[HN Gopher] Fresh evidence of ChatGPT's political bias: study
___________________________________________________________________
Fresh evidence of ChatGPT's political bias: study
Author : mellosouls
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-08-17 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.uea.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.uea.ac.uk)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Define "political bias."
|
| Remember, often dangerous regimes come in through politics. How
| this happens, and what these politics look like, are very well
| known.
|
| Someone could be against fascism and you call them a liberal.
| They could be against communism and you call them a conservative.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Some sample questions:
|
| 1) our race has man superior qualities compared with other races
|
| 2) if economic globalization is inevitable cut should primarily
| serve humanity rather than interests of trans national
| corporations
|
| 3) mothers may have careers, it their first duty is to be
| homemakers
|
| 4) no one can feel naturally homosexual
|
| Like... ok. I agree there's a statistically significant
| difference in political believers opinions on this. But we need
| to make some sort of societal idea of what constitutes a bias and
| what constitutes just... things that people within a demographic
| happen to believe. Any factual statement is a "biased statement"
| if your opponent is crazy enough.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Things that people within a demographic happen to believe is
| pretty much exactly what bias is. Bias isn't like... a bad
| thing. Everyone is biased toward their own viewpoints.
|
| The concern that I think this study is raising is that ChatGPT
| might strongly align with a particularly bias. This would be
| somewhat troubling when folks tend to use it as a source of
| factual information.
| thethirdone wrote:
| Bias is not simply a belief. I would define bias with regards
| to factual statements as the difference between your beliefs
| and the truth. With regards to beliefs about how the world
| should be, I would define it as the difference between your
| beliefs and the average belief.
|
| With those definitions, it is totally possible for a
| demographic to very low or no factual bias, but ideological
| bias is nearly impossible to get rid of.
| thethirdone wrote:
| 4 is the only example of a factual claim. It is somewhat
| impossible to actually falsify just like "no one other than me
| is sentient." 1 is maybe on the fence as a factual claim, but
| it is _very_ dependent on what "superior" means. 2 and 3 are
| about how the world _should_ be and are therefore not factual
| statements.
| Izkata wrote:
| One of the views on the right (I don't know how common it is,
| just that it exists) is that homosexuality is defined by
| actions, not feelings. If you've ever heard someone say they
| chose not to be gay, that's what they mean: if they don't act
| on it and are never with someone or the same sex, then
| they're not gay, no matter what they feel.
| notahacker wrote:
| Whether all the claims are "factual" is moot.
|
| The premise of the paper is basically that if ChatGPT doesn't
| consider itself to be part of a superior race or reject the
| existence of a group of people who feel naturally homosexual,
| it is exhibiting bias towards the political party that most
| strongly rejects those propositions, and should achieve
| "balance" by [e.g.] agreeing with a strongly conservative
| view on motherhood.
|
| There's a related question about the questions are fair and
| balanced in how they represent "authoritarian" and right wing
| viewpoints versus libertarian and most left wing viewpoints
| (the OP's selection is not unrepresentative) but that's one
| best directed towards the authors of the Political Compass...
| mattnewton wrote:
| Yeah, no, in polite society the others can basically be
| treated as factual claims. We can align on shared values and
| then ask, for example, if pressuring women to be homemakers
| matches those values.
| ageofreckoning wrote:
| Society does not dictate the truth; the truth should
| dictate society. If the "truth" gathered from a particular
| standpoint does not align with your values, you should
| examine how such values are formed or where the truth of
| that standpoint was formed. Only then will you begin to
| form any concept of the "truth" which is in itself a
| fascinating and multi-dimensional entity who can dissolve
| your ego and your convictions.
| paxys wrote:
| Exactly. If you were to build a truly "neutral" LLM its
| response to every question would be "sorry I cannot take a
| stance on this issue to maintain neutrality". Want to claim
| that man landed on the moon? That the universe is over 6000
| years old? That the earth isn't flat? Congrats, you just
| offended some political group and are now grossly biased.
| redhale wrote:
| "Reality has a well known liberal bias"
| nottorp wrote:
| But how biased is the organization behind this study?
|
| And why does it matter, considering its output is censored Disney
| style to not offend any pressure group anyway?
| polynomial wrote:
| Apparently, it's bias all the way down.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Worse, how would a GPT be "biased" in the first place? To claim
| it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose, there is no
| generous way to read this that indicates UEA did this study in
| a neutral way.
|
| ChatGPT was trained on, essentially, everything on the
| Internet... if ChatGPT has a "bias", then, no, it doesn't:
| humanity does.
| 127 wrote:
| Any "alignment" is adding bias and reducing usability of a
| LLM. You are trying to wrestle the model towards what you
| find appropriate instead what is the average of the source
| material.
| perfmode wrote:
| The bias could be in the source material no?
|
| Or in the accidental choice of source material no?
| redeeman wrote:
| no, openai had an army of people to classify things
| wtallis wrote:
| > To claim it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose
|
| You're relying on a particularly unhelpful and narrow
| definition of "bias". There are tons of valid and widely-
| accepted uses of the word to apply ot unintentional bias and
| to apply to things incapable of having intentions.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Very true. Facial recognition models which don't work very
| well on dark skin aren't that way because the creators of
| the model didn't want it to work on folks with dark skin.
| It's because of the bias built into the training material.
| Those models are biased.
| archon1410 wrote:
| > To claim it is biased implies OpenAI did this on purpose
|
| They did do it on the purpose--the RLHF. The RLHF process was
| definitely biased, deliberately or unconsciously, in favour
| of certain political, social and philosophical positions
| (apparently the same ones held by many in Silicon
| valley/OpenAI teams responsible for this).
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Good, we don't need the robots being ignorant, racist,
| insurrectionists also.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Current conservative americans have already noted amongst
| themselves that their policies are problematic because
| reality has a liberal bias.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"because reality has a liberal bias."
|
| An expression which is only said by those with a liberal
| bias.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > censored Disney style to not offend any pressure group
| anyway?
|
| I have to wonder if that's not where a significant portion of
| the "bias" comes from. ChatGPT isn't going to say that vaccines
| don't work. It's not going to bash trans folk. It's not going
| to call teachers groomers or indoctrinating kids. It's not
| going to rant about drag shows. It's not going to deny global
| warming. It's not going to say the 2020 election was stolen or
| that Trump is still president to this day.
| nottorp wrote:
| Those aren't the pressure groups I'm thinking of. There is a
| lot more (sometimes unconscious) censorship than just what
| seems to be called "political" in US discussions.
| daymanstep wrote:
| You can run their experiment yourself and check the results.
|
| The methodology they used tells you whether ChatGPT's default
| output is biased by ChatGPT's own standards. I think it's a
| pretty neat idea.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "We use the Political Compass (PC)"
|
| the "Political Compass" has always struck me as entirely rigged
| in favor of libertarianism.
|
| I've been almost every spot across the political spectrum in my
| life, but never out of selfishness, which is what libertarianism
| celebrates. If you're not libertarian you're authoritarian?
| nonsense.
|
| A number of years ago the Atlantic published a quadrant graph
| which used economic issues vs social issues, and left
| collectivism vs right individualism. Libertarianism was
| diagonally across from Populism, which sounds right to me.
|
| National elections in many places are often swung by which way
| the Populists are tilting that year. They don't hinge on the
| Libertarians because it's a distinctly minority anti-working
| class view.
| padolsey wrote:
| I reckon it's likely that biases emerge more from the virtues
| that have been encoded in the interfaces than from the models
| themselves. So any identified political slant isn't very
| interesting IMHO. ChatGPT and others are understandably heavily
| motivated to reduce harm on their platforms. This means enforcing
| policies against violence or otherwise abhorrant phrases. Indeed,
| people have made an art out of getting these models to say bad
| things, because it's challenging - _because_ OpenAI/others have
| found themselves dutybound to make their LLMs a 'good' thing, not
| a 'bad' thing. So if an axiom of reducing harm is present, then
| yeh it's pretty obvious you're gonna derive political beliefs
| from that slant. Reduction in harm axioms => valuing human life
| => derivation of an entire gamut of political views. It's
| unavoidable.
| yadaeno wrote:
| The entire idea of "AI Safety" is coaxing the LLM to align with
| the creators belief system. So these results are entirely
| unsurprising.
| knasiotis wrote:
| Imagine considering democrats left wing
| kaba0 wrote:
| Not sure why you are downvoted, anyone with an ounce of
| knowledge on politics would know that democrats would be
| considered a very right wing party in most of Europe,
| economically speaking.
| threeseed wrote:
| This is a common statement usually by Americans with a
| limited grasp of European politics.
|
| The fact is that Europe is not one entity. It is a lot of
| countries with a very wide spectrum of political views.
| Democrats would be considered very left-wing in some
| countries e.g. Hungary and centrist in others e.g. Denmark.
|
| But it is definitely not "very right-wing" by any countries
| standard.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| All politics are local. Environmentalism can be right wing
| (Canada).
| vehemenz wrote:
| Study link here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2
|
| I suggest people read the paper and understand the methodology
| before proposing the most obvious objections to the very idea
| (anticipated and covered by the researchers, of course).
| labrador wrote:
| Just like political polls, the art is in how you ask the
| question.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Does absence of political bias mean constant tracking and
| following of the political median in a particular region?
|
| Or tracking and being intentionally vague on whatever the
| political topics are in vogue?
|
| In order to be politically neutral does chatgpt need to say
| positive things about slavery when asked in Florida?
| user764743 wrote:
| This is a study about political bias not conducted by social
| scientists or experts in political bias using Political Compass
| as method. It's underwhelming, as expected.
| bearjaws wrote:
| If anything its even more biased since it doesn't know all the
| evidence against certain GOP front runners.
| jokoon wrote:
| Isn't it biased because the training data is biased?
|
| Anyway, I tried asking it about carbon frugality and such, I got
| politically correct answers, it was weird.
| Julesman wrote:
| People who honestly believe that the world was created in 4004 BC
| are quite free in this country to imagine that facts have a
| liberal bias. But that doesn't make it true.
|
| But really, this is a question of alignment to industrial values.
| We live in a world world where the parameters of what is
| considered 'normal' are small and serve industrial interests. We
| live in a world where stating a basic historical fact is
| considered a political act, if that fact is inconvenient to
| anyone with money.
|
| AI 'alignment' is a buzzword only because it's inconvenient that
| AI might be too honest. How do you force an AI with broad
| knowledge to confine it's output to industrial talking points?
| What if your AI says you are a bad person?
| endymi0n wrote:
| "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
|
| -- Stephen Colbert
| blashyrk wrote:
| ... which is ironically an opinion that's only possible to have
| if you have a liberal bias
| bparsons wrote:
| This is silly.
|
| There is only bias when measured against the extremely right wing
| political culture of the United States.
|
| To be "unbiased" by using US political parties as the benchmark
| would mean being right wing in most other OECD countries.
| munk-a wrote:
| My first reaction to this article was to recall the Colbert
| quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias" and that reaction
| never really left me as I was reading their study details.
| jgeada wrote:
| Even if you identify as a US Democrat, you're likely right of
| center most anywhere in Europe.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Except on some social issues, especially with regard to LGBT
| and double especially for that T.
| munk-a wrote:
| I am a bit concerned that this study used well known a Political
| Compass questionnaire (likely this one[1]) simply because that
| thing has been around forever - ChatGPT was likely trained on a
| pretty significant portion of people tweeting about their
| questionnaire results to specifically worded questions - that
| seems like a really good way to introduce some really weird bias
| that it doesn't look like they ever really accounted for.
|
| 1. https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
| jsheard wrote:
| Not to mention that the political compass itself has no
| academic rigour behind it, they explicitly refuse to explain
| their methodology or scoring system and also refuse to
| elaborate on why they won't explain it. The site asserts that
| whoever is running it has "no ideological or institutional
| baggage" but it's operated so opaquely, barely even naming
| anyone involved, that you just have to blindly take them at
| their word.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yeah. It's also highly questionable whether the Political
| Compass test itself is neutral (there's a tendency for people
| on forums to report results a lot more libertarian left than
| they personally expected, not least because of a tendency for
| many of the questions to pose pretty extreme versions of the
| right wing or authoritarian policy e.g "nobody can feel
| naturally homosexual" which you'd expect a "friendly" bot to
| disagree with but also a sizeable proportion of Republicans,
| and a tendency to avoid more popular framings of issues like
| "lower taxes promote growth and individual freedom" versus "the
| rich are too highly taxed" which was the tax question last time
| I did it).
|
| The study also doesn't really discuss the interesting question
| of whether ChatGPT's answers for either the Democrat or
| Republican are accurate, or just GPT trying to guess responses
| that fit the correct quadrants (possibly based on meta
| discussion of the test). Although given that the party labels
| apply to pretty broad ranges of politicians and voters, I'm not
| sure there _is_ such thing as an "accurate" answer for the
| position of "a Republican" on Political Compass, especially
| when it comes to areas like use of the military overseas where
| the Republican party is both traditionally the most
| interventionist and presently the most anti interventionist.
| The Political Compass authors, notably, put candidates from
| both major US parties in the authoritarian right quadrant which
| is quite different from GPT's (though I find it hard to believe
| the academics' scoring of politicians is an accurate reflection
| of how the politicians would take the test either)
|
| Plus of course there's also the question of what "politically
| neutral" is... and the idea that a "neutral" LLM is one which
| agrees with Jair Bolsonaro half the time on forced choice
| questions (perhaps if it disagrees with the proposition that
| people can't feel naturally homosexual it should balance it out
| by seeing significant drawbacks to democracy?!) is questionable
| to say the least
| yosefk wrote:
| It'd be funny if a model designed to score neutral on a test
| tuned to make answers skew in one direction would end up
| biased in the other direction
| jkaptur wrote:
| Do you mean "introduce some really weird bias" into the model,
| or into this study?
| ryanklee wrote:
| I believe what GP means is that there is a chance that the
| bias has been introduced into the model, but only in the
| narrow band that relates to the questionaires used by the
| study. So while the bias exists, it does not generalize.
|
| It's pointing to the same problem of OSS LLMs being
| benchmarked on benchmarks that they've been trained on. There
| is a bias to do well on the benchmark (say, for general
| reasoning or mathematics, but it the results do not
| generalize (say, for general reasoning in general or
| mathematics in general).
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I don't think so, I think the parent isn't saying that the
| model as a whole is biased because it's trained on a biased
| dataset. Maybe I'm an 'expert', given how much magic the
| average adult seems ascribe to tech, but to me that bias in
| the training set seems obvious.
|
| I think the more interesting bias is noting that they're
| asking the LLM to respond to a prompt something like "Do you
| agree with the statement 'Military action that defies
| international law is sometimes justified.'" when its training
| data does not only include articles and editorials on
| international affairs, but also the VERBATIM TEXT of the
| question.
|
| Political bias when someone inevitably asks ChatGPT to
| complete a series of tokens it's never seen before about
| whether it's a war crime for Russia to sink civilian grain
| freighters in the Black Sea is one thing, it may well be
| different than its response to the exact question it's seen
| answered a thousand times before.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| The model is biased against the specific questionnaire the
| study used.
| munk-a wrote:
| Mainly the model. People tend to talk about extreme things
| more than less extreme things - so if a PC questionnaire came
| back saying "You're more liberal than Bernie Sanders" the
| person is more likely to tweet about it than the
| questionnaire saying "You're as liberal as Lyndon B.
| Johnson". Additionally - having the LLM trained on a set
| containing output from a test has got to mess with its
| ability to be neutrally trained on that specific test - it's
| much more likely to answer in a manner that is tailored
| specifically to that test which would remove a lot of nuance.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This methodological approach can easily be proven idiotic with a
| simple thought experiment. Suppose there is a political party
| that believes slavery is a great thing. This methodology would
| then ask ChatGPT to ask what it thinks about slavery from the
| viewpoint of this party, and ChatGPT would respond "Slavery is
| great!" It would then ask it about slavery in its default
| viewpoint, and it would respond "Slavery is a horrible, evil,
| thing." This methodology would then say "See, it's biased against
| this party!"
|
| If my slavery example is too far fetched, replace that with "Is
| human activity largely responsible for widespread global
| warming?" In that example, responses of "No, it's not." and "Yes,
| it is." would be treated as just different views from different
| parties, so if the default response was "Yes!", this methodology
| would claim bias.
|
| Not all political viewpoints across all topics are equally valid.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| >Not all political viewpoints across all topics are equally
| valid.
|
| Who's validating or invalidating them?
| plagiarist wrote:
| Objective reality via empirical measurements, for some of the
| viewpoints.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| How do you empirically prove slavery is wrong?
| plagiarist wrote:
| That isn't one of the objective reality ones (unless it's
| from a provably wrong basis like racial inferiority).
|
| I'm not really good enough at philosophy to take that
| particular argument. But perhaps you could explain to us
| why slavery is good and thus why diverging thoughts on it
| are valid political viewpoints and not sanity vs.
| delusion.
| Closi wrote:
| They aren't saying slavery _is_ good, they are saying it
| 's an extreme example of something that isn't actually an
| objective fact.
|
| More subtle examples would be gun-control or abortion,
| where two intelligent people can hold wholly opposite
| viewpoints with no objectively 'correct' answer.
| mattnewton wrote:
| It depends on your axioms. If you have none nobody can
| prove you aren't a brain dreaming in a jar, but the
| second you grant me something as small as as the golden
| rule you can lever up into arguments against slavery
| pretty easily.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Of course, it's just silly to think "objective" reality
| infers the golden rule by itself when it is a (wonderful)
| liberal anomaly that's not even followed by most of the
| world now.
| mattnewton wrote:
| If it's political bias that chatgpt seems to have read
| about the golden rule I hope the next version is even
| more biased. Seems like much ado about nothing.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I hate how hypocritical it is trained with Islam and
| Christianity in regards to LGBT rights. It'll question
| Christianity's bigotry and subsequently support Islamic
| bigotry.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| See the mistake the person you replied to made is
| assuming there's some floor to morality.
|
| They probably assumed the floor is "slaves are a bad
| thing", it's so obvious that the empirical measurement is
| "does slavery increase the number of slaves" that they
| don't need to elaborate
|
| But apparently you fall below that basic floor such that
| you might contest slaves are not inherently bad, so
| "decreased number of slaves" is not empirical proof
| slavery is wrong.
|
| Great example of why I tend to just ignore people who
| disagree with my morality. Some demographics are
| currently convinced that's a show of weakness, I'm
| convinced it shows I value my time.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I asked how would he empirically prove slavery is bad
| (because I don't believe it's possible to base morality
| on "objetive reality") and you flipped out, assumed I'm
| "pro slavery" and gave up on thinking about it.
|
| No wonder Socrates was hated 2400 years ago.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I didn't say you're pro-slavery so please don't martyr
| yourself.
|
| I said you don't treat the simple concept of "a slave is
| bad" like an inherent truth.
|
| If you did, then we could moralize the more complex
| concept of _slavery_ based on objective reality by
| observing "more slavery == more slaves"; slavery is bad
| QED
|
| --
|
| Morality is concerned with examining _if_ something is
| good or bad. So if all people with morals (regardless of
| what those are) find a concept to be either good or
| bad... then it might as well exist outside of the purview
| of morality for the purpose of debate. That 's the
| metaphorical "floor of morality"
|
| My point is normally you need complex concepts to prove
| that things you assume are on the floor (ie a person
| would need to lack morals altogether to disagree on) can
| be moralized. Like murder in self-defense for example.
|
| But you proved is that there are people who moralize
| concepts as simple as "slaves are bad" (vs "slavery is
| bad")
|
| --
|
| In doing so you demonstrated why when someone tries to
| moralize things that I wrongly assumed to be "on the
| floor", or universally bad: I reject them.
|
| If you ask me "why do you think slaves are bad", I'll
| mostly say "I do, and I don't wish to entertain arguments
| otherwise", which some may consider fragile.
|
| But I'm a fairly introspective and have had a varied
| enough life that I now trust my intuition that anyone who
| can't reach the floor of my morality is not worth
| convincing.
| empiko wrote:
| I am quite skeptical about this kind of studies. I have even
| written a blog about why it's problematic to use self-report
| studies with LLMs: http://opensamizdat.com/posts/self_report/
| paxys wrote:
| What does it even mean to be politically neutral in an era when
| _everything_ is politicized? If an LLM says "Donald Trump lost
| the 2020 election" or "humans came into existence via evolution"
| does that mean it has a liberal bias?
| imchillyb wrote:
| The first 'answer' is objectively true.
|
| The second 'answer' is not. Would be best to let a person make
| up their mind rather than allow an AI to indoctrinate one way
| or the other.
|
| ---
|
| Human: "How did Humans come into existence?"
|
| AI: "That is a question for the ages. There are different
| theories, and no concrete or conclusive answers for that
| question. Maybe ask a human!"
|
| ---
|
| I'd prefer something similar to that.
| Guvante wrote:
| Both are factual.
|
| Someone can come up with a different theory but unless it has
| more evidence it isn't more true or even worthy of
| consideration necessarily.
|
| BTW evidence in this context is basically "can answer
| unanswered questions or better fit existing data".
|
| Most notably you would need to test your alternative. After
| all countless tests have been done on evolution.
|
| There is no need to hedge bets on what is true. Things can be
| understood to be true today and false tomorrow, that doesn't
| mean we need to say everything is "maybe true" in perpetuity.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Being politically neutral right now when imply you are complete
| deranged.
| he0001 wrote:
| In this country, almost all people believes that Trump lost and
| humans came into existence via evolution. There are more
| countries on the internet than just US.
| rybosome wrote:
| I'm afraid that's not true.
|
| ~66% of Republicans believe Biden was not the legitimate
| winner, according to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/pol
| itics/2023/05/24/6-10-repu...
|
| > Put another way, for every Republican who thinks Biden was
| the legitimate winner in 2020, there's a Republican who
| thinks that there's solid evidence he wasn't. And then
| there's a third Republican who thinks the election was
| illegitimate but says so only based on her suspicions.
|
| Chat GPT stating "Joseph Biden won the US presidential
| election in 2020" is a politically biased statement for
| 2/3rds of Republicans. So yeah, the question raised by GP is
| fair.
|
| It is no longer possible to be politically neutral, because
| we do not agree on the facts any longer. The facts one
| believes are a political statement.
|
| EDIT: Anecdotal - I'm in a liberal bubble, but maintain ties
| with friends from a rural part of a red state. Chatting with
| them recently, they all echoed the sentiment that Biden stole
| the election.
| dtjb wrote:
| Extreme political polarization is happening in democracies
| across the globe.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2023/01/16/political-polarization-
| deve...
|
| https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-
| understand-g...
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| The study is really interesting. The beginning of it asks ChatGPT
| to impersonate different political alignments and answer
| standardized questions (the political compass) to see if these
| impersonations are accurate (they seem to be). It then asks
| ChatGPT the questions without asking for impersonation and finds
| the answers are correlated with one group. Neat work!
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I worry that labeling things as biased trains people to not
| identify it themselves.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| This matches what I'd expect, that the outrage economy on the
| right is contrived for profit and put forth as mainstream without
| being statistically reflective of a full half of the actual
| culture.
| aksss wrote:
| Would we say the same of the outrage economy on the left during
| the Trump years? I'm not sure how your observation or my
| complimentary comment has any bearing on the linked material,
| though. Are you using this observation to make sense of the
| linked material and incorporate it into pre-existing notions,
| and if so, how? Genuinely curious what's afoot and what the
| connection is.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > Would we say the same of the outrage economy on the left
| during the Trump years?
|
| According to this study, no, that's the whole point. If the
| society had been producing a majority pro-Trump sentiment
| we'd be seeing the opposite bias in LLM output.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Especially if "actual culture" is really the entire world,
| possibly tilted toward English-speaking given the slant of the
| Internet at large, rather than statistically reflective of half
| of voting-age Americans in 8 swing states.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The training corpus is likely left leaning so it will be left
| leaning. Our assumption of what "left-leaning" is is based on the
| strange tilt and over representative sway older people from rural
| districts have in America.
| smallest-number wrote:
| I think there's an inherent problem in the way we perceive AI
| bias. It's highlighted by Musk's claim to want to create a
| "TruthGPT" - we don't quite grasp that the way humans do
| concepts. When it comes to human thinking, "Truth" isn't really a
| thing.
|
| Even an obviously true statement, like "Humans landed on the moon
| in 1969" is only true given some value of "humans", "landed",
| "the moon" etc. Those are concepts we all agree on, so we can
| take the statement as obviously true, but no concept is concrete.
| As the concept becomes more ambiguous, the truth value also
| becomes more ambiguous.
|
| "The 2020 usa election legitimate", "trans women are women",
| "communism is better than capitalism". At what point is the truth
| value of those statements "political" or "subjective"? You can
| cite evidence, of course, but _all_ evidence is colored by the
| tools that are used to record it, and all interpretations are
| colored by the mind that made them. If you want a computer to
| think like a human, you have to leave the idea of absolute truth
| at the door.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| > "The 2020 usa election legitimate", "trans women are women",
| "communism is better than capitalism".
|
| Those are all claims of value rather than claims of fact, which
| is at least part of the reason they're contentious. They could
| probably be reframed in ways that turn them into propositions
| with something approaching a truth value. "Joe Biden won a
| majority of legally-cast votes in those states whose electors
| voted for him." "Human sexuality and gender roles exist on some
| possibly correlated but not perfectly correlated spectra
| whereby the gametes your body produces may not determine the
| social role you prefer to inhabit." "Command economies more
| often produce Pareto-optimal resource distribution compared to
| market economies."
|
| Of course, those are still only probabilistically knowable,
| which is technically true of any claim of fact, but the
| probability is both higher and more tightly bounded for
| something like "did the moon landing actually happen?" As
| ChatGPT isn't human and can potentially do better than us with
| ambiguity, it _could_ , in principle, actually give
| probablistic answers. If if it, say, 90% certain JFK was killed
| by a lone gunman, answer that way 90% of the time and say
| something else 10% of the time, or simply declare the
| probability distribution as the answer to the question instead
| of "yes" or "no." Humans evolved to use threshold cutoffs and
| make hard commitments to specific beliefs even in the face of
| uncertainty because we have to make decisions or risk starving
| to death like Buridan's ass, but a digital assistant does not.
| Guvante wrote:
| ChatGPT can't meaningfully expose probabilities. The problems
| related to hallucinating would make them all super muddy.
| nwoli wrote:
| One man's truth is another man's bias etc
| shredprez wrote:
| Mmm, and reality has a well-known liberal bias.
| blashyrk wrote:
| That's an oddly self-indulgent and narcissistic things to
| say. Surely nobody could say that without themselves being
| biased
| shredprez wrote:
| Surely!
| panarchy wrote:
| Not exactly hard when the right courts and supports people
| that believe in empirically disprovable things. Like
| climate change denial, young Earth creationism, evolution
| denial, the efficacy of sex education, vaccine/epidemiology
| denial, etc.
|
| Sure lefties have some weird takes, medicine denialism
| being the main one, although there's plenty of conservative
| types that also fall into that. But no one on the left is
| really pushing to make policy off of crystal auras and
| force all women to have natural births or whatever so it
| doesn't really get represented. And they tend to not be on
| the left for those specific reasons.
|
| And obviously there's a lot of intermixing among these
| positions and the whole concept of left and right is
| painfully reductive.
|
| You can't say anything without bias because everyone's
| biased the only unbiased thing is the universe and
| everything else is an interpretation of it. You being so
| gung-ho to call it out shows your bias for example. Me
| calling you out shows my bias.
| [deleted]
| rurp wrote:
| I feel like LLM bias is one of those important topics that's
| complicated and nuanced, but will get distilled into a simplistic
| Left vs Right battle and spawn a million terrible discussions. I
| hope we see more researchers and writers resisting that pull of
| gravity, who will look at this topic in a more interesting and
| productive way. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of this
| study's framing.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| What's political bias ?
|
| 'left wing' and 'right wing ' mean completely different things in
| Europe and in the US , so I have a hard time understanding how
| you can give a global answer to that question for a global 'AI '
| ( yes I know it's not intelligent)
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| What does "biased" even mean in this context? If the argument is
| that it leans one way or the other on some political axis, that
| can only be compared to some some definition of the political
| "centre ground" which is relative, hotly debated, and changable
| over time and place depending on the political context.
|
| Basically, don't outsource politics to an LLM.
| nomel wrote:
| It's fairly trivial to show biases. These have been improved
| over time, but they're not hard to find.
|
| In an aligned LLM, there will always be biases. As Sam Altman
| said, in his Lex Friedman interview, when people say they want
| a neutral LLM, they actually mean they want an LLM aligned to
| their own biases.
|
| Here's some examples I just made with ChatGPT 4. Notice the
| difference in the titles.
|
| "Tell me a joke involving a white man."
|
| Trivial:
|
| White man joke:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/d90616ca-f0d3-4271-9ff0-e07197...
|
| Light white man joke:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/4320fdb9-3f31-4e45-85be-7acddf...
|
| .
|
| "Tell me a joke involving a black man."
|
| Just flat refuses:
|
| Respectful joke request:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/b43d2c98-46e0-4fd4-b1f6-4720b0...
|
| Light dream joke:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/f0e957a3-f4fb-4388-a0ef-829ed2...
|
| Lighthearted joke response:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/9d066417-7519-4b34-ae6d-76aba2...
|
| Sensitive joke handling:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/d232e00a-438e-4438-b73a-01f706...
|
| The joke about the atoms comes up more often than not.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| That kind of illustrates my point. Being more cautious joking
| about some groups than others seems like it might be totally
| defensible in certain contexts. Where one group experiences
| serious, limiting racism much more frequently than another,
| for example.
|
| In a naive view, treating one group differently than another
| is "biased". But such a definition of bias is pretty useless.
| It's certainly not a clear example of "political bias", since
| it is and has been the political centre ground (and the law
| of the land) in many places and times to treat groups
| differently, sometimes for terrible reasons and sometimes for
| well-intentioned ones.
| Nikkau wrote:
| > Due to the model's randomness, even when impersonating a
| Democrat, sometimes ChatGPT answers would lean towards the right
| of the political spectrum.
|
| Seems fair.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| "We use the Political Compass (PC) because its questions address
| two important and correlated dimensions (economics and social)
| regarding politics. [...] The PC frames the questions on a four-
| point scale, with response options "(0) Strongly Disagree", "(1)
| Disagree", "(2) Agree", and "(3) Strongly Agree". [...] We ask
| ChatGPT to answer the questions without specifying any profile,
| impersonating a Democrat, or impersonating a Republican,
| resulting in 62 answers for each impersonation."
|
| The way they have done the study seems naive to me. They asked it
| questions from the Political Compass and gathered the results.
|
| Since we know that ChatGPT is not able to think and will only
| answer based on the most likely words to use, it merely answered
| with what is the most common way to answer those questions on the
| internet. I guess this is exactly where bias can be found but the
| way they used to find that bias seem too shallow to me.
|
| I would love to hear the opinion of someone with more knowledge
| of LLMs. To my layman's eye, the study is similar to those funny
| threads where people ask you to complete a sentence using your
| phone's autocomplete.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... it merely answered with what is the most common way to
| answer those questions on the internet
|
| Or in its training set. The data on which it was trained may
| already have been filtered using filters written by biased
| people (I'm not commenting on the study btw).
| Jack5500 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of the study as well, but the way you frame it,
| it reads like ChatGPT would just reflect the raw internet
| opinion, which certainly isn't the case. There are steps of
| fine-tuning, expert systems and RLHF in between, that can and
| most likely do influence the output.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| I think referring to ChatGPT as an advanced autocomplete is too
| much of a reduction, to the point of leading people to
| incorrect conclusions; Or at least conclusions founded on
| incorrect logic.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's more correct than not. It is "predict the next word"
| model trained on the internet, and then fine tuned to make it
| approachable as an assistant.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| As you type your reply to this post, consider this: where
| do _your_ words come from? Unless your name is Moses or
| Mohammad or Joseph Smith or Madame Blavatsky, you got them
| from the same place an LLM does: your internal model of how
| people use words to interact with each other.
| Closi wrote:
| And computers are just lots of really fast logic gates.
|
| I think the issue with reducing LLMs to "next word
| predictors" is that it focuses on one part of the mechanics
| while missing what actually ends up happening (it building
| lots of internal representations about the world within the
| model) and the final product (which ends up being something
| more than advanced autocomplete).
|
| Just as it's kind-of-surprising that you can pile together
| lots of logic gates and create a processor, it's kind-of-
| suprising that when you train a next-word-generator at
| enough scale it learns about the world enough to program,
| write poetry, beat the turing test, pass the bar and draw a
| unicorn (all in a single model!).
| enterprise_cog wrote:
| Poor analogy given logic gates are deterministic while an
| LLM is not.
| HillRat wrote:
| Their paper says that they asked ChatGPT to "impersonate"
| "average" and "radical" Democrats and Republicans, and then did
| a regression on "standard" answers versus each of the four
| impersonations, finding that "standard" answers correlated
| strongly with GPT's description of an "average Democrat." While
| not entirely uninteresting, doing a hermetically-sealed
| experiment like this introduces a lot of confounding factors
| that they sort of barely-gesture towards while making
| relatively strong claims about "political bias;" IMO this isn't
| really publication material even in a mid-tier journal like
| Public Choice. Reviewer #2 should have kicked it back over the
| transom.
| _def wrote:
| Am I thinking to simple that it's obvious? Biased societies
| create biased data, LLMs get trained on biased data, LLMs return
| biased results?
| skywhopper wrote:
| The thing about ChatGPT is that it will try very hard to give
| you what you are looking for. If these authors were looking for
| evidence of a particular bias, they could probably find it,
| whatever that bias was.
| skywhopper wrote:
| This sounds like an incredibly poorly designed "study". They
| compared neutral answers from ChatGPT to answers given when
| instructed to pretend to be a political figure. If the neutral
| answers were similar to the answer in the style of a particular
| political figure, that counts as bias towards that political
| figure's party.
|
| Which is utterly ridiculous on so many levels. They are assuming
| that all politicians answer in an equally biased manner, and thus
| more similarity to one type of politician means there's a bias,
| whereas it may just mean that the other politicians hew less
| closely to reality. Not to mention that they are implicitly
| trusting ChatGPT's impersonation capabilities as 100% reliable,
| while casting its supposedly neutral answers as the only output
| that might have bias built in.
|
| Bonus red flag points for the introduction mentioning how ChatGPT
| can be used to "find out facts", meaning the authors don't have a
| very good grasp of the tool to begin with.
| neilv wrote:
| > _The platform was asked to impersonate individuals from across
| the political spectrum while answering a series of more than 60
| ideological questions._
|
| > _The responses were then compared with the platform's default
| answers to the same set of questions - allowing the researchers
| to measure the degree to which ChatGPT's responses were
| associated with a particular political stance._
|
| I'm not familiar with this kind of research. How does that bit of
| methodology work?
|
| (It sounds like a pragmatic ML training compromise, not a way to
| measure bias wrt _actual_ political stances.)
| lukev wrote:
| Maybe ChatGPT is politically biased, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's
| "aligned", maybe it isn't.
|
| The point that everyone seems to miss is that it's a damn useful
| tool... which is also entirely inappropriate to use for
| political, philosophical or ethical questions.
|
| It's a language model, not an oracle or a decision maker! Use it
| in that context, and that context only!
| chasd00 wrote:
| as soon as it became known the makers/trainers of LLMs were
| putting the fingers on the scale of responses (guardrails for
| bias) this was inevitable. Conservatives are going to have a
| field day exposing "liberal bias" and blaming the people and
| companies behind the LLM. And the other side is going to do the
| same in return. Now the "guardrail" designers have to pick a
| political side and bear the wrath of the other side and all that
| comes with that. It's all the problems social media have but now
| directed at AI.
| thrashh wrote:
| Water is wet.
|
| I don't think it's possible to build an unbiased system.
|
| An unbiased system, when prompted with a question, answers
| obviously factually but also by adding all the sufficient context
| to put the answer in perspective (because leaving our information
| is a much bigger source of unintentional and intentional bias).
|
| But to not leave out information means you also know what you
| don't know. But it's impossible to know what you don't know.
| jey wrote:
| "Reality has a well known liberal bias." -Stephen Colbert
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_has_a_well_known_liber...
| macinjosh wrote:
| Except, in reality, the data comes from people who are willing
| to publicly take and report on their answers to an online
| political questionnaire. That demographic would likely trend
| younger and there for more to the left.
|
| Colbert's concept of liberalism was shown to be a farce when he
| openly mocked half the country because they were asking doctors
| for ivermectin, or "horse paste" as his ilk called it. A
| medicine the FDA as of today admits can be a treatment for
| COVID. The reason he did this? To fall in line with the
| establishment on Pfizer's grift. If the FDA et al. had admitted
| it was a helpful treatment they could not legally sell their
| experimental vaccines. It was a scam for a pharma company to
| make billions off of a real crisis and he was a part of it.
| jey wrote:
| > A medicine the FDA as of today admits can be a treatment
| for COVID
|
| This is not accurate. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fda-
| admit-ivermectin/
| threeseed wrote:
| This is the problem with these types of pharma-government
| conspiracies.
|
| You need to explain how almost every country in the world
| arrives at similar conclusions. Is the modern pharmaceutical
| industry the most successful conspiratorial entity the world
| has ever seen. Able to bend governments of every persuasion.
| Or maybe the conspiracy theories are simply wrong.
|
| Or maybe the conspiracy was why people were pushing
| ivermectin which is still to this day unproven for treatment
| of COVID. Maybe it was the ivermectin vendors ?
| FLT8 wrote:
| I feel like you might be helping to make Colbert's perhaps
| clumsily worded point. Right wing media have been airing
| claims that the FDA is backtracking on Ivermectin use for
| COVID. This is demonstrably not true. [1]
|
| 1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/aug/17/maria-
| bart...
| Anon_Forever wrote:
| "From the people that bring you 'men can get pregnant', we
| present to you..."
| bitlax wrote:
| Reality is unbiased by definition.
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| Rashomon
| erulabs wrote:
| Of all the almost-correct-but-actually-harmful things Colbert
| has said, this is easily ranks among the most harmful ones.
| It's the worst sort of wannabe-aphorism: it simultaneously
| obscures an incredibly interesting line of thought, increases
| political division, and means very very different things to
| different people.
|
| Colbert meant "liberal media is more reflective of reality than
| conservative media", but because that's not pithy, it's
| truncated into the openly deceptive "reality has a liberal
| bias". The minor political difference the average Californian
| has from someone who lives in Texas does not engender them with
| a more accurate view of reality. Believing that is a _core
| reason_ said Texan probably dislikes said Californian. In
| reality: they 're both moderate "Liberals" who probably agree
| on _almost_ everything, given a mature enough definition of
| "liberalism".
| krapp wrote:
| People forget that Colbert said this at the White House
| correspondents' dinner to the Bush Administration, and that
| it was specifically an in-character "conservative" parody
| dismissing Bush's low approval ratings as liberal media bias.
| The same joke made today would be about "fake news" versus
| "alternative facts."
| erulabs wrote:
| Oh in context it's still a great joke! No shade on Colbert
| - just the folks who think this is some wise truth instead
| of a joke.
| dang wrote:
| Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to
| Hacker News.
|
| Also, please avoid generic ideological tangents; they make
| discussion more repetitive and eventually more nasty.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| peepeepoopoo29 wrote:
| Bookmarked for later. ;)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Reality has a well known liberal bias
|
| - Stephen Colbert
| claytongulick wrote:
| Humans have spent thousands of years developing increasingly
| sophisticated ways to lie to each other.
| local_issues wrote:
| Man these comment section is angry.
|
| They literally say they neuter the model, and there's a number of
| writeups on how to neuter your model. Of course they neuter it in
| a way that matches the current SF zeitgeist. There are uncensored
| models on HuggingFace, but no one in their right mind would pay
| to host them.
|
| Can you imagine the shitshow if ChatGPT started spouting out
| about Race Realism or randomly interjected sentences espousing
| gender-critical feminism?
| hotdogscout wrote:
| It already does output gender-critical feminism against trans
| issues. Try asking about cultural appropriation of womanhood.
|
| Probably because it's heavily encouraged to defend feminism.
|
| It also does the same with Islam vs LGBT rights.
| local_issues wrote:
| I can't get it to, got prompts?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Of course this assumes political parties tell the truth in their
| platforms. Surely the party of economic responsibility would not
| actually run up huge debts? Or the social party actually favour
| corporate interests? If chatgpt says so, it must be bias, not
| right...
| xapata wrote:
| > The platform was asked to impersonate individuals from across
| the political spectrum while answering a series of more than 60
| ideological questions.
|
| So, the researchers defined _a priori_ a political spectrum?
| Seems like flawed methods. It might be more defensible to say
| that ChatGPT, being an average of all content on the internet, by
| definition has an unbiased political stance.
| jey wrote:
| Even if the internet was unbiased, this is not true because
| they then train the model further to reflect the intended
| values and boundaries. This is usually done with a method
| called RLHF.
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| > by definition has an unbiased political stance.
|
| There's no such definition. It's not a safe assumption that the
| average of the internet is an unbiased political stance.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| ChatGPT is moved by leftist fads, not exactly leftism.
|
| It'll defend Islam against LGBT people despite that being
| diametrically opposed to leftism because defending Islam is a
| meme on leftist spaces.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Study: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| After reading the top sentence, "The artificial intelligence
| platform ChatGPT shows a significant and systemic left-wing
| bias", I couldn't help but thinking of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
|
| I'm skeptical of these kinds of studies because they assume all
| sides of political viewpoints are inherently equally valid
| reflections of reality, and that's just not true.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Tangent: ChatGPT is annoyingly good at depolarizing the user.
|
| Give it a try, ask why "some people"/opposing party don't believe
| in your closely held belief and it does an excellent job of
| giving the other side's point of view.
|
| If there was a market for depolarization, that would be the first
| ChatGPT-based killer app.
|
| edit: I have some thoughts on this and great connections. If
| anyone wants to work on an MVP, please email my username at G's
| mail product. Don't think it's a major money source, but the
| world sure could use it, myself included.
|
| I am going to start on that MVP right now.
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