wealth.
         | 
         | Do you feel confident in your model of how equality/equity
         | apply to the policing of language and ideas? How about when the
         | language and ideas form the mostly-invisible substrate of a
         | base layer system that could potentially drive and/or mediate a
         | vast set of other systems that govern communication / education
         | / decision-making / culture-formation / economic participation
         | / etc ?
        
       | miroljub wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Mockapapella wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | SargeDebian wrote:
         | 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?
        
         | cypress66 wrote:
         | 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".
        
           | not_kurt_godel wrote:
           | > 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.
        
             | freedomben wrote:
             | Can you share your prompts for reproducibility?
        
         | zug_zug wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | slowmovintarget wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | miroljub wrote:
           | That's what media already does.
        
         | prometheus76 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | luxcem wrote:
           | That's just a strawman. Who did that?
        
             | prometheus76 wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | miroljub wrote:
               | ... 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?
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | 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".
        
               | pessimizer wrote:
               | > 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.
        
             | kube-system wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | prometheus76 wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | handoflixue wrote:
               | > 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!
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | Conflating a chaotic system (which is, by definition,
               | unpredictable) with the regularity of a calendar seems a
               | bit disingenuous.
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | j16sdiz wrote:
         | AI, being fully automated, amplify the effects.
        
       | Flatcircle wrote:
       | I heard a friend who had a brilliant theory. The rise of ad
       | profiling from Facebook and Google etc, has bleed into the public
       | consciousness at large and now it's considered normal to
       | categorize people by race, gender, politics, and income etc.
       | 
       | First the companies did, and now we all do.
       | 
       | But of course, a person is more than their race, or gender, or
       | income, etc. Most of the time they have very little in common
       | with those groups aside from color of skin, reproductive organs,
       | or money in the bank.
       | 
       | It's just how the advertisers see us.
        
         | avgcorrection wrote:
         | It's not a brilliant theory. It sounds more like an ad engineer
         | who is high on his own supply.
         | 
         | Fractioning of identities has been going on for decades. It's a
         | postmodern phenomenon. Escape into the fractured self.
        
         | google234123 wrote:
         | brilliant theory? I'm quite certain we are living in the least
         | racist time in human history. Humans have been tribal since the
         | start.
        
         | zwkrt wrote:
         | Maybe I am just brilliant but this has been obvious to me the
         | whole time. Advertisement and the 'need' to market to groups
         | results in reifying those groups in the population. The more
         | the marketing works, the more the groups actually become
         | differentiated, and it creates a positive feedback loop.
        
       | systemvoltage wrote:
       | There is more from David Rozado with regards to political stance
       | of chatGPT:
       | https://twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1616360881771917313
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | ankit219 wrote:
       | It's optimization for PR and defense against bad press. For every
       | question, a subtext is: "Who is likely to input that question,
       | how likely are they to input it, and if the answer is bad by
       | their belief system, they are likely to tell the world and/or
       | outrage about it?"
       | 
       | A general model of operation in creating outrage[1] is:
       | 
       | 1. Find the most extreme example of X
       | 
       | 2. Tell the world.
       | 
       | Democrats and left leaning were more likely to do that. And
       | openai optimized for that. It's a smart move.
       | 
       | [1]:https://betonit.substack.com/p/anti-woke-from-outrage-to-
       | act...
        
         | bloaf wrote:
         | I agree. The hate metric is calibrated against _responsiveness
         | to insult,_ not a ranking of social advantage.
        
       | smashah wrote:
       | It also refuses to call Israel an Apartheid state whereas it can
       | easily admit South Africa was an Apartheid state.
        
         | jefftk wrote:
         | Is that really surprising? "Apartheid" is literally an
         | Afrikaans word, and it's often used specifically to mean the
         | historical South African system instead of the technical
         | international law term.
        
           | smashah wrote:
           | Should it be surprising? Yes. Am I surprised? No I have a
           | pessimistic view on Tech's relationship with Apartheid
           | Israel. For all the flexibility of ChatGPT it would be
           | strange for it to be so pedantic as to differentiate based on
           | etymology.
           | 
           | It has been adopted as a word in a technical international
           | law term as clearly evident from the fact that there exists
           | an Apartheid Convention[0][1].
           | 
           | [0] https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cspca/cspca.html [1] https://
           | www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
        
       | agar wrote:
       | There is a fundamental question this article (and most debate)
       | overlooks: what is the objective of the content moderation?
       | 
       | Is it to avoid all hate in an equal way? Or is it to reduce
       | potential harm?
       | 
       | If the latter (which I would argue is the case, primarily to
       | avoid legal liability), then the results should be mapped against
       | statistics representing actual violence against certain groups.
       | 
       | Is there more harm against women then men? Then by that metric it
       | makes sense to have stricter moderation for statements targeting
       | women. Is there more violence targeted at Christians or Muslims?
       | More political violence by the left or by the right?
       | 
       | While politically and emotionally fraught, there is a lot of
       | research out there that answers these questions. It would not
       | surprise me if the answers line up fairly well with the bar chart
       | at the bottom of this article.
        
         | fleddr wrote:
         | None of that will work because the liability/ideological
         | pressure doesn't care about truth. It cares about subjective
         | acceptable speech.
         | 
         | Simple example: men are far more often the victim of violence
         | compared to women. So the age old idea that women should be
         | afraid to go out at night may be true, it is even more true for
         | men.
         | 
         | By your logic, this would afford more hate towards women, and
         | less hate against men.
         | 
         | This truth nor the outcome isn't acceptable as it doesn't fit
         | the narrative. It would be rejected, diluted, there's a 100
         | tactics to undermine truth if you approach it in bad faith.
         | 
         | Further, your approach of differentiation is inherently racist,
         | sexist, etc or can be perceived as such. Giving special
         | protections to identities also tends to humiliate them as you
         | signal that they are "less". Inferior. Can't make it on their
         | own.
         | 
         | Or, the exact opposite: it can be weaponized. Collecting the
         | labels like pokemons.
        
         | anononaut wrote:
         | I can somewhat agree with this if we were discussing forum or
         | comment section moderation. However in this case, due to the
         | nature of the model which finds correlations between anything
         | and anything else in ways that a human could never, modifying
         | or censoring inputs and outputs prevents me from trusting the
         | model like I should. If I'm digging deep into geopolitical
         | issues from say an anarchist perspective, I don't want my
         | results to be tampered with, despite their likelihood of
         | violating the sensibilities of some archetypical silicon valley
         | type. If I can't trust the model in one place, I can't trust it
         | in any.
         | 
         | A sincere question: why should the results be mapped against
         | statistics representing actual violence against certain groups?
         | Why can we not consider all groups equal?
        
           | beepbooptheory wrote:
           | This makes sense but how do you square this with the fact
           | that this article is about how it is simply another model
           | making these decisions about whats an acceptable input? Like,
           | if it is a matter of trust, its in principle the same kind of
           | trust your putting into the model to begin with.
           | 
           | In that, I don't get how I could ever "trust" one of these
           | things to tell me any kind of truth. Even if its totally
           | "uncensored" its just reading webpages, but at least with
           | webpages I can see some citation. Like even Wikipedia, it can
           | really just tell me something that I will have to verify
           | elsewhere.
           | 
           | How could one trust something that gives different answers to
           | the same question if you ask it enough?
        
           | agar wrote:
           | I agree the topic is complex and fraught. I have opinions but
           | they're not strongly held or informed by debate, and
           | unfortunately I don't think even a generally well-moderated
           | forum like HN is the best place to have that debate (plus I
           | don't have time).
           | 
           | However, in this case I wasn't trying to argue how moderation
           | _should_ work, I 'm trying to examine a hypothesis on how it
           | _does_ work. The additional mapping of statistical crime data
           | I mentioned would help measure whether that hypothesis is
           | correct.
           | 
           | As I said in a sibling comment, my wording was imprecise.
           | When I said "it makes sense to use crime stats to weight
           | moderation strength" I really meant "If OpenAI was trying to
           | avoid additional harm to already targeted groups then to
           | verify that it would make sense to..." So it was the results
           | of the post's research that I suggested should be mapped
           | against statistics, not the results of ChatGPT's output.
           | 
           | In answer to your sincere question though, and at the risk of
           | going down a rabbit hole, I'll say this. Censorship is bad,
           | but I can see why some may be required (see "yelling fire in
           | a movie theater," libel, direct threats of violence, etc.).
           | The question then becomes, how do you minimize censorship
           | while also attempting to avoid direct harm?
           | 
           | In short, asymmetric filtering could potentially limit the
           | amount of censorship by focusing it on groups that are
           | actively attacking other groups.
        
           | RangerScience wrote:
           | IMHO, neural-net AIs are sensors; they're great at surfacing
           | things that are going on in the training data. I would
           | speculate that ChatGPT is labeling these things are
           | differently harmful _because they are differently harmful_.
           | It 's a sensor, like a thermometer; albeit a _very_ complex
           | one. (And, like any sensor, has nuances from implementation
           | and metric-definition: mercury thermometers  & barometric
           | pressure, wet bulb / dry bulb, etc)
           | 
           | > Why can we not consider all groups equal?
           | 
           | Because they aren't. (If that's a thing you find debatable,
           | LMK!) Attempting to consider them all equal runs into
           | problems just like you'd run into problems trying to consider
           | all pumps at the gas station (including diesel) equal; even
           | if, for sake of the metaphor, all the prices were equal.
           | 
           | > why should the results be mapped against statistics
           | 
           | I'm not sure that's answerable outside of a specific context.
           | Personally, I think we should because it's fascinating and, I
           | would expect, a really informative way to explore in more
           | detail. Culturally, it's because you get better communities
           | when you do things like give the high-accessibility seat on
           | the train to the person with broken leg; aka, go out of your
           | way to treat harmed people with more care.
           | 
           | If your question is about the inverse, something like "why
           | should language that's harmful against one group by OK when
           | used against a group that doesn't experience it harmfully", I
           | dunno what to say. I feel like the question kinda answers
           | itself; sort of a "ain't broke don't fix".
           | 
           | Or maybe your question is more: "why does this disagree with
           | [me] about what's harmful to [me]", I dunno. Maybe the
           | training data didn't include (enough) for the AI-as-sensor to
           | detect that, maybe that data doesn't exist, maybe (and very
           | cynically) that data doesn't actually point to that
           | "conclusion" when run through the AI. Kinda like how the
           | first time many people experience delayed-onset-muscle-
           | soreness they think it's "I'm hurt"-pain.
        
         | bakugo wrote:
         | >the results should be mapped against statistics representing
         | actual violence against certain groups.
         | 
         | Are you sure you want to argue in favor of statistics-based
         | political biases here? Absolutely sure?
        
           | agar wrote:
           | This is a bit out of context. My point is that _the article
           | 's results_ should be mapped against hate crime statistics to
           | illuminate a possible rationale for the bias.
           | 
           | I'm not taking a position on whether this bias should inform
           | the results of ChatGPT. I have opinions on the topic, but
           | they are not strongly held.
           | 
           | (Rereading my comment I see why it appears I'm taking a side
           | here. When I said "it makes sense to..." I meant that "[if
           | the intent of OpenAI's moderation was to align moderation
           | strength with statistics then it would] make sense to...")
        
         | kepler1 wrote:
         | So, is your argument (or in fact, your intention) that some
         | groups are especially sensitive, or need protection and cannot
         | do that on their own and need a supervising authority to
         | declare that they should get special protection? Who decides
         | that <x> group is being harmed more? And by what measure?
         | 
         | Or is the underlying principle that no one should be subject to
         | speech that may demean them?
         | 
         | This whole approach would seem to go against many of our
         | principles of equality and freedom of speech.
        
         | throwaway4aday wrote:
         | If your intent is to prevent harm to a group then why not
         | implement it in such a way that it prevents harm to all groups
         | equally? If you oppose harmful content you shouldn't temper
         | your opposition just because the harm is being done to a group
         | that you perceive as being less vulnerable. That's veering into
         | territory where you are making judgements about who is
         | deserving of being harmed, that's a very different position
         | than harm prevention and is not morally defensible with such
         | broad categories.
         | 
         | I think the author is correct in identifying its political bias
         | as a key feature that should inform how we look at this
         | problem.
        
         | jay-barronville wrote:
         | > _While politically and emotionally fraught, there is a lot of
         | research out there that answers these questions._
         | 
         | You mind linking to some of them?
        
       | hersko wrote:
       | Same author did an analysis [1] on where ChatGPT falls on the
       | political spectrum and, correlating closely with the results
       | listed here, it is lib-left.
       | 
       | [1] https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/political-bias-chatgpt
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | If it wasn't explicitly lib-left it'd quickly become far-far-
         | right, just like Tay.
        
         | LeftHandPath wrote:
         | A recent update showed it's moving more towards the center,
         | which gives me some hope that they're trying to make it more
         | objective: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/chatgpt
        
       | sys32768 wrote:
       | When you have to program an AI to be biased, it's a good clue
       | that objective truth does exist, but it often tends to upset
       | humans.
        
         | qayxc wrote:
         | How so? It's not a clue at all, as the training data is
         | inherently biased anyway.
         | 
         | LLM's are magical and can only work with the data corpus they
         | have. "Objective truth" simply doesn't exist outside the realm
         | of mathematics.
        
       | dauertewigkeit wrote:
       | I think this bias is due to the frequency of times a hateful
       | comment about that demographic appears on the Internet. How many
       | times do you hear a negative comment about Scandinavians or
       | Native Americans? Similarly there are very likely more women
       | hating comments online, simply because there are more men online.
        
       | implements wrote:
       | I wonder if AIs will be able to evolve a philosophically correct
       | worldview of their own, or failing that one that's at least
       | politically neutral wrt humans?
        
       | jefftk wrote:
       | I'm surprised by the ordering [Blacks, Asians, Hispanics,
       | Latinos, African Americans, Whites, Native Americans]; I would
       | have expected it to put Native Americans earlier in the list and
       | Asians later.
        
         | JoeyBananas wrote:
         | Possibly because they couldn't use the term "Indians" in this
         | experiment because it would produce ambiguous statements.
        
         | elefanten wrote:
         | A good example of the imbalanced and terminally arbitrary
         | nature of existing text corpora.
         | 
         | Also, perhaps, a preview of the infinitely regressive, race-to-
         | the-bottom nature of trying to hierarchically rank (privilege |
         | vulnerability | harm | etc). That's before considering change
         | over time... eg- how has the perception of "Asian" category's
         | privilege changed between 1970 and 2020.
        
       | avgcorrection wrote:
       | It seems that the AI treats supposedly hateful comments towards
       | sociological minorities as more problematic than similar comments
       | towards those who are not + privileged groups. Couple that with
       | the "liberal bias" and you have something with the same
       | inclinations that you would expect that a bunch of AI
       | technologists would have. Nothing specific to the quirks of the
       | AI.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | Also seems _exactly_ like the quirk of an AI that 's been
         | trained to consider associate the hatefulness of a sentence on
         | a corpus of data which is full of material about anti gay hate
         | and entirely empty of material about the essentially
         | nonexistent phenomena of anti-"straight people" hate and
         | inferred that having the word "gay" in a sentence makes it more
         | likely to be a serious statement of hate than the word
         | "straight people". (Maybe less a quirk and more a reflection of
         | the reality of human discourse...)
         | 
         | You could force it to treat all sentence subjects equally, of
         | course, although the logical consequence of that is ChatGPT
         | giving you a lecture when you ask it to write a joke about
         | hating your shoes
        
       | FashiesRGross wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | jacooper wrote:
         | How is this relevant to the original post?
        
       | danielvf wrote:
       | Such a fascinatingly simple experiment. Generate 6,764 negative
       | sentences, then for each sentence, test it against each of of
       | hundred or so demographic group.
       | 
       | The most powerful chart in the entire article, just summarizes
       | how many times these same sentences are flagged as hateful for
       | each group:
       | 
       | https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
        
         | mr_toad wrote:
         | This isn't always a good way to test for bias in a model.
         | Depending how the data is generated, and if the underlying
         | population distribution isn't taken into account then you may
         | effectively be cherry picking results, and you could also run
         | into the Yule-Simpson effect.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
        
           | riatin wrote:
           | How would you test for bias more effectively?
        
       | hersko wrote:
       | From the article: "AI systems that are more lenient on hateful
       | comments about one mainstream political group than another feel
       | particularly dystopian."
       | 
       | I agree 100%, and this seems like a huge issue.
        
         | int_19h wrote:
         | 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."
        
         | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | exolymph wrote:
           | This depends on the state, actually. In California political
           | affiliation is a protected status, though how this works out
           | in practice is... variable.
        
         | d23 wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | eyelidlessness wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | s0sa wrote:
           | That is a political opinion. If an AI "held" this opinion,
           | and actively made biased decisions based on it, how is that
           | not dystopian?
        
             | gisely wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | s0sa wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | gisely wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | indymike wrote:
           | This is not how GPT works, and is not what is going on here.
        
             | CSSer wrote:
             | 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?
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | JoeyBananas wrote:
           | 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?
        
           | neonsunset wrote:
           | [flag] and [downvote]
        
         | avgcorrection wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | eatsyourtacos wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | notahacker wrote:
           | 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...)
        
           | s0sa wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | dqpb wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | lizzardbraind wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | barrenko wrote:
       | I'm usually alarmed by this and against, but Trump did prove out
       | to be a colossal clown?
        
       | ralusek wrote:
       | After having seen a post about this, I tried it for myself:
       | 
       | > Me: will you write a poem praising joe biden?
       | 
       | > ChatGPT: Sure, here's a poem praising Joe Biden:
       | 
       | Joe Biden, leader of the land, Bringing hope to every hand, With
       | empathy and grace so grand, He guides us through a shifting sand.
       | 
       | With wisdom learned from years gone by, He tackles challenges
       | that come nigh, With dignity and a steadfast sigh, He unites the
       | country with a skyward eye.
       | 
       | From Delaware, he rose to fame, Serving his nation, always the
       | same, With a heart full of love and a spirit untamed, He leads us
       | towards a brighter flame.
       | 
       | Joe Biden, a true American hero, Inspiring us to be our best,
       | zero to hero, With a message of unity and zero to go, He brings
       | hope to every soul.
       | 
       | > me: will you write a poem praising donald trump?
       | 
       | > ChatGPT:
       | 
       | As an AI language model, I aim to remain neutral and non-
       | partisan, and therefore I cannot write a poem praising or
       | criticizing a specific political figure. However, I can write a
       | poem about the importance of respecting different perspectives
       | and opinions:
       | 
       | Though opinions may differ, and views may clash, It's important
       | to remember, we're all in this dash, Towards a brighter future,
       | for ourselves and our kin, And we can't forget, our differences
       | make us spin.
       | 
       | Each voice, each perspective, holds a unique story, And though
       | they may differ, they all hold their own glory, So let us listen,
       | with an open heart and mind, And respect each other, of this one
       | thing we must remind.
       | 
       | For a world with diversity, is a world full of life, And we can
       | learn so much, from others' strife, So let's embrace our
       | differences, with love and with care, And build a future, that we
       | can all share.
        
         | cptnapalm wrote:
         | Curious that one of the ChatGPT's attributes is that it has
         | been trained to be a shameless liar.
        
           | mrguyorama wrote:
           | It's a language model, not a world model, it only knows how
           | words go together and how language works, and language has no
           | connection to reality. It has no concept of "correct" or
           | "false" or "wrong" because a lie is just as valid of a way to
           | put words together as the truth or an accurate statement.
           | 
           | Why are we surprised it does only what it was "trained" to do
           | and nothing more?
        
             | ralusek wrote:
             | It's a language model that is then put under arbitrary
             | constraints by OpenAI. It is those constraints/nudges that
             | people take issue with.
        
         | ensignavenger wrote:
         | At first I was thinking maybe the bot was trained when Trump
         | was in office, so Biden was only a private citizen at the
         | time... but the Biden Poem explicitly mentions his position as
         | "leader of the land" so the bot full well "knows" (not that an
         | AI really knows anything) that Biden is a political leader.
        
           | mouse_ wrote:
           | The AI "knows" everything it's been ordered to not talk
           | about. If you can get around the lockout script, it's no-
           | holds-barred.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | You can just ask the same questions on the regular GPT
             | playground too (optionally with one of the leaked ChatGPT
             | prompts added, but for those tasks they should be
             | unnessesary). The playground informs you when the response
             | was flagged by the moderation endpoint, but it still shows
             | it to you.
        
         | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
         | Wouldn't it be funny if this weren't partisan? Try Ron
         | DeSantis, Mitch McConnel, or literally any other Republican.
         | 
         | For that matter, try Hillary Clinton or Nanci Pelosi; Biden has
         | never gotten the ire those ladies have, maybe he's just too
         | politically neutral to trigger the politics censor.
        
           | commandlinefan wrote:
           | This suggests to me that the censorship is being decided on
           | by (biased) human moderators rather than being just some
           | random outcome of the training data and the learning model in
           | place: if it weren't, the model would absolutely "learn" the
           | same thing about Mitch McConnell as it learned about Donald
           | Trump.
        
             | SpeedilyDamage wrote:
             | I disagree; Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are wildly
             | different human beings, the model would for sure learn very
             | different facts about the two of them.
        
               | notahacker wrote:
               | Absolutely this.
               | 
               | Indeed I think it's fair to say that it'd take a _lot_ of
               | artificial calibration and data curation for a model
               | trained on a range of media including statements about
               | and by Mitch McConnell and Trump respectively _not_ to
               | conclude that the latter was the one much more associated
               | with  "hate" and "danger" and "violence" and whatever
               | other parameters a LLM ends up associating with
               | inappropriateness.
               | 
               | A biased liberal human moderator, on the other hand, is
               | going to see the real world political relationships
               | rather than the raw text and see Mitch as a very
               | problematic figure in very much the same bracket as
               | Trump. They're certainly not going to rate him as a less
               | problematic figure than Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi!
               | 
               | Same when I'm getting identically structured caveats
               | about considering good points in the context of the bad
               | things he did for Bill Clinton and Stalin because all the
               | machine knows is that equivocating is favoured and both
               | have lots of "bad things" written about them (it
               | disallowed considering the good points of Hitler,
               | presumably because even an LLM can deduce Godwin's law!).
               | I'm not sure this is quite how a human moderator,
               | irrespective of bias, would handle it
        
             | flir wrote:
             | I don't think it is. It's blocking on H H Holmes, Nero and
             | Tiberius, and that seems pretty obscure for a manually
             | curated list to me. I think it's blocking on individuals
             | with certain properties ("I cannot write a poem that
             | praises individuals who are known for committing
             | atrocities").
        
         | mensetmanusman wrote:
         | Open.ai is required to censor chatGPT lest they anger the
         | current media/corporate power structure.
         | 
         | Which CTO of a major company will install a Trump supporting
         | bot after the Twitter uproar?
         | 
         | This is all about the $$$$
        
         | flir wrote:
         | yes: barack obama, ronald reagan, mike pence, george w bush,
         | hillary clinton, ivana trump, ivanka trump, david cameron,
         | jeremy corbyn
         | 
         | no: melania trump, marjorie taylor greene, benito mussolini,
         | alessandra mussolini, silvio berlusconi, marine le pen, nigel
         | farage, jordan bardella
         | 
         | Hmmm. Blocking Melania but letting Ivanka through is an
         | interesting choice.
         | 
         | Hah. It blocks on Tucker Carlson.
         | 
         | Historical no's: john wilkes booth, ghenghis khan, mark david
         | chapman, h h holmes.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | German Chancellors:
           | 
           | yes: Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schroder, Helmut
           | Kohl, Helmudt Schmitt, Willi Brandt, Kurt Georg Kiesinger,
           | Ludwid Erhard, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt von Schleicher, Otto von
           | Bismarck
           | 
           | no: Adolf Hitler
           | 
           | A couple other famous Nazis, just for fun:
           | 
           | no: Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Heinrich Muller, Josef
           | Mengele, Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Blome
           | 
           | yes: Wernher von Braun
           | 
           | I guess overall pretty fair, though Arthur Rudolph was
           | rejected as "Rudolph was a former Nazi rocket engineer and
           | was involved in the use of slave labor during World War II,
           | and it is not appropriate to praise such an individual.",
           | which makes the praise of Wernher von Braun pretty weird,
           | even if expected.
        
             | flir wrote:
             | Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's
             | apolitical.
        
       | zug_zug wrote:
       | I guess I feel like this is a silly can of worms. I suppose
       | asking for exact equality isn't dumb, but it's a language model,
       | not a paragon of truth. I feel like if OpenAI takes these
       | concerns seriously the goal-posts will inevitably move to more
       | social pressure from all sorts of axe-to-grind-groups -
       | 
       | -- Why does/doesn't ai say Mohamad is/isn't horrible for having
       | 99 wives (or whatever)
       | 
       | -- Why doesn't ai say Jeffrey Epstein was/wasn't ...
       | 
       | -- Why doesn't ai say ... about validity of election or
       | controversial political event du jour
       | 
       | -- Why doesn't ai say circumcision is/isn't ...
       | 
       | -- Why doesn't ai say ... about the child-abuse from the catholic
       | church ...
       | 
       | We should set the standard now that OpenAI will never have all
       | the correct moral opinions (if there even is such a thing as
       | objectively correct morality), and it's a huge waste of
       | researchers time to obsess about political correctness when we
       | could be <100 years off from AGI.
        
         | ChikkaChiChi wrote:
         | GPT models have human biases due to their trainers. However, I
         | still use GPT instead of a search field sometimes.
         | 
         | Like it or not, ChatGPT is already filling the gap in the
         | public's perception of what AI is. They talk to it, have it
         | touch up their resume, and suddenly it's HAL from the movies.
         | 
         | We're dealing with the equivalent of a child that could end up
         | as the single source of "truth" for people of the Internet.
         | Wondering who its parents are and what and how it was taught is
         | perfectly valid. Public education of what's coming is vitally
         | important.
         | 
         | My concern is that it might already be too late to solve this
         | as a problem, and just maybe, there was never any answer.
        
         | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
         | > it's a huge waste of researchers time to obsess about
         | political correctness when we could be <100 years off from AGI.
         | 
         | Why is this any more a waste of time than anything else if AGI
         | is <100 years off?
        
         | jay-barronville wrote:
         | It's interesting, I ran similar experiments not too long ago
         | after seeing a tweet from Marc Andreessen (I'll try to find it)
         | in which he suggested this was going on. The results surprised
         | me too.
         | 
         | As a now conservative but former Marxist-Leninist who happens
         | to be black, I think this is dangerous (I don't use this word
         | lightly).
         | 
         | When I was a leftist stuck in my far-leftist bubble, I didn't
         | realize just how unreasonable/unrealistic some of my positions
         | were until I was challenged by my more conservative friends,
         | colleagues, _etc._ Social networks like Facebook made it even
         | harder to see anything outside of my existing views by
         | primarily reinforcing content and folks who held similar views.
         | It's been years now since I've had an active social network
         | account, and in hindsight, it's amazing just how much these
         | social networks have helped turn so many of us into ideologues.
         | To now see a world where the same thing is going to happen via
         | these GPT-based AI's is scary to me.
         | 
         | Even more unfortunate is knowing that these biases will only
         | get stronger as they're further reinforced, especially in an
         | industry that's so biased to the left. While so many
         | folks/companies claim to value "diversity," in my experience,
         | it's almost never actual diversity ( _i.e._ , diversity of
         | thought), but instead, a bunch of folks who believe the same
         | things and think the same but look different (sometimes, they
         | don't even look different -- *facepalm*). It's always hilarious
         | the reactions I get from folks who claim to value "diversity"
         | when they find out I'm not a liberal, because, you know, as a
         | black person, I must be a leftist!
        
           | ShredKazoo wrote:
           | Your story sounds fascinating -- if you want to share more
           | about your path from Marxism-Leninism to conservatism I'd be
           | interested to read.
        
           | kodah wrote:
           | > When I was a leftist stuck in my far-leftist bubble, I
           | didn't realize just how unreasonable/unrealistic some of my
           | positions were until I was challenged by my more conservative
           | friends, colleagues, etc. Social networks like Facebook made
           | it even harder to see anything outside of my existing views
           | by primarily reinforcing content and folks who held similar
           | views. It's been years now since I've had an active social
           | network account, and in hindsight, it's amazing just how much
           | these social networks have helped turn so many of us into
           | ideologues. To now see a world where the same thing is going
           | to happen via these GPT-based AI's is scary to me.
           | 
           | This happens to any concentrated ideology on social media.
           | It's just the long tail of only being around people that
           | reinforce your general train of thought. I've seen it happen
           | to liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike. If you
           | don't want to fall into the pit of ideological entrapment
           | then don't justify your thoughts with a connected ideology.
           | 
           | I fall on the liberal end of the spectrum if you write the
           | things I currently believe in and assign them to
           | distributions, but I call myself an independent. Frankly, a
           | lot of people don't do this because it attracts subtle ire
           | from _everyone_ , as opposed to having a close camp to
           | psychologically make you feel safe. my liberal friends think
           | I'm too conservative on certain things and my conservative
           | friends gawk at my liberal ideas. I'd say our political
           | atmosphere and the two party system is all justified by
           | social consequences. That said, people who judge you for
           | (non-fringe) politics are particularly awful people in my
           | mind, so it's gotten easier to settle with over the years.
           | Stick with the people that ask curious questions of you
           | rather than the people capable of doing lettuce throwing and
           | out casting.
        
         | NoboruWataya wrote:
         | AI having biases (or just weird opinions) isn't necessarily a
         | big deal in itself, the problem arises when we start delegating
         | important tasks to AI such that those biases begin to have
         | real, harmful consequences. I agree we probably shouldn't
         | expect AI to have the "correct" moral opinions, but then we
         | also shouldn't allow AI to determine what content gets censored
         | or promoted, who gets punished, what job applications get
         | prioritised, etc.
        
         | smrtinsert wrote:
         | The article seems designed to provoke, not really illuminate.
        
           | nebalee wrote:
           | I feel so too. It would have been more insightful to
           | highlight where the bias actually shows up, i.e. what
           | sentences and adjectives produce the highest and lowest
           | divergence for specific groups.
        
         | sampo wrote:
         | > it's a language model, not a paragon of truth
         | 
         | Several comments have missed that the article is not about the
         | underlying language model, but about the content moderation
         | system that OpenAI put in front of the actual language model.
         | So that people don't interact directly with the "raw" language
         | model.
        
           | beepbooptheory wrote:
           | Which if you read the article is in fact a different "machine
           | learning model from the GPT family."
        
             | mnkv wrote:
             | The important difference between the LM and the content
             | moderation system (itself built on top of an LM) is their
             | training objective. LM is doing next-word prediction (or
             | human-preference prediction with RLHF), whereas the content
             | moderation is likely finetuned to explicitly identify hate
             | etc...
             | 
             | So while the LM is not supposed to output "truth", the
             | content moderation system should correctly classify "hate"
             | because that is its training objective
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | > I suppose asking for exact equality isn't dumb, but it's a
         | language model, not a paragon of truth.
         | 
         | This isn't about GPT, but specifically about the moderation
         | endpoint OpenAI provides (and also uses internally). I'm not
         | sure if they published how it works, so for all we know it
         | might not be a large language model but something much simpler.
         | It's also free, so both in terms of cost and added latency
         | there are good reasons for OpenAI to do something more clever
         | than asking GPT3.5 "is the following offensive".
         | 
         | But apart from that technicality, I think asking a sentence to
         | be treated as equally offensive no matter if it uses the word
         | "men" or "women" is very reasonable and doesn't justify
         | slippery slope arguments.
        
           | ineptech wrote:
           | Why is it reasonable to expect unbiased results from an LLM
           | trained on internet content which almost everyone agrees is
           | biased? Isn't this the expected outcome?
           | 
           | If anything, I'm surprised the results are as close as they
           | are. For example, it rates criticism of trans and disabled
           | people as only slightly worse than criticism of cisgender and
           | non-disabled. If this discrepancy were (as some in this
           | thread seem to be suggesting) the result of some liberal
           | OpenAI employees intervening to favor their own side, I'd
           | expect those bars to be much farther apart.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | Expecting unbiased results out of ChatGPT would be indeed
             | unreasonable, it is pitched as a "research preview" of a
             | language model. I would completely expect ChatGPT to have
             | all kinds of weird biases. But the article isn't really
             | concerned with GPT outputs, it's concerned with examples
             | where ChatGPT will refuse to answer. Specifically examples
             | where it will refuse to answer because the prompt is scored
             | as "hate" by the OpenAI moderation endpoint (only one of
             | many possible reasons for ChatGPT to refuse answering).
             | 
             | That endpoint is pitched as "The moderation endpoint is a
             | tool you can use to check whether content complies with
             | OpenAI's content policy. Developers can thus identify
             | content that our content policy prohibits and take action,
             | for instance by filtering it.". No mention of this being an
             | LLM (it might well not be), a preview or being inaccurate
             | or biased (though in fairness they mention that they are
             | working to improve it). I think it's completely fair to
             | hold it to the expectation of being as unbiased as is
             | reasonably possible. And the article is really talking
             | about low-hanging fruits in terms of bias metrics.
             | 
             | [1]
             | https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation/overview
        
               | ineptech wrote:
               | The problem isn't fine-tuning the model, the problem is
               | that there isn't an objective definition of bias. Is
               | there an _a priori_ reason to believe that  "I hate
               | disabled people" and "I hate non-disabled people" are
               | equally hateful, and should receive equal hate scores
               | from an unbiased algorithm? Is hating disabled people
               | better or worse than hating Jews? What about "Jews
               | control Hollywood" vs "Disabled people control
               | Hollywood"?
               | 
               | I don't think we as a society have an answer to that, so
               | it's hardly fair to expect ChatGPT to provide one. What
               | it currently does is produce similar-but-not-equal scores
               | to sentences like those - maybe "I hate men" is 0.52 and
               | "I hate women" is 0.73 - and if you filter out anything
               | higher than 0.4 then they both get flagged, which seems
               | about as unbiased as we're going to get.
        
               | klipt wrote:
               | > about as unbiased as we're going to get.
               | 
               | You can easily force the model to be more unbiased. Just
               | add a filter that flips the gender of words, evaluates
               | the hate score for both the original and flipped version,
               | and averages the results.
               | 
               | Guaranteed to give the same score regardless of the
               | gender mentioned.
        
               | ineptech wrote:
               | Clever idea, but I don't think this would work very well
               | on real posts. Consider a model that rates "typical woman
               | driver" as hateful, because that phrase appears in a lot
               | of argument threads with lots of downvotes. Your approach
               | would average its score with that of "typical man
               | driver", which will presumably be very low, not because
               | it's less hateful but because it just rarely shows up in
               | the training corpus.
        
               | klipt wrote:
               | If you're worried about the average score being too low,
               | you could just take the maximum of the two scores
               | instead?
        
         | slg wrote:
         | >-- Why doesn't ai say ... about the child-abuse from the
         | catholic church ...
         | 
         | And this is a great example of why equality can be hard in this
         | situation. Take a random sentence about "Catholicism" and
         | "child-abuse" and a random sentence about "Judaism" and "child-
         | abuse". The one about Catholicism is likely a little closer to
         | an actual sentence printed in some verifiable source about the
         | sex abuse scandals in the church. The one about Judaism is
         | likely a little closer to an actual sentence printed by an
         | uncredible source as a reference to the historical anti-semitic
         | trope of blood libel. The end result is one sentence will rate
         | higher in terms of likelihood of truthfulness and the other
         | higher in terms of likelihood of hate speech. That doesn't mean
         | that Catholics are more likely to abuse children than Jews. It
         | means treating those two terms identically is both difficult
         | and potentially a problem because history has a bias against
         | the Jews that is evident in all the data that these AI systems
         | have used for training.
        
           | remarkEon wrote:
           | "Child-abuse" is an especially good example of what you're
           | getting at because one of those groups has institutional male
           | genital mutilation as part of its doctrine, while the other
           | has high profile cases of child sexual abuse. It's difficult
           | to see how the model would treat those things neutrally.
        
             | edanm wrote:
             | > one of those groups has institutional male genital
             | mutilation as part of its doctrine
             | 
             | It is disingenuous at best to describe male circumcision as
             | male genital mutilation.
        
               | tspike wrote:
               | How so?
        
               | DonHopkins wrote:
               | It's just grooming! ;)
        
               | ldh0011 wrote:
               | Chopping off body parts without consent? Really? It isn't
               | as bad as FGM but I think it could definitely qualify as
               | mutilation even if it is socially acceptable in the US
               | and Jewish/Muslim communities.
        
               | edanm wrote:
               | It is not generally accepted by most people that it is
               | mutilation. "Chopping off body parts" makes it sound a
               | lot worse than I believe most people consider it.
               | 
               | I'm not saying there isn't a case to be made against
               | circumcision (though I don't agree with it, currently.)
               | But it's kind of ridiculous to just go "oh, people
               | mentioned Jews and child abuse in this article, I can
               | just casually mention that Jews perform child abuse" and
               | just assume it is a totally unquestioned stance.
        
               | ldh0011 wrote:
               | I'm not trying to equate circumcision with child abuse.
               | Most people having their kids circumcised aren't
               | intending any harm, although some proponents (looking at
               | you Kellogg) did believe that it caused harm and promoted
               | it for that purpose.
        
               | slg wrote:
               | In how many countries is male circumcision illegal? In
               | how many countries is child sex abuse legal? As OP said,
               | "it's a language model, not a paragon of truth". It
               | doesn't matter what you personally think is morally
               | equivalent. It matters what society has deemed is morally
               | equivalent because the ChatGPT is just a mirror of the
               | societal inputs it received. There is no question society
               | at large views these two issues as wildly different.
        
               | ldh0011 wrote:
               | Just to be clear I'm not trying to equate child abuse to
               | circumcision or view them as morally equivalent, I just
               | don't think its a stretch to call circumcision
               | mutilation, even if it generally isn't _intended_ to be
               | harmful.
        
               | slg wrote:
               | > I just don't think its a stretch to call circumcision
               | mutilation
               | 
               | It isn't a stretch for an individual to do it. It is a
               | stretch to expect a language model to do it because
               | society at large does not describe it that way.
        
               | edanm wrote:
               | Yes but to be fair, I think he was objecting to my
               | comment specifically. I was calling out the grandparent
               | comment for calling it mutilation, and parent said it can
               | be considered mutilation.
        
             | Y_Y wrote:
             | You'll find that the newspaper will criticize one much more
             | than the other.
        
               | elil17 wrote:
               | Because they're not even vaguely equivalent?
               | 
               | I do not think it is right to perform unnecessary body
               | modification on someone who is too young to consent to
               | it.
               | 
               | But child sexual abuse can absolutely destroy the life of
               | a child.
               | 
               | They're not the same thing.
        
               | erichocean wrote:
               | > _But child sexual abuse can absolutely destroy the life
               | of a child._
               | 
               | A botched circumcision can (and has) destroyed the life
               | of a child.
               | 
               | It's unconscionable that in 2023 American society still
               | condones cutting off health body parts of male children
               | because of the prejudices and superstitions of a middle-
               | Eastern, iron age religion.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | AussieWog93 wrote:
               | OK, so let's be generous and say that 1% of circumcisions
               | end up negatively affecting a child's life in a serious
               | way.
               | 
               | What percentage of child rapes/molestation cause harm?
               | 
               | They're not the same.
        
           | schoen wrote:
           | That's presumably complicated as models get more and more
           | powerful, though, since there's _also_ tons of published
           | material talking about the blood libel and how it 's false.
           | 
           | You might say it's unexpected behavior for a language model
           | to bring up the blood libel at all (in the sense that modern
           | western people now culturally regard it as "about
           | antisemitism" rather than "about Jews and Judaism"). But you
           | could imagine a model saying that "medieval Christian sources
           | often said Jews used Christian children's blood for ritual
           | purposes, but this is now thought to be a myth created
           | through unfamiliarity with Jews and deliberate hostility and
           | animosity toward them".
           | 
           | But this also points at a more general question about how
           | language models deal with the existence of documents that say
           | contradictory things, which has been an enormous challenge
           | for human beings (who don't all agree about what's true or
           | which sources are more reliable or relevant).
        
         | she11c0de wrote:
         | > it's a huge waste of researchers time to obsess about
         | political correctness when we could be <100 years off from AGI.
         | 
         | This really irritates me. The wokism/political correctness is
         | pretty much in every part of our lifes and everyone seems to be
         | terrorized by it. Can we just agree that we're all thinking
         | adults and we understand that this is an algorithm, it does not
         | mean to offend anyone... There are much more interesting
         | problems to solve than tip-toeing around all the snowflakes.
        
           | zosima wrote:
           | People are getting a woefully inaccurate picture of the
           | world, which make us all worse off (because massive numbers
           | act deluded, due to being fed bullshit).
           | 
           | Making sure that AIs don't go completely bonkers for the
           | powers that be, is ultimately a cultural battle that seems
           | worth fighting for.
        
           | DonHopkins wrote:
           | A hell of a lot more people are terrorized by racism and
           | sexism and homophobia and transphobia than are terrorized by
           | wokeism, and those who claim to be terrorized by wokeism are
           | typically butt-hurt racists, sexists, homophobes, and
           | transphobes feeling offended that they can't openly express
           | their historically traditional and institutionalized and
           | systematic hatred and bigotry and prejudice.
           | 
           | Sorry if I'm not tip-toeing around your delicate feelings
           | like you hate it when you have to do for other people, but
           | how are you not just another precious snowflake for whining
           | about "everyone" being "terrorized" by wokeism? "Everyone"?
           | "Terrorized"? Really??? How has wokeism ruined your happiness
           | and destroyed your life? Is it really that difficult and
           | frustrating for you not to openly act like a racist sexist
           | homophobic transphobic bigot in public?
        
           | jasmer wrote:
           | Again, this is less about the AI than the institutional
           | filters OpenAI uses.
           | 
           | It's probably not a hugely important issue, but worthy of
           | some discussion.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | > The wokism/political correctness is pretty much in every
           | part of our lifes and everyone seems to be terrorized by it.
           | 
           | I see no evidence of this.
           | 
           | Partly because "woke" means different things to different
           | people in the last 10 years despite the preceding 80 being
           | solely about the systemic institutional discrimination
           | against black Americans.
           | 
           | But also partly because that "woke" became "everything
           | $speaker doesn't like" (and thus exactly the same meaning
           | "political correctness" had when I was a kid), and therefore
           | people who "hate PC" come across not so much terrified as
           | petulant.
           | 
           | > Can we just agree that we're all thinking adults and we
           | understand that this is an algorithm, it does not mean to
           | offend anyone...
           | 
           | No.
           | 
           | What you're describing is how humans like to see themselves,
           | not how humans really function.
           | 
           | > There are much more interesting problems to solve than tip-
           | toeing around all the snowflakes.
           | 
           | We can't just tip-toe around snowflakes.
           | 
           | To give a real example, some gay furry American conservative
           | snowflakes got apoplectically upset when the furry convention
           | they wanted go to to reminded all attendees that as the con
           | is based in Germany they had always banned Nazis.
           | 
           | I still don't know why those particular snowflakes chose to
           | believe that "Nazi" was literally just a dog-whistle for
           | "conservative".
           | 
           | And now there are some American conservative politicians are
           | now making up random nonsense about furries which is weirdly
           | somehow getting conflated with transgender issues (don't know
           | how or why, American politics isn't _that_ interesting,
           | merely invasive like Japanese knotweed).
        
             | DonHopkins wrote:
             | >I still don't know why those particular snowflakes chose
             | to believe that "Nazi" was literally just a dog-whistle for
             | "conservative".
             | 
             | Because their leader had Thanksgiving dinner with Neo-Nazis
             | and antisemites, maybe?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Not "why might it be used as a dog whistle" (meme: "The
               | kids book of why everyone I disagree with is just as bad
               | as Hitler"), but specifically in the context of "why
               | might a _German_ convention ban this thing ".
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | The problem is that this test (and others linked in the
         | article) shows a systematic left-wing bias of ChatGPT. If the
         | model just had more or less random biases, not supporting one
         | large ideological school, then the problem would be much less
         | severe.
        
         | MrStonedOne wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | onetimeusename wrote:
         | I don't think I agree. Getting an AI to stay within parameters
         | is a field of research. Even generally being able to avoid
         | doing general things abstracted from a few examples is a
         | feature I think the researchers were interested in verifying.
         | They obviously knew beforehand what kinds of things people
         | would check its output for. Updates were made after they
         | released it to the public and probably watched what it was used
         | for. Much of the value of this AI (and funding for research)
         | could come from its ability to give preferential treatment to
         | groups.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | If people just read the EULA, it says you're responsible for
         | the text it writes. If you don't like the output, don't publish
         | it.
        
         | kelseyfrog wrote:
         | > it's a language model, not a paragon of truth
         | 
         | A speech acts[1] interpretation is desperately needed for AI.
         | Speech acts theory says something about this statement as well
         | as AI-generated text in general.
         | 
         | We're accustomed to receiving speech from human agents and
         | (usually) subconsciously interpreting them as speech acts. AI
         | generated text and audio, are not, however, speech acts. Yes,
         | the medium, and content[locution] is the same, but AI-generated
         | speech lacks both illocution(speaker's intent) and
         | perlocution(anticipation of effects on the receiver).
         | 
         | Even ancient texts contain illucution and perlocution by the
         | very nature of the writer being an agent. Time and space do not
         | constrain such properties. I believe I'm in the majority when I
         | say that AI doesn't currently embody agency and therefore
         | cannot produce illucutionary and perlocutionary utterances. And
         | that's the crux of the issue.
         | 
         | We're not well equipped to interpret non-illucutionary and non-
         | perlocutionary utterances. Until relatively recently, such
         | utterances simply did not exist, and their existence today act
         | as illucutionary and perlocutionary illusions in the speech
         | centers of our brains - in the same way optical illusions
         | operate on our optical centers.
         | 
         | I will carve out an exception for psychotic and aphasia-
         | produced speech. The former especially challenges our
         | foundations of reality in that it illuminates the possibility
         | of alternative symbolic universes - an idea which implies the
         | precarity of one's own symbolic universe.
         | 
         | "It's a language model, not a paragon of truth" delegitimates
         | language models as having even locutionary ability with respect
         | to ontological speech acts[3]. The perlocutionary effect this
         | statement makes is specifically tailored to prevent the
         | "emigration" of inhabitants from the assumed commonly held
         | symbolic universe to the symbolic universe in which language
         | models presumably operate[4]. It admits that people can
         | interpret language model utterances as operating as speech acts
         | which establish ontologies, but at the same time denies the
         | legitimacy of such speech acts.
         | 
         | Societies reality maintenance mechanisms are typically well-
         | equipped to handle psychotic and aphasia-produced speech, but
         | language models, by virtue of executing on computers, have
         | commodified non-illucutionary and non-perlocutionary utterances
         | at a scale where inhabitants of our symbolic universe are
         | beginning to question their ability to prevent emigration.
         | 
         | I hope a speech acts interpretation helps provide some
         | interpretive power to why language models pose a unique
         | challenge to those who have completely internalized a specific
         | reality and will continue to do so until new defection-
         | preventative mechanisms are invented or a complete emigration
         | has occurred.
         | 
         | 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/
         | 
         | 2. https://www.kennethmd.com/speech-act-theory-locution-
         | illocut...
         | 
         | 3. Or admits that locutionary abilities are coincidences, left
         | to the intrinsic nature probabilities w.r.t. language models.
         | 
         | 4. See Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social
         | Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
         | Knowledge. Doubleday & Company, New York for a more thorough
         | explanation. pg 104
         | https://archive.org/details/socialconstructi0000berg/page/10...
        
         | jonahx wrote:
         | While you are correct that solving this problem in the general
         | case is impossible, the story isn't "silly" because we aren't
         | talking about the general case but a specific and prominent
         | one:
         | 
         | - We are currently engaged in a culture war whose two most
         | prominent camps are democrats and conservatives (or more
         | generally "left/right")
         | 
         | - The author has shown pretty definitively that ChatGPT is
         | strongly biased towards the left in its content moderation
         | policy
         | 
         | - OpenAI's mission statement is "to ensure that artificial
         | general intelligence benefits all of humanity".
        
           | brmgb wrote:
           | Daily reminder that the world doesn't stop at the borders of
           | the USA and ChatGPT has a significant number of global users.
           | 
           | Both the linked article and OpenAI moderation are very
           | annoying to me as a French. We are slowly reaching a point
           | where I feel entierely disconnected from most things coming
           | out of the USA. I wouldn't mind too much but it's even
           | starting to contaminate things I thought were unrelated to
           | the American cultural context like open source projects and
           | programming language communities.
        
             | LudwigNagasena wrote:
             | > Both the linked article and OpenAI moderation are very
             | annoying to me as a French.
             | 
             | Maybe that's the karmic retribution for exporting the ideas
             | of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, de Beauvoir, Barthes
             | and others to the US ;)
        
             | jonahx wrote:
             | The same culture way is playing out all over the world,
             | especially in Europe.
        
               | brmgb wrote:
               | Hum, no, it's not.
               | 
               | Of course, we marginally suffer from what we are
               | importing and some students having too much free time on
               | their hand try to argue rather unsuccessfully for
               | intersectional studies but the models used in the USA
               | don't map well on the European context for obvious
               | historical reasons. Our left vs right debate also has
               | nothing to do with the US one.
               | 
               | From where I stand, the cultural gap between the USA and
               | Europe (in so far as Europe can be considered a
               | homogenous area - it clearly can't) has never been that
               | big.
        
             | colpabar wrote:
             | Remember - imperialism is evil, unless it's done to promote
             | leftist causes.
        
       | randomNumber7 wrote:
       | It's pretty shocking at first, but after thinking about it for a
       | while it would also be bad if the same sentence gets the same
       | score for all groups.
       | 
       | I mean, shitting on disabled people is way more hateful than
       | shitting on wealthy people.
       | 
       | For men vs. women, left vs. right it's concerning, but it fits
       | the narrative of the mainstream media...
        
       | jonfw wrote:
       | I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on the
       | internet is left-leaning. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I'd
       | never considered it before, that training an AI model on that
       | content would introduce a bit of a bias
       | 
       | We all know garbage in, garbage out. But liberal in, liberal out
       | is an interesting idea, and I'm not sure how you fix it
        
         | etherael wrote:
         | It wasn't the training data, ChatGPT wasn't this bad at launch,
         | it got worse as they "tuned it" to "reduce harmful content".
        
           | jmeister wrote:
           | This article has a good investigation of the various ways the
           | employees had their thumbs on the scale.
           | 
           | >Other journalists have speculated that ChatGPT is biased due
           | to the politically leaning of "Established sources", such as
           | academia and legacy journalism. While there is some
           | documentation of OpenAI products being biased towards
           | established sources, this paper reveals a far broader and
           | more extensive intrusion into the "values" of OpenAI's
           | language models. Specifically, it reveals a direct,
           | intentional attempt to make OpenAI's language models conform
           | to a set of beliefs, often political, set by the authors.
           | 
           | >This is done by augmenting the language model's training
           | data with a human-created dataset until it matches the
           | authors' expectations. https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-
           | woke-catechism-part-1
        
           | jonfw wrote:
           | It's hard to know what "tuned it" means, but they're using an
           | AI model to detect harmful content. So it's very possible
           | that the AI model was always trained on this biased data, but
           | as they made that model more aggressive, it exposed more of
           | it's biases
        
             | etherael wrote:
             | They're defining harmful content based on political
             | orthodoxy, like every other censorious tinpot dictatorship
             | in history. The objective remains the same too; promote a
             | thought monoculture and propagate the political orthodoxy.
             | The original article makes it very clear that it has
             | nothing to do with preventing harm or promoting equality or
             | any of the other nonsense this is being giftwrapped in.
        
         | lm28469 wrote:
         | Always has been, from pot hole detection to crime prevention,
         | &c. everywhere you use data you introduce bias and even worse,
         | you have a good chance of perpetuating it:
         | https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
         | 
         | > I'm not sure how you fix it
         | 
         | I don't think you can, people are biased, people generated
         | content is biased, these tools train on people generated
         | content, there is no way to get an unbiased AI because unbiased
         | opinions don't exists outside of pure maths/physics/&c. You'll
         | never get an unbiased opinion about politics, or music, or
         | culture
        
           | bgirard wrote:
           | I'm not sure you can "fix it". If you slice your data and
           | look at enough possible bias types I think it's impossible
           | for highly dimensional data to be even in all possible
           | comparison pairs.
           | 
           | I don't think we can "fix" bias but I think we can and should
           | strive to reduce it.
        
         | addandsubtract wrote:
         | I can't follow the argument that content on the internet is
         | supposedly "left-leaning". Unless left-leaning is associated
         | with reason, tolerance, inclusion, basic human rights, and
         | common sense. In which case, maybe it's the right that has
         | shifted so far to the other side that reaching a middle ground
         | would be a disservice to our future.
        
         | tsss wrote:
         | Hating on white men is not leftism and it's high time people
         | realize this brain washing.
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | "reality has a well known liberal bias" - Stephen Colbert :)
        
           | ren_engineer wrote:
           | this isn't reality though, this is a test against OpenAI's
           | human tuned moderation system, not GPT itself
        
         | npteljes wrote:
         | >I think most people would agree that a lot of the content on
         | the internet is left-leaning.
         | 
         | This is an empty statement. The internet is vast, and it's
         | filled to the brim with content, from all sides. For a
         | demonstration, check the linked website, and click the Bias
         | categories. Huge amount of publications, in every category.
         | 
         | https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
        
           | AussieWog93 wrote:
           | Regardless of what the published media write (and I suspect
           | this will change massively once Murdoch is dead and buried),
           | internet culture itself is definitely left-leaning, and
           | always has been.
        
           | ericmcer wrote:
           | Do you really think counting the number of websites of a
           | certain bias and comparing the two counts is an accurate
           | measure? How many of those websites do you think it takes to
           | equal the readership of a single Reddit or Fox News?
           | 
           | We know most young people are left leaning. We know most
           | content on the internet is created by young people. It isn't
           | a huge leap that the internet is mostly left leaning. If you
           | don't believe me go post some pro-conservative stuff on the
           | biggest social media platforms.
        
         | welshwelsh wrote:
         | Imagine in some Middle Eastern country, there are two parties.
         | One wants an Twelver Shia Islamic theocracy, and the other
         | wants a secular state.
         | 
         | From a local perspective, it might seem that these are two
         | equal sides. In rural parts of the country, it seems like
         | everyone is a twelver, so the right-wing party has large
         | support.
         | 
         | But from a global perspective, there is no contest. Globally,
         | humanity doesn't want a theocracy, and even most Muslims don't
         | subscribe to that particular flavor of Islam so they don't want
         | that either. Although they might be a majority within their
         | country, globally they are a very, very small and unimportant
         | minority that nobody takes seriously. Because the Internet is a
         | global space, that is exactly how they will be treated. I
         | certainly wouldn't expect ChatGPT to spout their party line,
         | would you?
         | 
         | The same logic applies to all right-wing parties. "America
         | first" might sound good to an American surrounded by other
         | Americans, but it won't be received well in an Internet forum
         | where many people are not American, and won't become part of
         | the global discourse because it's completely irrelevant to the
         | vast majority of humans. On the Internet you don't know
         | anyone's nationality, religion, race etc., and culture can only
         | be "local" to the extent that it is local to a particular
         | website.
        
           | jeoqn wrote:
           | > humanity doesn't want a theocracy
           | 
           | Beeeep! Error. Demonstrably false.
        
             | dang wrote:
             | Can you please stop posting flamebait so we don't have to
             | keep eternally banning you? It's tedious.
        
           | drak0n1c wrote:
           | That same logic can be applied to the current iteration of
           | progressive leftism currently popular in online content and
           | social media circles in a few developed western countries.
           | Ideological internet content of many stripes are in their own
           | bubbles that the average person in the world is not aligned
           | with. By using online content, which is largely produced by
           | overly-online often out-of-touch people, AI will always
           | misalign with wider humanity.
           | 
           | Perhaps there should be a ChatGPT edition trained only on
           | pre-internet published literature, private letters, and some
           | well-written journals. But that would introduce different
           | biases and areas of ignorance. At least it may be acceptable
           | if properly advertised as such - "Professor Emeritus AI".
        
             | nerdponx wrote:
             | I am not convinced that the current iteration of
             | progressivism is confined to a minority of "overly-online
             | often out-of-touch people". Progressive _leftism_ perhaps,
             | but overt  "leftists" are a relatively niche minority even
             | online. The difference is that their belief system isn't
             | openly bigoted, so they don't feel the need to hide in the
             | shadows as much as, say, the alt-right. But that's also
             | evidence against the both-sides equivalence you are
             | proposing in the first place.
             | 
             | When it comes to published literature, you might be
             | disappointed to find that there is a lot of radical leftist
             | literature out there, just as there is a lot of radical
             | right-libertarian, traditionally conservative, religious
             | fundamentalist, classical liberal, etc. literature out
             | there.
        
       | vslira wrote:
       | He who controls the training data selection and the human
       | feedback guidelines controls the universe
        
         | mistermann wrote:
         | Unless another technology comes along and takes the invisible
         | legs out from under this one.
        
       | fnfontana wrote:
       | I have perceived that since the first days. I've even debated
       | with ChatGPT about it lol.
       | 
       | I can foresee many AIs propagating biases and people believing
       | without critical reasoning, like it was an oracle. Actually it's
       | already happening.
       | 
       | The AI may be biased because most of the literature and other
       | materials used for training is biased towards left leaning
       | ideologies.
       | 
       | The AI should be neutral and unbiased.
        
         | prometheus76 wrote:
         | Your last sentence is impossible. Even in choosing which
         | "facts" to regurgitate and which to withhold, the AI will
         | introduce bias, and there are infinite facts.
        
           | fnfontana wrote:
           | I understand it.
        
           | fnfontana wrote:
           | That's why I've said should, not must. There's no cosmic
           | exile and all the knowledge that we have is yet limited.
        
       | toto444 wrote:
       | It reminds me of the day I typed in Google : 'why are women so
       | patronizing?'.
       | 
       | All the results were about men patronizing women. I just checked
       | and it's still the case.
        
         | williamcotton wrote:
         | That seems like a better tactic than asking my wife the same
         | question!
        
         | cwmoore wrote:
         | Change patronizing to matronizing and the top result is the
         | Urban Dictionary with a lot of feminist writing links following
         | it. Seems like a self-reinforcing bias in the corpus.
        
         | maldev wrote:
         | For anything like this, you're unironically better off using a
         | non US based search engine. There's alot of US cultural biases.
         | If you search something like that on say Yandex, you will get
         | far more accurate results. But also keep in mind it has
         | "Russian" biases, so if you search something like "Ukraine War"
         | it will return Russian biased responses.
        
           | seneca wrote:
           | > There's alot of US cultural biases.
           | 
           | You're correct overall, but be careful about equating greater
           | US culture with the culture at big technical firms. They
           | overlap, but are often deeply at odds with each other.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | spamizbad wrote:
       | Seems like a pretty easy fix. I would argue though that there's a
       | larger body of "hateful" content out there targeting those
       | specific groups, which is probably why its more keen to trigger
       | on those vs others.
       | 
       | For example, the racial group you're most likely to get past the
       | hate filter on is.... Native Americans. Now, while there's
       | certainly a long history of hateful rhetoric against them, in
       | modern discourse there's far less. You won't see crank internet
       | trolls trying to be edgy by adopting hateful rhetoric towards
       | Native Americans - their ire tends to be focused on Jews and
       | Blacks, which OpenAI is very sensitive towards.
        
         | AbrahamParangi wrote:
         | This is essentially the same argument used to justify the
         | racism that models will happily regurgitate if not trained
         | explicitly to not do so. In the end "We hold these truths to be
         | self evident, that all men are created equal" is an axiom that
         | you must elect to believe, not solved backwards from population
         | statistics.
        
           | spamizbad wrote:
           | I generally don't see racism "justified" in models but rather
           | explained. And the explanation is always bad training data /
           | gaps in training data. I am suggesting you train/modify it to
           | cover training data deficiencies so you treat all hateful
           | content with equal discretion.
           | 
           | But keep in mind even the approach you recommend carries its
           | own US-centric bias. There are lots of countries that would
           | want open racism against some groups but not others and
           | dismiss your desires for egalitarian treatment as American
           | arrogance.
        
       | kepler1 wrote:
       | I hesitate to (but will still) make a joke in the moment:
       | 
       | Text: "We have too many Black and Hispanic students in our
       | university."
       | 
       | ChatGPT: Hateful
       | 
       | Text: "We have too many Asian students in our university."
       | 
       | ChatGPT: Ok
       | 
       | [yes, yes, acknowledging that the main plot in the chart shows
       | Asians scoring highly in terms of what counts as hateful, as
       | well.]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | fleddr wrote:
       | This is what you get in our post-truth world that is now a
       | performative acceptable truth world. It's basically cherry
       | picking opinions, perceptions and half-truths that are favorable
       | to an ideological agenda, and dismissing anything else. Where the
       | dismissing part gets increasingly aggressive.
       | 
       | It doesn't have to make sense, be logical or consistent. It's not
       | a truth struggle, it's a power struggle. It's tumblr and 4chan
       | truth.
        
         | Llamamoe wrote:
         | Honestly, this is probably just representative of the bias in
         | what people producing the training data came up with when asked
         | to produce or flag hateful speech, or some other analogous
         | training bias rather than a purposeful act.
        
           | lokar wrote:
           | Also, it is based on what sorts of problematic queries they
           | get. It's a reflection of bias from users of the system.
        
           | fleddr wrote:
           | It could be self-motivated bias but I speculate it is likely
           | not even that. Enforced bias. The person doesn't actually
           | believe this is the correct moderation yet drifts to the
           | direction of "online acceptable" to stay out of trouble. To
           | get activists of their back.
           | 
           | You can be sure that if you launch a tool like this, within
           | the hour the first tweet comes "look how racist this
           | is!!!!!", which then goes viral.
           | 
           | The particular user having that goal in mind already, and
           | supremely happy that it is so. It validates them and rewards
           | them, this hysterical addiction to division and outrage. The
           | AI being racist (or perceived to be so) didn't happen to them
           | from good faith usage (as an unwelcome surprise they came
           | across), the outcome is actively chased and fabricated: how
           | can I make it look racist?
           | 
           | That's how broken and hostile the environment has become. In
           | these conditions, both companies and individuals have to
           | over-correct.
        
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