Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Goes Haywire, Boasts About Billionaire’s Pee-Drinking Skills and ‘Blowjob Prowess’
DandomRude@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Although Grok’s manipulation is so blatantly obvious, I don’t believe that most people will come to realize that those who control LLMs will naturally use this power to pursue their interests.
They will continue to use ChatGPT and so on uncritically and take everything at face value because it’s so nice and easy, overlooking or ignoring that their opinions, even their reality, are being manipulated by a few influential people.
Other companies are more subtle about it, but from OpenAI to MS, Google, and Anthropic, all cloud models are specifically designed to control people’s opinions—they are not objective, but the majority of users do not question them as they should, and that is what makes them so dangerous.
There’s huge risk here but I don’t think most are designed to control people’s opinions. I think most are chasing the cheapest option and it’s expensive to have people upset about racist content so they try to train around that sometimes too much leading to black Nazi images etc.
But yeah, it is a power that will get abused by more than just grok
but I don’t think most are designed to control people’s opinions
Yeah I’m on team chaos theory. People can plan and design shit all they want, but the complexity will lead to unexpected behavior, always. How harmful that unwanted behavior is, or how easy it is to control or contain, is often unknown in advance, but invented things tend to develop far, far outside the initial vision of the creators.
I use various AI models and I repeatedly notice that certain information is withheld or misrepresented, even though it is freely available in abundance and is therefore part of the training data.
I don’t think this is a coincidence, especially since the operators of all cloud LLMs are so business-minded.
A bunch of this can be expected failure modes for LLMs. Do you have a list of short examples to get an idea?
What do you find is being suppressed?
For example, objective information about Israel’s actions in Gaza. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against leading members of the government a long time ago, and the UN OHCHR classifies the actions of the State of Israel as genocide. However, these facts are by no means presented as clearly as would be appropriate given the importance of these institutions. Instead, when asked whether Israel is committing genocide, one receives vague, meaningless answers. Only when specifically asked whether numerous reputable institutions actually classify Israel’s actions as genocide do most LLMs reveal that much, if not all, evidence points to this being the case. In my opinion, this is a deliberate method of obscuring reality, as the vast majority of users will not or cannot ask questions if they are unaware of the UN OHCHR’s assessment or do not know that arrest warrants have been issued against leading members of the Israeli government on suspicion of war crimes (many other reputable institutions have come to the same conclusion as the UN OHCHR and the International Criminal Court).
Another example: if you ask whether it is legally permissible to describe Donald Trump as a rapist, you will be told that this is defamation. However, a judge in the Carroll case has explicitly stated that this description applies to Trump – so it is in fact legally permissible to describe him as such. Again, this information is only available upon explicit request, if at all. This also distorts reality for people who are not yet informed. However, since many people initially seek information from LLMs, this leads to them being misinformed because they lack the background knowledge to ask explicit follow-up questions when given misleading answers.
Given the influence of both Israel and the US president, I cannot help but suspect that there is an intention behind this.
khepri@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s why I trust my random unauditable chinese matrix soup over my random unauditable american matrix soup frankly
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Trusting any of that shit is the problem.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
You mean Deepseek on a local device?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
No one is really running Deepseek locally. What ollama advertises (and basically lies about) is the now-obselete Qwen 2.5 distillations.
…I mean, some are, but it’s exclusively lunatics with EPYC homelab servers, heh.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 40 minutes ago
Thx for clarifying.
I once tried a community version from huggingface (distilled), which worked quite well even on modest hardware. But that was a while ago. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to look into this stuff lately, but I wanted to check that again at some point.
khepri@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
naw, I mean more that the kind of people who uncritically would take everything a chatbot says a face value are probably better off being in chatGPTs little curated garden anyway. Cause people like that are going to immediately get grifted into whatever comes along first no matter what, and a lot of those are a lot more dangerous to the rest of us that a bot that won’t talk great replacement with you.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Ahh, thank you—I had misunderstood that, since Deepseek is (more or less) an open-source LLM from China that can also be used and fine-tuned on your own device using your own hardware.