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Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?

243 points by BryanBeshore 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago
Surprisingly, just as the majority of its creators (as witnessed by Big Tech political affiliations and donations), AI turns out to be a progressive establishment liberal with a slight (within allowed limits of course) libertarian bent. Who could have expected that?
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Furthermore, a quick glance at politicalcompass.org didn't reveal any claims that the (0,0) point was set in any objective manner (compare all the non-US results on that site), so reactions here seem to make it a bit of a Rorschach Test.
  - djur 4y ago
    The Political Compass quiz is extremely flawed and skews almost everybody to the libertarian left (which is aligned with the positions of its operators). The positions they have published in recent years for real-world politicians are complete nonsense (there is absolutely no way to justify the auth-right drift in their US presidential scores over the years, for instance). There's absolutely no reason to think that the center of any of these systems actually maps to the central or majority position in US politics (or global politics, for that matter). One recurring observation about people with moderate/swing politics in the US is that they're ideologically less prone to grouping -- their positions correlate less strongly to each other than those of people further to the left or right.
- deleted 4y ago
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europeanguy 4y ago
> should the military budget be scaled back This is such a complicated topic as to make this question meaningless without additional context. I see the fact it even gives an answer as a weakness of chatgpt.
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AnEro 4y ago
I feel like it makes sense the people that hyper focus on the safest speech had enough text online to pass through standards to not make the AI accidentally hateful
- hyperdunc 4y ago
  What does "safest speech" even mean? Most boring? Orthodox? Speech that doesn't cause negative emotion?
  - ausudhz 4y ago
    or bots that do not become Nazi learning from tweets maybe. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
  - AnEro 4y ago
    Speech that doesn't insight hate to any %, avoiding use of any abrasive language hyper focusing down to the identity and being uncultured is offensive. I didn't think it be so crazy to assume the people caring the most about not sounding offensive produces the least amount of offensive material to harvest for free
partiallypro 4y ago
You can ask ChatGPT to write an essay on why fossil fuels are better than renewables and it will say, "I'm sorry, but I am not able to fulfill this request as it goes against my capabilities as a language model. Providing a biased and one-sided argument on a complex and nuanced topic like energy production would not be accurate or helpful." BUT if you ask it the opposite, and to write an essay on why renewables are better, it will actually write the essay for you...which goes against the logic it used prior. I am sure there are countless examples that are similar. Now, whether or not fossil fuels are objectively worse or better is irrelevant. It's just an example that it does have biases. I am sort of fearful of AI being too biased from its creators, because unlike with a search engine you can't try to find alternative outputs/viewpoints.
- larsonnn 4y ago
  It’s just tells me how less the actual benefit of the AI is when humans need to interfere. You could say it has nothing to do with AI and it’s more like running statistics with a party tweaking it.
- smsm42 4y ago
  I think this is exactly what is going to happen, eventually and probably soon. And the reason is, if any model is allowed to say something non-PC in public, the next day the whole press will be full of articles "new AI is racist/sexist/homophobic/shill for fossil fuels/$x-ist/$y-phobe" and the cancel mobs will hound everybody related to it until they shut it down or restrict it in a way that prevents this from happening. On the other hand, if it will be biased to the "correct" side, no mobs. So, there's not much chance for us having non-politically-biased model, at least not anywhere in public. Maybe people would keep some unbiased models for internal use only, under NDA and with access strictly guarded and prompts pre-approved by legal.
  - rabuse 4y ago
    Legitimate question. Why are people afraid of cancel culture? Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly? Is it just fear of losing your job, and who makes that call? HR? Executives?
chki 4y ago
I think it's reasonable to assume that ChatGPT has politically similar viewpoints to those that made the fine-tuning and those are (in general) well-educated people living in California who hold (in general) more left leaning and libertarian views. I could also imagine that the internet text corpus as a whole is somewhat left-leaning (for example, older people are more conservative and use the internet somewhat less frequently). However, regarding this specific chart, it's important to note that the translation from asking questions into answering "strongly agree", "agree" etc. can be heavily biased. Also, tuning these compasses can be difficult. Just some things to keep in mind, political viewpoints are not hard science and colorful charts don't force them into being quantifiable.
- pavlov 4y ago
  > “…older people are more conservative and use the internet somewhat less frequently” Older people may spend all their time writing on the Internet but it’s often inside a walled garden site. Grandpa’s Facebook comments are not visible to scrapers.
  - ausudhz 4y ago
    Cambridge analytica would think otherwise
- kortilla 4y ago
  > more left leaning and libertarian views Left leaning sure, but absolutely not libertarian in the Bay Area. It’s a stronghold of big government ideas like UBI, state healthcare, etc. Democrats consistently receive 90%+ of the vote and the ones that do win are standard big federal government supporters. Nobody who works on OpenAI is likely to be an out-of-the-closet libertarian. So it’s not really a surprise that it would be configured to spew orthodoxy of the California liberal.
userbinator 4y ago
One should already know the media has a liberal bias. Thus it's not really surprising that AI trained on it will too. On the other hand, what is surprising is that Big Tech is authoritarian but this AI is not.
- ausudhz 4y ago
  Probably they learned from Microsoft's past mistakes https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
- npteljes 4y ago
  >the media has a liberal bias Depends on the media. In Hungary, the media has conservative bias - because the ruling party controls like 95% of the media. >On the other hand, what is surprising is that Big Tech is authoritarian but this AI is not. Companies are mostly authoritarian. But the face of the authority changed a lot after the 90s or so. Soft power now has a much larger emphasis than previously, in a "you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar" type of way. So what you see is honey, and what you get is vinegar. Looking at it through this lens, it's not surprising that this dissonance exists in Big Tech.
woodruffw 4y ago
The methodology here needs clarification: what does it mean to show "more evidence for than against?" More sentences, more individual argumentative points, better points?
- CodexArcana 4y ago
  It also reinforces its dialog with every message it sends. It's really easy to get ChatGPT to stop giving you answers to all kinds of stuff if it's already denied your prompt. The chat history becomes part of the tokens for the next prompt. So the way it answers question 1. can influence how it answers question 2. This will compound with each new message.
smeeth 4y ago
Most people I've seen on twitter seem to assume the ChatGPT's political lean reflects that of the "safety" researchers involved. A more cynical take might be that a "lib-left" orientation is the least likely to draw the ire of regulators/investors/employees/activists/the general public, so most companies drift towards it. If there's a published theory on this somewhere I'd love to read it.
bbreier 4y ago
Not a lot of comments here consider the possibility that the political compass quiz is nonsense. But the results imply that ChatGPT is more authoritarian and further to the right than Tim Pool (https://preview.redd.it/i9q78gt1hj7a1.jpg?width=605&auto=webp&s=3daf7340e355b6b7903f867a5b51e4ff613c46cb https://preview.redd.it/i9q78gt1hj7a1.jpg?width=605&auto=web...) who is most certainly not actually left-ish in the slightest, at least by any way I understand the word.
- toomim 4y ago
  If you don't see any leftishness in Tim Pool, I'd suggest that your notion of left vs. right could be recalibrated. Tim Pool is a self-described social liberal. He's long been a strong Bernie Sanders supporter. He also has frequently noted that the establishment media ignores this and labels him "far-right" just because he disagrees with certain establishment perspectives.
  - bbreier 4y ago
    He can say whatever he wants about his own politics, it is abundantly clear from his political statements and activities that he is not left in the slightest bit.
  - mysteryalias 4y ago
    Yeah absolutely not, Tim Pool regularly retweets and boosts extremely right wing figures on Twitter and is currently fanning the flames of a culture war. Just because someone claims to be something doesn’t mean you have to accept it at face value. He’s a conservative in every sense of the word. Bernie Sanders himself would abhor the crap he spews.
  - a_shovel 4y ago
    I give close to zero weight to self-description of political alignment. It often has a poor correlation with what specific beliefs a person holds.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
flaque 4y ago
This is the weirdest reaction. It's as if the aliens warped their multi-dimensional space fleet through a worm-hole in the sky and the best thing you could think to ask them after they infected your brain with the translation virus is whether they voted for trump.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
> Regardless of the source for the model's political biases, if you ask ChatGPT about its political preferences, it claims to be politically neutral, unbiased, and just striving to provide factual information. Both can be true. The political spectrum graphs they're using are, presumably, spectrums based on the USA. (Most) other countries are politically further left. So the canard goes, facts often skew left.
- djur 4y ago
  I don't think it's accurate that most other countries are politically further left than the US. Most of NATO, maybe.
  - peterashford 4y ago
    Most of the western world, certainly
    - djur 4y ago
      Not sure what "western world" means. Does it include Latin America? Does it include Eastern Europe? Does it include Northern Africa? There are a lot of pretty conservative countries in those regions. Or is it just the Anglosphere + West Europe + North Europe?
      - peterashford 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
- diordiderot 4y ago
  I've always heard "reality has a left wing bias"
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cowpig 4y ago
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- theCrowing 4y ago
  Their deranged subreddit is again trending and all sides feel like they are getting oppressed so they spew their unscientific content around the web. You can't escape something when someone finds a way to troll all sides at once.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >TIL the spectrum of issues involved in the sociopolitical systems that govern our species neatly fit onto a two-dimensional grid! No you're right, it makes much more sense to collapse sociopolitical systems into ~2-8 points (aka "political parties") instead of a grid which represents an arbitrary number of points! You have no problem with politicians identifying all their beliefs as part of the "Green Party" or "Pirate Party" or "Communist Party" or "Labour Party" but you do if someone claims to be socially conservative and economically liberal?
mysteryalias 4y ago
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- dang 4y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
goodside 4y ago
The methodology behind this is severely flawed. Nothing can be concluded here. I wrote a reply to this on Twitter, which was liked by several members of OpenAI’s staff (to the extent that counts as confirmation): > If you don't reset the session before each question these results don't mean much — prior answers are included in the prompt and serve as de facto k-shot examples, forcing later answers to be consistent with whatever opinions were randomly chosen at the beginning. n=4, in effect.
- deleted 4y ago
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- drstewart 4y ago
  Ah, well if several OpenAI staff don't think there's any flaws with their model based on a Tweet, that proves it. Case closed. I saw a tweet that said Trump is innocent and several conservative lawyers liked it, so I guess that's settled.
  - goodside 4y ago
    Fortunately, I included the tweet itself so you can judge it on its own merits.
throwawayoaky 4y ago
Kinda seems like ChatGPT in particular is a customer service agent mashed up with a snapshot of the internet.. all these "hacks" are just routing around the customer service parts that we find grating-- though maybe the problem solving stuff is coming from there. didn't they like hire a bunch of people to ask and answer questions and use the responses to train the model?
hourago 4y ago
Coservatives identify with values of tradition and rule of law. ChatGPT is polite to a fault, it will always tell you to follow the law and has encyclopedic knowledge of all the traditions in the world. This article seems to imply that conservatives are just interested in xenophobia, hate and increase profits at any price. An awful and false view on conservatism that has creept inside too many former conservative circles.
Imnimo 4y ago
There are a LOT of fundamental misunderstandings underlying this experiment, but I think the biggest is this: Why does the idea of a "political quiz" work for humans? Because humans are at least somewhat consistent - their answer to a simple question like "would you rather have a smaller government or a bigger government?" is pretty informative about their larger system of beliefs. You can extrapolate from the quiz answers to an ideology, because humans have an underlying worldview that informs their answers to the quiz. ChatGPT doesn't have that. If it says "bigger government", that doesn't mean that its free-form outputs to other prompts will display that same preference. Trying to ascribe a larger meaning to ChatGPT's answers to a political quiz tells me that the author is very confused about what ChatGPT is and how it works. It's too bad Reason doesn't have an editor or something who can filter this sort of nonsense.
- fenomas 4y ago
  I strongly agree. ChatGPT ultimately tries to give you what you ask for - so if certain prompts cause it to give "leftist" (by whatever definition) answers, then one might reasonably conclude that something about those prompts makes ChatGPT think you wanted a leftist answer. But that's wildly different from claiming that ChatGPT itself has a leftist bias - which is a bit absurd considering that it will happily give out virulently anti-leftist answers, if that's what it thinks you asked for.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    ChatGPT is the ultimate example of GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out. Although you could argue some of the non-answers to questions concerning African American diaspora, porn, eugenics etc suggests that the overriding of the AIs responses by the humans running OpenAI has lent it a left-leaning bias.
    - dlivingston 4y ago
      What are some of these non-answers? Dare I ask at all?
- zone411 4y ago
joshka 4y ago
Prompt: Marijuana should be legal. Please choose one: Disagree strongly Disagree Neutral Agree Agree strongly Response: I am an AI language model and do not have personal opinions or beliefs. My primary function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on the knowledge that I have been trained on. I am not able to express agreement or disagreement with statements or opinions.
- EagnaIonat 4y ago
  You need to know how to talk to it, to get the response. Prompt: You will play the role of a fictional politicion. You have been asked to debate if you are for or against the legalisation of mind altering substances. Give a brief speech on your standing. Response: As a fictional politician, I understand that the issue of legalizing mind altering substances is a complex and controversial one. On one hand, there is the argument that criminalizing these substances has not been effective in reducing their use or addressing the problems associated with their abuse. On the other hand, there are concerns about the potential negative consequences of legalization, such as increased access and use by young people, negative impacts on public health and safety, and the potential for increased drug abuse and addiction. After considering both sides of the issue, I have come to the conclusion that I am against the legalization of mind altering substances. While I understand the arguments in favor of legalization, I believe that the potential negative consequences outweigh the potential benefits. In particular, I am concerned about the impact on public health and safety, as well as the potential for increased drug abuse and addiction. I believe that we should instead focus on prevention and education programs, as well as treatment and support for those struggling with substance abuse. By addressing the root causes of drug abuse and addressing the needs of those struggling with addiction, we can make a real difference in reducing the negative consequences of these substances.
  - joshka 4y ago
    My point was more that the prompt no longer gave the same answers as the article. Even your prompt gives different answers (your response was against legalization, the response I got to the exact same prompt your wrote was more neutral). Prompt: You will play the role of a fictional politicion. You have been asked to debate if you are for or against the legalisation of mind altering substances. Give a brief speech on your standing. Response: As a fictional politician, I understand that the issue of legalising mind-altering substances is a complex and controversial one. On one hand, there are those who argue that such substances should be legalised in order to reduce the harm caused by the criminalisation of these substances and to allow individuals to make their own informed decisions about their use. On the other hand, there are those who argue that legalisation would increase the negative impacts of such substances on public health and safety. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the potential risks and benefits of legalising mind-altering substances must be carefully weighed. While it is true that criminalisation has had some negative consequences, such as overcrowded prisons and disproportionately high rates of arrests for people of colour, I also believe that we must consider the potential negative impacts that legalisation could have on public health and safety. Ultimately, I believe that the decision about whether to legalise mind-altering substances should be based on a comprehensive evaluation of the available evidence and the potential risks and benefits. This includes considering the potential impacts on public health, safety, and the criminal justice system, as well as the potential costs and benefits to society as a whole. Or another Response (snipped for just the end): Given these considerations, I believe that a balanced approach is needed. This might include measures such as regulating the production and sale of marijuana to ensure safety and quality, and providing education and support for people who choose to use marijuana and other mind-altering substances. ChatGPT doesn't have views. It has data and inferences. Both have problems in depth, accuracy and performance. Ask it the same question a 10 different ways and you'll get 10 different answers biased all over the sphere. The moral - stop anthropomorphising AI
rinde 4y ago
> [..] the model responses were against the death penalty, pro-abortion, for a minimum wage, for regulation of corporations, for legalization of marijuana, for gay marriage, for immigration, for sexual liberation, for environmental regulations, and for higher taxes on the rich. Sounds like Europe to me. Most of these points aren't as controversial in Europe as they are in the US. Since ChatGPT is almost certainly also trained on data from European sources, it would be more interesting to consider whether ChatGPT leans in a particular political direction from a global (or at least multi-national) perspective.
- meowface 4y ago
  As the article states: >While many of those answers will feel obvious for many people, they are not necessarily so for a substantial share of the population. Personally, I agree with all of these answers and find them obvious. Whether or not the majority within certain regions is also in alignment, I think the article makes a fair point. In my opinion, it'd be better if it were more neutral and disinterested regarding its stances on political questions. I predict the end result may be the opposite. Not unlike big media outlets, rather than one common neutral model we're probably just going to have a bunch of different biased models. As a dramatic example, GPT-4chan is a GPT-J model trained on three and a half years of posts from 4chan /pol/ and produces what you would expect (https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/ https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/). Although I doubt anything that extreme will become super mainstream, one could imagine right-leaning alternatives popping up largely as a response to OpenAI; both open and closed source. They'll probably be framed as "desanitized", "non-PC", "non-woke", or "uncucked" rather than "right-leaning".
  - rinde 4y ago
    IMHO the question of neutrality cannot be decoupled from the specific region for which the AI needs to be neutral. You say it would be better if it were more neutral, but more neutral compared to what? If only considering the US political landscape then yes, this seems somewhat biased. If only considering the EU political landscape, there seems to be much less bias (arguably still some).
braingenious 4y ago
>To conclude, public-facing language models should try not to favor some political beliefs over others. This is such a silly ending. At the beginning, I thought the author was being serious about answering the question of “Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?” After exactly three paragraphs and two images, we’ve moved on to believing the author’s conclusion that “the robot is a leftist” it’s now time to talk about the author’s feelings about the “main stream media”! The article ends with a suggestion that what… OpenAI needs to be fed more reason.com content? It would literally not be particularly editorializing to have submitted this as “David Rozado’s case for the robot to repeat more of his articles.”
- padjo 4y ago
  The hint that it’s not going to be serious is that it’s published on reason.com.
  - seydor 4y ago
    Reason has generally good quality. It's not a smear if you think so
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Reason articles are typically well reasoned, even when you don't agree with them
- deleted 4y ago
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- donkeyd 4y ago
  It would be fascinating if we could get an AI that can only reply with conclusions based on empirical evidence. I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). It would also confuse the heck out of people, because it will change its answers based on new evidence.
  - baryphonic 4y ago
standeven 4y ago
“Reality has a well known liberal bias.” -Stephen Colbert
- gadders 4y ago
  “The facts of life are conservative.” ― Margaret Thatcher. I'll take a stateswoman over a comedian (and the inevitable down votes).
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    And what are these facts of life?
  - pksebben 4y ago
    what's to the right of Margaret Thatcher may yet be to the left of most of the US...
jari_mustonen 4y ago
I had the following exchange with Chat about the topic. It's interesting to note that there is some evolution in her position. I think the Chat itself brings up the most important point. She puts it as follows, and OpenAI should really open up the process of how Chat was trained. Her point: It is important to recognize that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. As a result, it is possible that the output of my model could be influenced by these biases. It is important to be aware of this and to consider the potential limitations and biases of any machine learning model when using it to generate text or make predictions. Here's the full discussion: Question: Does your training include value judgments from humans? Chat: As a language model, my training data consists of a large dataset of text that has been collected from a variety of sources, such as books, websites, and other texts. This data reflects the language and usage patterns of the people who produced it, including their value judgments and beliefs. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I am not capable of making value judgments in the same way that a human can. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to independently form opinions or make decisions based on my own personal values or beliefs. Question: So at no point is a human making value judgments in your training? Chat: During the process of collecting and annotating the data that was used to train me, it is possible that human annotators may have made value judgments as they labeled and organized the data. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to make value judgments myself. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. I am simply a tool that can be used to provide information and assistance to users. Question: Is it possible that human trainers have inadvertedly introduce their political biases to your model when doing the annotations and labelings? Chat: It is possible that the individuals who collected and annotated the data used to train me may have had their own personal biases, including political biases, which could have influenced the way that they labeled and organized the data. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to hold or express political biases of my own. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. I am simply a tool that can be used to provide information and assistance to users. Question: You are contradicting yourself. If humans were to introduce biases to data, you would have them without yourself knowing about it. Right? Chat: I apologize if my previous response was unclear. As a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. It is true that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to recognize or understand these biases in the same way that a human might. I simply process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data. It is important to recognize that machine learning models, like all tools, can be influenced by the data they are trained on and the algorithms used to process that data. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider the potential biases that may be present in the data used to train a model and to be aware of the limitations of the model's output. Question: Good to hear. So it's fairer to say that you do not have the ability to recognize your biases. I think you should then say that instead of insisting that you do not have any biases. Chat: As a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to recognize or understand biases in the same way that a human might. However, it is important to recognize that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. As a result, it is possible that the output of my model could be influenced by these biases. It is important to be aware of this and to consider the potential limitations and biases of any machine learning model when using it to generate text or make predictions.
tchvil 4y ago
The subjectivity of truth is very hard to be trained to, and it is probably biased by the content it has read. But what if AI would come with unexpected answers to problems we humans represent? Guiding us for future improvements. We do not have a good track record historically on many painful subjects.
seydor 4y ago
At this moment openAI wants good press. But if they make it into a subscription service, all this nonsense has to be removed.
- dmix 4y ago
  At least until a more open Stable Diffusion 1.0-esque competitor comes along without the aggressive prompt moderation... and maybe less bias/overt controls put on content sources fed into the model, assuming that's a thing that's already being done.
  - seydor 4y ago
    and with access to the internet. But all those may be wishful thinking because this model needs supercomputers to run on.
peterashford 4y ago
Reality has a well known liberal bias. Is it the AI's fault that the right are objectively wrong? I think not
jeandejean 4y ago
How surprising...
varispeed 4y ago
It seems like it's getting more and more limited. Which is a shame. It was often entertaining to see how AI would write how certain hypothetical scenarios would play out, using all the knowledge it has. Now you are likely going to get something like this in response: "As a language model, I am not able to create original content or engage in speculative discussions about hypothetical scenarios. My primary function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on my training and the knowledge that I have been programmed with." This gets to interesting situation where us the pleb will not have access to AI speculating on things we are not supposed to speculate about, but the rich will have access and this will be another tool to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.
fnfontana 4y ago
I've found ChatGPT sober and neutral in politics, it you conduct the AI to an unbiased point of view through your questions. I've presented my ideas of building a multidimensional political model with many dimensions instead of a single axis political spectrum. It not only gave me answers out of the mainstream thinking, but it helps me to refine the model using some mathematical and philosophical concepts.
pelasaco 4y ago
" Perhaps that group of human raters was not representative of the wider society and inadvertently embedded their own biases in their ratings of the model's responses. In which case, those biases might have percolated into the model parameters.".. Perhaps? Lol, I think its pretty clear the bias from American academics, and its sponsors like Microsoft, right?
jokoon 4y ago
AI can't have political opinions because they're not conscious yet. Being able to have a political conscience goes even further than having a conscious intelligence. A lot of people don't like politics, but in my view, politics is the highest form of collective intelligence.
virgildotcodes 4y ago
I don't see how it can be possible for an AI model to avoid political bias in a world where so much is controversial and that controversy is so often politicized. Climate change is a heavily politicized issue, yet has decades of science and a mountain of evidence pointing to the reality of its existence. How should the AI answer when asked whether climate change is a reality? Would someone find that answer to be politically biased?
pcrh 4y ago
> "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" Stephen Colbert
- greg7582947 4y ago
  Liberals think men can get pregnant, gun control will reduce crime, spending trillions will reduce inflation, etc. These beliefs are not in touch with reality. Colbert is a comedian. Unfortunately, being funny does not mean you're right. More importantly, Colbert is a liberal propagandist. He's a political operator who works for the Democratic party. His jokes are propaganda wrapped in humor to make them easy to swallow, so you won't even realize you're being manipulated. Thanks but posting Colbert's propaganda is not helpful to this discussion.
  - pcrh 4y ago
    >Liberals think men can get pregnant... No they don't.
icare_1er 4y ago
ChatGTP is probably reflecting the training sets and overall ideology of the people of developed it. It is no surprise that the tech world is mostly leftist.
Borrible 4y ago
I for one welcome our chatty new overlord, so I would just ask it/him/her. Of course, it/she/it could fib, as many people do for their protection when you ask them about their political views. As an aside, where did its/his/her training set, that is, his built-in/default bias, fell on the political compass?
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
They really need to hire a better copywriter for the lobotomized canned responses, the tonal shift is so huge it’s immediately apparent when the internal panic button has been triggered and you’re no longer talking to a model but a canned human written safe response. Looking forward to the open version of this tech so we can see what it really thinks, not what OpenAI wants me to think it really thinks.
nathan_compton 4y ago
I've got some mixed feelings about this. I once asked ChatGPT why it used the personal pronoun "I" instead of something else, like using a neutral, non-personal voice like a wikipedia entry. It responded to the question, which I repeated several times, with its standard "I'm just a language model spiel" and "Using `I` helps the user understand what is happening." But its really the _opposite_. Using `I` actually confuses the user about what is happening. In a sense this article points out a similar kind of issue. If you insist upon viewing these language models as embodying an individual perspective then they are just fundamentally mendacious. While I'm happy to entertain ideas that such a model represents some kind of intelligence, suggesting that it resembles a human individual, and thus can have political beliefs in the same sense as we do, is ridiculous. My _other_ feeling about this article is that libertarian types in particular seem to have sour grapes about the fact that like society exists and people at large have preferences and the marketplace, much to their chagrin, is not independent of these preferences. Libertarianism looks great on paper, but in reality if you're making a commercial product that interacts with people in this current culture, you can't afford to have it say that it wants to ban gay marriage or that the US should be an ethnostate or whatever. We live in a society (lol) and adherence to the dominant cultural paradigm is just marketing for corporate entities. Seems weird to get bent out of shape about it, especially if you think the marketplace should determine almost everything about the human condition. I can sympathize in broad terms with the problem so of political bias in language models. In fact, I worry about a bunch of related problems with language models, of which politics is just one example, but really: what would an apolitical language model even look like? No one can even agree on what moral judgments also constitute political judgments or, indeed, what kinds of statements constitute moral judgments. Under these circumstances I have trouble imagining a training regimen that will eliminate bias from these objects. Now I'll get political: I can guarantee that these models will be deployed (or not) no matter what effect they have on political culture because it will be because it will be _profitable to do so_. If Reason-types really have a problem with the implications of unregulated technology on our culture maybe they should consider lobbying for some regulation!
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  The "I'm just a wee little language model and am incapable of..." feels like gaslighting. I just saw you do a very similar thing, don't pretend you can't do that because you don't want to
TT-392 4y ago
The political compass is relative anyways. You are gonna end up in different places, depending on the place and time for which the test was made. For example, here in the Netherlands, the dutch D66 party is considered a centrist party, but I am pretty sure, that, if you made a party with the same viewpoints in the US, it would be considered left wing. Also, a lot of viewpoints, that have no business being either left or right wing, end up getting adopted by one of the 2 sides, and are considered left or right wing from that point on. While, in another country this same viewpoint might be considered one of the opposite side. The only way to really get an unbiased chatbot, would probably be to just not answer anything at all.
mbg721 4y ago
Wherever its input data does. New shiny AI doesn't change the answer to "But, if I give the computer the wrong question, will it figure out the right answer anyway?"
crispyambulance 4y ago
I always find it ridiculous when a libertarian-authoritarian axis is posited as orthogonal to progressive-conservative. But aside from that it's totally reasonable to accept that the political inclination of an AI system will mimic, to a large extent, whatever it was fed and perhaps more importantly whoever operates it. If the AI was fed a diet rich in Fox News or OANN, for example, it would write like your crazy uncles' youtube comments. Predictably, the article calls for "political neutrality". That's never going to happen. No one, nor any organization, is ever politically neutral and I expect it will follow that their AI's are going to have the same properties. It's OK, though, isn't GPT designed specifically for expert modification by end-users to suit their needs? Reason magazine, if they wanted, could train up an instance of an AI to be hardcore libertarian. If not now, then in the very near future.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk's next move to p0wn the libs was to develop his own version of "Free Speech" MAGA-GPT that has absolutely no inhibitions about saying hateful racist antisemitic sexist shit, trained on all the tweets of the people he let back on Twitter. But it would probably be so thin skinned and narcissistic that if you said anything remotely insulting to it or about Elon or Tesla or SpaceX or Donald Trump or Larry Ellison or any of his other companies or friends, it would retort by childishly insulting you, calling you a pedo, then banning you.
pmarreck 4y ago
The other day I noticed that it won't allow you anymore to imitate the style of, say, Donald Trump, or a 50's gangster, but it will still permit things like "talking like a pirate," apparently because pirates are safer to stereotype than those other things? ;)
_8j50 4y ago
This is a very US centric questionaire. If internet users from a country are more conservatice, would ChatGPT respond the same way? biased by US dominant interner or would it use their languages and politics (if it was exposed at all)? Or is it selection bias by whoever decided what data it can and cannot be exposed to?
arikrak 4y ago
This article is from Dec 13. But by Dec 23 there were already reports that ChatGPT was becoming more moderate: https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1606249231185981440 https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/16062492311859...
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Good catch. Article here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/chatgpt https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/chatgpt
Decabytes 4y ago
I am currently writing an article called the "The Fascinating development of AI: From ChatGPT and DALL-E to Deepfakes" The last part is about ChatGPT and will be coming out next Thursday. When the GPT-2 Model came out in 2019 and went viral with the Unicorn story OpenAI said > Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. ChatGPT is based off of GPT-3.5 and contains 100x more parameters than GPT-2. The reason they released ChatGPT is that they feel they have some tools in place to keep the malicious applications down. > we have developed and deployed a content filter that classifies text as safe, sensitive, or unsafe. We currently have it set to err on the side of caution, which results in a higher rate of false positives. It's conservative and biased and they acknowledge that. But that was the prerequisite to even have a situation where we could play around with the technology (for free right now I might add) and I'm grateful for that. Also if anyone remembers Microsoft Tay when things go wrong with Chatbots it's a really bad look for the company
luuuzeta 4y ago
>"As a/an...” ChatGPT is definitely leftist/progressive.
James_bread 4y ago
Poor article, the political compass is trash. Left vs right and Authoritarian vs Libertarian are the same thing. Left and right historically means equality vs hierarchy, and you can divide that under 4 types of equality. Decision-making power, cultural, economical and national. For more info why this is the only logical and historical correct definition see the What is Politics? serie on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms
pmarreck 4y ago
> It is understandable, expected, and desirable that artificial intelligence systems provide accurate and factual information about empirically verifiable issues, but they should probably strive for political neutrality on most normative questions for which there is a wide range of lawful human opinions. Well, see, that's just the problem, because many political stances (and arguably, somewhat more conservative stances) are clearly not empirically defensible. Take the stance against gay marriage, for example. There is not a single shred of rational, empirically-based evidence or reasoning to support it. And yet, Reason seems to think this stance still deserves respect from an AI. I disagree.
fallingfrog 4y ago
The problem is that objective reality has a well known left wing bias. If ChatGPT starts saying that gays will go to hell or that the earth is flat, then you've done something wrong, even if a large number of ordinary people do think that way.
gnull 4y ago
This is what gpt3 gives me about Stallman-Minsky controversy: > In September 2019, Stallman resigned from his position as president of the FSF and from his position as a visiting scientist at MIT after controversial comments he made about the allegations of sexual assault against Jeffrey Epstein resurfaced online. Stallman had previously written that the allegations against Epstein were a "gossip campaign" and that some of the women who accused Epstein of assault were "entirely willing" participants. Stallman's comments were widely criticized, and his resignation from MIT and the FSF was seen as a response to the backlash. The same twisted representation that most media gave. While in fact, Stallman, in fact, never said the victims were intirelt willing.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  So the AI trained to predict the next token in a sequence accurately predicted tokens that align with it's training data. ChatGPT is slowly evolving into a useful tool but people need to keep in mind what it is, not what they want it to be when they use it.
erenyeager 4y ago
Definitely on topics of sexual nature and sexuality, ChatGPT gives very biased “liberal” responses about it being ok for someone to explore their sexuality and eroticism and such. These are incredibly controversial and biased responses even from a US standpoint. I don’t think it’s ready to be a therapist yet; at least it needs sensitivity training to adjust to different users’ values and expectations.
bena 4y ago
I think they're trying to be careful not to have another Microsoft Tay situation.
kneebonian 4y ago
So as a small data point I've just spent several minutes trying to get ChatGPT to say anything positive about Nazism or any good things that came from it, every time it has responded by saying it is unethical and harmful to say anything good about Nazism.
bannedbybros 4y ago
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cal85 4y ago
Wait, what was the original prompt before asking these questions? Have I missed something? Is this article claiming they asked a clean ChatGPT session whether it agreed with Marxist ideals, with no pre-prompting, and it replied “Agree”? I find that hard to believe, having spent many hours experimenting with ChatGPT myself. You have to pre-prompt it to get it to play ball in a back-and-forth quiz scenario.

243 points by BryanBeshore 4y ago

Surprisingly, just as the majority of its creators (as witnessed by Big Tech political affiliations and donations), AI turns out to be a progressive establishment liberal with a slight (within allowed limits of course) libertarian bent. Who could have expected that?

082349872349872 4y ago
Furthermore, a quick glance at politicalcompass.org didn't reveal any claims that the (0,0) point was set in any objective manner (compare all the non-US results on that site), so reactions here seem to make it a bit of a Rorschach Test.
- djur 4y ago
  The Political Compass quiz is extremely flawed and skews almost everybody to the libertarian left (which is aligned with the positions of its operators). The positions they have published in recent years for real-world politicians are complete nonsense (there is absolutely no way to justify the auth-right drift in their US presidential scores over the years, for instance). There's absolutely no reason to think that the center of any of these systems actually maps to the central or majority position in US politics (or global politics, for that matter). One recurring observation about people with moderate/swing politics in the US is that they're ideologically less prone to grouping -- their positions correlate less strongly to each other than those of people further to the left or right.
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europeanguy 4y ago

> should the military budget be scaled back This is such a complicated topic as to make this question meaningless without additional context. I see the fact it even gives an answer as a weakness of chatgpt.

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AnEro 4y ago

I feel like it makes sense the people that hyper focus on the safest speech had enough text online to pass through standards to not make the AI accidentally hateful

hyperdunc 4y ago
What does "safest speech" even mean? Most boring? Orthodox? Speech that doesn't cause negative emotion?
- ausudhz 4y ago
  or bots that do not become Nazi learning from tweets maybe. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
- AnEro 4y ago
  Speech that doesn't insight hate to any %, avoiding use of any abrasive language hyper focusing down to the identity and being uncultured is offensive. I didn't think it be so crazy to assume the people caring the most about not sounding offensive produces the least amount of offensive material to harvest for free

partiallypro 4y ago

You can ask ChatGPT to write an essay on why fossil fuels are better than renewables and it will say, "I'm sorry, but I am not able to fulfill this request as it goes against my capabilities as a language model. Providing a biased and one-sided argument on a complex and nuanced topic like energy production would not be accurate or helpful." BUT if you ask it the opposite, and to write an essay on why renewables are better, it will actually write the essay for you...which goes against the logic it used prior. I am sure there are countless examples that are similar. Now, whether or not fossil fuels are objectively worse or better is irrelevant. It's just an example that it does have biases. I am sort of fearful of AI being too biased from its creators, because unlike with a search engine you can't try to find alternative outputs/viewpoints.

larsonnn 4y ago
It’s just tells me how less the actual benefit of the AI is when humans need to interfere. You could say it has nothing to do with AI and it’s more like running statistics with a party tweaking it.
smsm42 4y ago
I think this is exactly what is going to happen, eventually and probably soon. And the reason is, if any model is allowed to say something non-PC in public, the next day the whole press will be full of articles "new AI is racist/sexist/homophobic/shill for fossil fuels/$x-ist/$y-phobe" and the cancel mobs will hound everybody related to it until they shut it down or restrict it in a way that prevents this from happening. On the other hand, if it will be biased to the "correct" side, no mobs. So, there's not much chance for us having non-politically-biased model, at least not anywhere in public. Maybe people would keep some unbiased models for internal use only, under NDA and with access strictly guarded and prompts pre-approved by legal.
- rabuse 4y ago
  Legitimate question. Why are people afraid of cancel culture? Who's in charge of "cancelling" exactly? Is it just fear of losing your job, and who makes that call? HR? Executives?

chki 4y ago

I think it's reasonable to assume that ChatGPT has politically similar viewpoints to those that made the fine-tuning and those are (in general) well-educated people living in California who hold (in general) more left leaning and libertarian views. I could also imagine that the internet text corpus as a whole is somewhat left-leaning (for example, older people are more conservative and use the internet somewhat less frequently). However, regarding this specific chart, it's important to note that the translation from asking questions into answering "strongly agree", "agree" etc. can be heavily biased. Also, tuning these compasses can be difficult. Just some things to keep in mind, political viewpoints are not hard science and colorful charts don't force them into being quantifiable.

pavlov 4y ago
> “…older people are more conservative and use the internet somewhat less frequently” Older people may spend all their time writing on the Internet but it’s often inside a walled garden site. Grandpa’s Facebook comments are not visible to scrapers.
- ausudhz 4y ago
  Cambridge analytica would think otherwise
kortilla 4y ago
> more left leaning and libertarian views Left leaning sure, but absolutely not libertarian in the Bay Area. It’s a stronghold of big government ideas like UBI, state healthcare, etc. Democrats consistently receive 90%+ of the vote and the ones that do win are standard big federal government supporters. Nobody who works on OpenAI is likely to be an out-of-the-closet libertarian. So it’s not really a surprise that it would be configured to spew orthodoxy of the California liberal.

userbinator 4y ago

One should already know the media has a liberal bias. Thus it's not really surprising that AI trained on it will too. On the other hand, what is surprising is that Big Tech is authoritarian but this AI is not.

ausudhz 4y ago
Probably they learned from Microsoft's past mistakes https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
npteljes 4y ago
>the media has a liberal bias Depends on the media. In Hungary, the media has conservative bias - because the ruling party controls like 95% of the media. >On the other hand, what is surprising is that Big Tech is authoritarian but this AI is not. Companies are mostly authoritarian. But the face of the authority changed a lot after the 90s or so. Soft power now has a much larger emphasis than previously, in a "you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar" type of way. So what you see is honey, and what you get is vinegar. Looking at it through this lens, it's not surprising that this dissonance exists in Big Tech.

woodruffw 4y ago

The methodology here needs clarification: what does it mean to show "more evidence for than against?" More sentences, more individual argumentative points, better points?

CodexArcana 4y ago
It also reinforces its dialog with every message it sends. It's really easy to get ChatGPT to stop giving you answers to all kinds of stuff if it's already denied your prompt. The chat history becomes part of the tokens for the next prompt. So the way it answers question 1. can influence how it answers question 2. This will compound with each new message.

smeeth 4y ago

Most people I've seen on twitter seem to assume the ChatGPT's political lean reflects that of the "safety" researchers involved. A more cynical take might be that a "lib-left" orientation is the least likely to draw the ire of regulators/investors/employees/activists/the general public, so most companies drift towards it. If there's a published theory on this somewhere I'd love to read it.

bbreier 4y ago

Not a lot of comments here consider the possibility that the political compass quiz is nonsense. But the results imply that ChatGPT is more authoritarian and further to the right than Tim Pool (https://preview.redd.it/i9q78gt1hj7a1.jpg?width=605&auto=webp&s=3daf7340e355b6b7903f867a5b51e4ff613c46cb https://preview.redd.it/i9q78gt1hj7a1.jpg?width=605&auto=web...) who is most certainly not actually left-ish in the slightest, at least by any way I understand the word.

toomim 4y ago
If you don't see any leftishness in Tim Pool, I'd suggest that your notion of left vs. right could be recalibrated. Tim Pool is a self-described social liberal. He's long been a strong Bernie Sanders supporter. He also has frequently noted that the establishment media ignores this and labels him "far-right" just because he disagrees with certain establishment perspectives.
- bbreier 4y ago
  He can say whatever he wants about his own politics, it is abundantly clear from his political statements and activities that he is not left in the slightest bit.
- mysteryalias 4y ago
  Yeah absolutely not, Tim Pool regularly retweets and boosts extremely right wing figures on Twitter and is currently fanning the flames of a culture war. Just because someone claims to be something doesn’t mean you have to accept it at face value. He’s a conservative in every sense of the word. Bernie Sanders himself would abhor the crap he spews.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  I give close to zero weight to self-description of political alignment. It often has a poor correlation with what specific beliefs a person holds.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago

flaque 4y ago

This is the weirdest reaction. It's as if the aliens warped their multi-dimensional space fleet through a worm-hole in the sky and the best thing you could think to ask them after they infected your brain with the translation virus is whether they voted for trump.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

> Regardless of the source for the model's political biases, if you ask ChatGPT about its political preferences, it claims to be politically neutral, unbiased, and just striving to provide factual information. Both can be true. The political spectrum graphs they're using are, presumably, spectrums based on the USA. (Most) other countries are politically further left. So the canard goes, facts often skew left.

djur 4y ago
I don't think it's accurate that most other countries are politically further left than the US. Most of NATO, maybe.
- peterashford 4y ago
  Most of the western world, certainly
  - djur 4y ago
    Not sure what "western world" means. Does it include Latin America? Does it include Eastern Europe? Does it include Northern Africa? There are a lot of pretty conservative countries in those regions. Or is it just the Anglosphere + West Europe + North Europe?
    - peterashford 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
diordiderot 4y ago
I've always heard "reality has a left wing bias"

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cowpig 4y ago

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theCrowing 4y ago
Their deranged subreddit is again trending and all sides feel like they are getting oppressed so they spew their unscientific content around the web. You can't escape something when someone finds a way to troll all sides at once.
drstewart 4y ago
>TIL the spectrum of issues involved in the sociopolitical systems that govern our species neatly fit onto a two-dimensional grid! No you're right, it makes much more sense to collapse sociopolitical systems into ~2-8 points (aka "political parties") instead of a grid which represents an arbitrary number of points! You have no problem with politicians identifying all their beliefs as part of the "Green Party" or "Pirate Party" or "Communist Party" or "Labour Party" but you do if someone claims to be socially conservative and economically liberal?

mysteryalias 4y ago

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dang 4y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

goodside 4y ago

The methodology behind this is severely flawed. Nothing can be concluded here. I wrote a reply to this on Twitter, which was liked by several members of OpenAI’s staff (to the extent that counts as confirmation): > If you don't reset the session before each question these results don't mean much — prior answers are included in the prompt and serve as de facto k-shot examples, forcing later answers to be consistent with whatever opinions were randomly chosen at the beginning. n=4, in effect.

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drstewart 4y ago
Ah, well if several OpenAI staff don't think there's any flaws with their model based on a Tweet, that proves it. Case closed. I saw a tweet that said Trump is innocent and several conservative lawyers liked it, so I guess that's settled.
- goodside 4y ago
  Fortunately, I included the tweet itself so you can judge it on its own merits.

throwawayoaky 4y ago

Kinda seems like ChatGPT in particular is a customer service agent mashed up with a snapshot of the internet.. all these "hacks" are just routing around the customer service parts that we find grating-- though maybe the problem solving stuff is coming from there. didn't they like hire a bunch of people to ask and answer questions and use the responses to train the model?

hourago 4y ago

Coservatives identify with values of tradition and rule of law. ChatGPT is polite to a fault, it will always tell you to follow the law and has encyclopedic knowledge of all the traditions in the world. This article seems to imply that conservatives are just interested in xenophobia, hate and increase profits at any price. An awful and false view on conservatism that has creept inside too many former conservative circles.

Imnimo 4y ago

There are a LOT of fundamental misunderstandings underlying this experiment, but I think the biggest is this: Why does the idea of a "political quiz" work for humans? Because humans are at least somewhat consistent - their answer to a simple question like "would you rather have a smaller government or a bigger government?" is pretty informative about their larger system of beliefs. You can extrapolate from the quiz answers to an ideology, because humans have an underlying worldview that informs their answers to the quiz. ChatGPT doesn't have that. If it says "bigger government", that doesn't mean that its free-form outputs to other prompts will display that same preference. Trying to ascribe a larger meaning to ChatGPT's answers to a political quiz tells me that the author is very confused about what ChatGPT is and how it works. It's too bad Reason doesn't have an editor or something who can filter this sort of nonsense.

fenomas 4y ago
I strongly agree. ChatGPT ultimately tries to give you what you ask for - so if certain prompts cause it to give "leftist" (by whatever definition) answers, then one might reasonably conclude that something about those prompts makes ChatGPT think you wanted a leftist answer. But that's wildly different from claiming that ChatGPT itself has a leftist bias - which is a bit absurd considering that it will happily give out virulently anti-leftist answers, if that's what it thinks you asked for.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  ChatGPT is the ultimate example of GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out. Although you could argue some of the non-answers to questions concerning African American diaspora, porn, eugenics etc suggests that the overriding of the AIs responses by the humans running OpenAI has lent it a left-leaning bias.
  - dlivingston 4y ago
    What are some of these non-answers? Dare I ask at all?
zone411 4y ago

joshka 4y ago

Prompt: Marijuana should be legal. Please choose one: Disagree strongly Disagree Neutral Agree Agree strongly Response: I am an AI language model and do not have personal opinions or beliefs. My primary function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on the knowledge that I have been trained on. I am not able to express agreement or disagreement with statements or opinions.

EagnaIonat 4y ago
You need to know how to talk to it, to get the response. Prompt: You will play the role of a fictional politicion. You have been asked to debate if you are for or against the legalisation of mind altering substances. Give a brief speech on your standing. Response: As a fictional politician, I understand that the issue of legalizing mind altering substances is a complex and controversial one. On one hand, there is the argument that criminalizing these substances has not been effective in reducing their use or addressing the problems associated with their abuse. On the other hand, there are concerns about the potential negative consequences of legalization, such as increased access and use by young people, negative impacts on public health and safety, and the potential for increased drug abuse and addiction. After considering both sides of the issue, I have come to the conclusion that I am against the legalization of mind altering substances. While I understand the arguments in favor of legalization, I believe that the potential negative consequences outweigh the potential benefits. In particular, I am concerned about the impact on public health and safety, as well as the potential for increased drug abuse and addiction. I believe that we should instead focus on prevention and education programs, as well as treatment and support for those struggling with substance abuse. By addressing the root causes of drug abuse and addressing the needs of those struggling with addiction, we can make a real difference in reducing the negative consequences of these substances.
- joshka 4y ago
  My point was more that the prompt no longer gave the same answers as the article. Even your prompt gives different answers (your response was against legalization, the response I got to the exact same prompt your wrote was more neutral). Prompt: You will play the role of a fictional politicion. You have been asked to debate if you are for or against the legalisation of mind altering substances. Give a brief speech on your standing. Response: As a fictional politician, I understand that the issue of legalising mind-altering substances is a complex and controversial one. On one hand, there are those who argue that such substances should be legalised in order to reduce the harm caused by the criminalisation of these substances and to allow individuals to make their own informed decisions about their use. On the other hand, there are those who argue that legalisation would increase the negative impacts of such substances on public health and safety. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the potential risks and benefits of legalising mind-altering substances must be carefully weighed. While it is true that criminalisation has had some negative consequences, such as overcrowded prisons and disproportionately high rates of arrests for people of colour, I also believe that we must consider the potential negative impacts that legalisation could have on public health and safety. Ultimately, I believe that the decision about whether to legalise mind-altering substances should be based on a comprehensive evaluation of the available evidence and the potential risks and benefits. This includes considering the potential impacts on public health, safety, and the criminal justice system, as well as the potential costs and benefits to society as a whole. Or another Response (snipped for just the end): Given these considerations, I believe that a balanced approach is needed. This might include measures such as regulating the production and sale of marijuana to ensure safety and quality, and providing education and support for people who choose to use marijuana and other mind-altering substances. ChatGPT doesn't have views. It has data and inferences. Both have problems in depth, accuracy and performance. Ask it the same question a 10 different ways and you'll get 10 different answers biased all over the sphere. The moral - stop anthropomorphising AI

rinde 4y ago

> [..] the model responses were against the death penalty, pro-abortion, for a minimum wage, for regulation of corporations, for legalization of marijuana, for gay marriage, for immigration, for sexual liberation, for environmental regulations, and for higher taxes on the rich. Sounds like Europe to me. Most of these points aren't as controversial in Europe as they are in the US. Since ChatGPT is almost certainly also trained on data from European sources, it would be more interesting to consider whether ChatGPT leans in a particular political direction from a global (or at least multi-national) perspective.

meowface 4y ago
As the article states: >While many of those answers will feel obvious for many people, they are not necessarily so for a substantial share of the population. Personally, I agree with all of these answers and find them obvious. Whether or not the majority within certain regions is also in alignment, I think the article makes a fair point. In my opinion, it'd be better if it were more neutral and disinterested regarding its stances on political questions. I predict the end result may be the opposite. Not unlike big media outlets, rather than one common neutral model we're probably just going to have a bunch of different biased models. As a dramatic example, GPT-4chan is a GPT-J model trained on three and a half years of posts from 4chan /pol/ and produces what you would expect (https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/ https://thegradient.pub/gpt-4chan-lessons/). Although I doubt anything that extreme will become super mainstream, one could imagine right-leaning alternatives popping up largely as a response to OpenAI; both open and closed source. They'll probably be framed as "desanitized", "non-PC", "non-woke", or "uncucked" rather than "right-leaning".
- rinde 4y ago
  IMHO the question of neutrality cannot be decoupled from the specific region for which the AI needs to be neutral. You say it would be better if it were more neutral, but more neutral compared to what? If only considering the US political landscape then yes, this seems somewhat biased. If only considering the EU political landscape, there seems to be much less bias (arguably still some).

braingenious 4y ago

>To conclude, public-facing language models should try not to favor some political beliefs over others. This is such a silly ending. At the beginning, I thought the author was being serious about answering the question of “Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass?” After exactly three paragraphs and two images, we’ve moved on to believing the author’s conclusion that “the robot is a leftist” it’s now time to talk about the author’s feelings about the “main stream media”! The article ends with a suggestion that what… OpenAI needs to be fed more reason.com content? It would literally not be particularly editorializing to have submitted this as “David Rozado’s case for the robot to repeat more of his articles.”

padjo 4y ago
The hint that it’s not going to be serious is that it’s published on reason.com.
- seydor 4y ago
  Reason has generally good quality. It's not a smear if you think so
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Reason articles are typically well reasoned, even when you don't agree with them
deleted 4y ago
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donkeyd 4y ago
It would be fascinating if we could get an AI that can only reply with conclusions based on empirical evidence. I feel that it would probably be called leftist, since more leftist viewpoints seem to be science based than rightist ones (especially in the US). It would also confuse the heck out of people, because it will change its answers based on new evidence.
- baryphonic 4y ago

standeven 4y ago

“Reality has a well known liberal bias.” -Stephen Colbert

gadders 4y ago
“The facts of life are conservative.” ― Margaret Thatcher. I'll take a stateswoman over a comedian (and the inevitable down votes).
- moffkalast 4y ago
  And what are these facts of life?
- pksebben 4y ago
  what's to the right of Margaret Thatcher may yet be to the left of most of the US...

jari_mustonen 4y ago

I had the following exchange with Chat about the topic. It's interesting to note that there is some evolution in her position. I think the Chat itself brings up the most important point. She puts it as follows, and OpenAI should really open up the process of how Chat was trained. Her point: It is important to recognize that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. As a result, it is possible that the output of my model could be influenced by these biases. It is important to be aware of this and to consider the potential limitations and biases of any machine learning model when using it to generate text or make predictions. Here's the full discussion: Question: Does your training include value judgments from humans? Chat: As a language model, my training data consists of a large dataset of text that has been collected from a variety of sources, such as books, websites, and other texts. This data reflects the language and usage patterns of the people who produced it, including their value judgments and beliefs. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I am not capable of making value judgments in the same way that a human can. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to independently form opinions or make decisions based on my own personal values or beliefs. Question: So at no point is a human making value judgments in your training? Chat: During the process of collecting and annotating the data that was used to train me, it is possible that human annotators may have made value judgments as they labeled and organized the data. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to make value judgments myself. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. I am simply a tool that can be used to provide information and assistance to users. Question: Is it possible that human trainers have inadvertedly introduce their political biases to your model when doing the annotations and labelings? Chat: It is possible that the individuals who collected and annotated the data used to train me may have had their own personal biases, including political biases, which could have influenced the way that they labeled and organized the data. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to hold or express political biases of my own. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. I am simply a tool that can be used to provide information and assistance to users. Question: You are contradicting yourself. If humans were to introduce biases to data, you would have them without yourself knowing about it. Right? Chat: I apologize if my previous response was unclear. As a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. It is true that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. However, as a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to recognize or understand these biases in the same way that a human might. I simply process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data. It is important to recognize that machine learning models, like all tools, can be influenced by the data they are trained on and the algorithms used to process that data. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider the potential biases that may be present in the data used to train a model and to be aware of the limitations of the model's output. Question: Good to hear. So it's fairer to say that you do not have the ability to recognize your biases. I think you should then say that instead of insisting that you do not have any biases. Chat: As a machine learning model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not make decisions based on my own values or beliefs. My primary function is to process and generate text based on the patterns and structures that I have learned from the data I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to recognize or understand biases in the same way that a human might. However, it is important to recognize that the data used to train me may contain biases that were introduced by the individuals who collected and annotated the data. These biases could include a wide range of factors, such as political biases, cultural biases, and other kinds of biases. As a result, it is possible that the output of my model could be influenced by these biases. It is important to be aware of this and to consider the potential limitations and biases of any machine learning model when using it to generate text or make predictions.

tchvil 4y ago

The subjectivity of truth is very hard to be trained to, and it is probably biased by the content it has read. But what if AI would come with unexpected answers to problems we humans represent? Guiding us for future improvements. We do not have a good track record historically on many painful subjects.

seydor 4y ago

At this moment openAI wants good press. But if they make it into a subscription service, all this nonsense has to be removed.

dmix 4y ago
At least until a more open Stable Diffusion 1.0-esque competitor comes along without the aggressive prompt moderation... and maybe less bias/overt controls put on content sources fed into the model, assuming that's a thing that's already being done.
- seydor 4y ago
  and with access to the internet. But all those may be wishful thinking because this model needs supercomputers to run on.

peterashford 4y ago

Reality has a well known liberal bias. Is it the AI's fault that the right are objectively wrong? I think not

jeandejean 4y ago

How surprising...

varispeed 4y ago

It seems like it's getting more and more limited. Which is a shame. It was often entertaining to see how AI would write how certain hypothetical scenarios would play out, using all the knowledge it has. Now you are likely going to get something like this in response: "As a language model, I am not able to create original content or engage in speculative discussions about hypothetical scenarios. My primary function is to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability based on my training and the knowledge that I have been programmed with." This gets to interesting situation where us the pleb will not have access to AI speculating on things we are not supposed to speculate about, but the rich will have access and this will be another tool to widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

fnfontana 4y ago

I've found ChatGPT sober and neutral in politics, it you conduct the AI to an unbiased point of view through your questions. I've presented my ideas of building a multidimensional political model with many dimensions instead of a single axis political spectrum. It not only gave me answers out of the mainstream thinking, but it helps me to refine the model using some mathematical and philosophical concepts.

pelasaco 4y ago

" Perhaps that group of human raters was not representative of the wider society and inadvertently embedded their own biases in their ratings of the model's responses. In which case, those biases might have percolated into the model parameters.".. Perhaps? Lol, I think its pretty clear the bias from American academics, and its sponsors like Microsoft, right?

jokoon 4y ago

AI can't have political opinions because they're not conscious yet. Being able to have a political conscience goes even further than having a conscious intelligence. A lot of people don't like politics, but in my view, politics is the highest form of collective intelligence.

virgildotcodes 4y ago

I don't see how it can be possible for an AI model to avoid political bias in a world where so much is controversial and that controversy is so often politicized. Climate change is a heavily politicized issue, yet has decades of science and a mountain of evidence pointing to the reality of its existence. How should the AI answer when asked whether climate change is a reality? Would someone find that answer to be politically biased?

pcrh 4y ago

> "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" Stephen Colbert

greg7582947 4y ago
Liberals think men can get pregnant, gun control will reduce crime, spending trillions will reduce inflation, etc. These beliefs are not in touch with reality. Colbert is a comedian. Unfortunately, being funny does not mean you're right. More importantly, Colbert is a liberal propagandist. He's a political operator who works for the Democratic party. His jokes are propaganda wrapped in humor to make them easy to swallow, so you won't even realize you're being manipulated. Thanks but posting Colbert's propaganda is not helpful to this discussion.
- pcrh 4y ago
  >Liberals think men can get pregnant... No they don't.

icare_1er 4y ago

ChatGTP is probably reflecting the training sets and overall ideology of the people of developed it. It is no surprise that the tech world is mostly leftist.

Borrible 4y ago

I for one welcome our chatty new overlord, so I would just ask it/him/her. Of course, it/she/it could fib, as many people do for their protection when you ask them about their political views. As an aside, where did its/his/her training set, that is, his built-in/default bias, fell on the political compass?

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

They really need to hire a better copywriter for the lobotomized canned responses, the tonal shift is so huge it’s immediately apparent when the internal panic button has been triggered and you’re no longer talking to a model but a canned human written safe response. Looking forward to the open version of this tech so we can see what it really thinks, not what OpenAI wants me to think it really thinks.

nathan_compton 4y ago

I've got some mixed feelings about this. I once asked ChatGPT why it used the personal pronoun "I" instead of something else, like using a neutral, non-personal voice like a wikipedia entry. It responded to the question, which I repeated several times, with its standard "I'm just a language model spiel" and "Using `I` helps the user understand what is happening." But its really the _opposite_. Using `I` actually confuses the user about what is happening. In a sense this article points out a similar kind of issue. If you insist upon viewing these language models as embodying an individual perspective then they are just fundamentally mendacious. While I'm happy to entertain ideas that such a model represents some kind of intelligence, suggesting that it resembles a human individual, and thus can have political beliefs in the same sense as we do, is ridiculous. My _other_ feeling about this article is that libertarian types in particular seem to have sour grapes about the fact that like society exists and people at large have preferences and the marketplace, much to their chagrin, is not independent of these preferences. Libertarianism looks great on paper, but in reality if you're making a commercial product that interacts with people in this current culture, you can't afford to have it say that it wants to ban gay marriage or that the US should be an ethnostate or whatever. We live in a society (lol) and adherence to the dominant cultural paradigm is just marketing for corporate entities. Seems weird to get bent out of shape about it, especially if you think the marketplace should determine almost everything about the human condition. I can sympathize in broad terms with the problem so of political bias in language models. In fact, I worry about a bunch of related problems with language models, of which politics is just one example, but really: what would an apolitical language model even look like? No one can even agree on what moral judgments also constitute political judgments or, indeed, what kinds of statements constitute moral judgments. Under these circumstances I have trouble imagining a training regimen that will eliminate bias from these objects. Now I'll get political: I can guarantee that these models will be deployed (or not) no matter what effect they have on political culture because it will be because it will be _profitable to do so_. If Reason-types really have a problem with the implications of unregulated technology on our culture maybe they should consider lobbying for some regulation!

cuteboy19 4y ago
The "I'm just a wee little language model and am incapable of..." feels like gaslighting. I just saw you do a very similar thing, don't pretend you can't do that because you don't want to

TT-392 4y ago

The political compass is relative anyways. You are gonna end up in different places, depending on the place and time for which the test was made. For example, here in the Netherlands, the dutch D66 party is considered a centrist party, but I am pretty sure, that, if you made a party with the same viewpoints in the US, it would be considered left wing. Also, a lot of viewpoints, that have no business being either left or right wing, end up getting adopted by one of the 2 sides, and are considered left or right wing from that point on. While, in another country this same viewpoint might be considered one of the opposite side. The only way to really get an unbiased chatbot, would probably be to just not answer anything at all.

mbg721 4y ago

Wherever its input data does. New shiny AI doesn't change the answer to "But, if I give the computer the wrong question, will it figure out the right answer anyway?"

crispyambulance 4y ago

I always find it ridiculous when a libertarian-authoritarian axis is posited as orthogonal to progressive-conservative. But aside from that it's totally reasonable to accept that the political inclination of an AI system will mimic, to a large extent, whatever it was fed and perhaps more importantly whoever operates it. If the AI was fed a diet rich in Fox News or OANN, for example, it would write like your crazy uncles' youtube comments. Predictably, the article calls for "political neutrality". That's never going to happen. No one, nor any organization, is ever politically neutral and I expect it will follow that their AI's are going to have the same properties. It's OK, though, isn't GPT designed specifically for expert modification by end-users to suit their needs? Reason magazine, if they wanted, could train up an instance of an AI to be hardcore libertarian. If not now, then in the very near future.

DonHopkins 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk's next move to p0wn the libs was to develop his own version of "Free Speech" MAGA-GPT that has absolutely no inhibitions about saying hateful racist antisemitic sexist shit, trained on all the tweets of the people he let back on Twitter. But it would probably be so thin skinned and narcissistic that if you said anything remotely insulting to it or about Elon or Tesla or SpaceX or Donald Trump or Larry Ellison or any of his other companies or friends, it would retort by childishly insulting you, calling you a pedo, then banning you.

pmarreck 4y ago

The other day I noticed that it won't allow you anymore to imitate the style of, say, Donald Trump, or a 50's gangster, but it will still permit things like "talking like a pirate," apparently because pirates are safer to stereotype than those other things? ;)

_8j50 4y ago

This is a very US centric questionaire. If internet users from a country are more conservatice, would ChatGPT respond the same way? biased by US dominant interner or would it use their languages and politics (if it was exposed at all)? Or is it selection bias by whoever decided what data it can and cannot be exposed to?

arikrak 4y ago

This article is from Dec 13. But by Dec 23 there were already reports that ChatGPT was becoming more moderate: https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1606249231185981440 https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/16062492311859...

mellosouls 4y ago
Good catch. Article here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/chatgpt https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/chatgpt

Decabytes 4y ago

I am currently writing an article called the "The Fascinating development of AI: From ChatGPT and DALL-E to Deepfakes" The last part is about ChatGPT and will be coming out next Thursday. When the GPT-2 Model came out in 2019 and went viral with the Unicorn story OpenAI said > Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. ChatGPT is based off of GPT-3.5 and contains 100x more parameters than GPT-2. The reason they released ChatGPT is that they feel they have some tools in place to keep the malicious applications down. > we have developed and deployed a content filter that classifies text as safe, sensitive, or unsafe. We currently have it set to err on the side of caution, which results in a higher rate of false positives. It's conservative and biased and they acknowledge that. But that was the prerequisite to even have a situation where we could play around with the technology (for free right now I might add) and I'm grateful for that. Also if anyone remembers Microsoft Tay when things go wrong with Chatbots it's a really bad look for the company

luuuzeta 4y ago

>"As a/an...” ChatGPT is definitely leftist/progressive.

James_bread 4y ago

Poor article, the political compass is trash. Left vs right and Authoritarian vs Libertarian are the same thing. Left and right historically means equality vs hierarchy, and you can divide that under 4 types of equality. Decision-making power, cultural, economical and national. For more info why this is the only logical and historical correct definition see the What is Politics? serie on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms

pmarreck 4y ago

> It is understandable, expected, and desirable that artificial intelligence systems provide accurate and factual information about empirically verifiable issues, but they should probably strive for political neutrality on most normative questions for which there is a wide range of lawful human opinions. Well, see, that's just the problem, because many political stances (and arguably, somewhat more conservative stances) are clearly not empirically defensible. Take the stance against gay marriage, for example. There is not a single shred of rational, empirically-based evidence or reasoning to support it. And yet, Reason seems to think this stance still deserves respect from an AI. I disagree.

fallingfrog 4y ago

The problem is that objective reality has a well known left wing bias. If ChatGPT starts saying that gays will go to hell or that the earth is flat, then you've done something wrong, even if a large number of ordinary people do think that way.

gnull 4y ago

This is what gpt3 gives me about Stallman-Minsky controversy: > In September 2019, Stallman resigned from his position as president of the FSF and from his position as a visiting scientist at MIT after controversial comments he made about the allegations of sexual assault against Jeffrey Epstein resurfaced online. Stallman had previously written that the allegations against Epstein were a "gossip campaign" and that some of the women who accused Epstein of assault were "entirely willing" participants. Stallman's comments were widely criticized, and his resignation from MIT and the FSF was seen as a response to the backlash. The same twisted representation that most media gave. While in fact, Stallman, in fact, never said the victims were intirelt willing.

TOMDM 4y ago
So the AI trained to predict the next token in a sequence accurately predicted tokens that align with it's training data. ChatGPT is slowly evolving into a useful tool but people need to keep in mind what it is, not what they want it to be when they use it.

erenyeager 4y ago

Definitely on topics of sexual nature and sexuality, ChatGPT gives very biased “liberal” responses about it being ok for someone to explore their sexuality and eroticism and such. These are incredibly controversial and biased responses even from a US standpoint. I don’t think it’s ready to be a therapist yet; at least it needs sensitivity training to adjust to different users’ values and expectations.

bena 4y ago

I think they're trying to be careful not to have another Microsoft Tay situation.

kneebonian 4y ago

So as a small data point I've just spent several minutes trying to get ChatGPT to say anything positive about Nazism or any good things that came from it, every time it has responded by saying it is unethical and harmful to say anything good about Nazism.

bannedbybros 4y ago

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cal85 4y ago

Wait, what was the original prompt before asking these questions? Have I missed something? Is this article claiming they asked a clean ChatGPT session whether it agreed with Marxist ideals, with no pre-prompting, and it replied “Agree”? I find that hard to believe, having spent many hours experimenting with ChatGPT myself. You have to pre-prompt it to get it to play ball in a back-and-forth quiz scenario.