Comment on Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 10 months agoSo this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you’re a culture warrior 1984’ing the whole world,
No this isn’t really a problem with the technology, though of course LLMs are extremely flawed in fundamental ways, it is a problem with conservatives being babies and throwing massive tantrums about any guardrails being added even when they are next to cliffs with 200 foot drops.
Conservatives and libertarians (who control most of these companies) want to try to figure this all out for themselves and are hellbent on trying the “no moderation” strategy first and haven’t thought past that step. This is what conservatives and libertarians always do, they might as well be a character archetype in commedia dell’arte at this point.
We can’t have an adult conversation about racism, sexism, hate against trans people or really even the basic concept of systematic stereotypes and prejudices because conservatives refuse to stop running around screaming, making this a conversation with children where everything has to be extremely simplified and black and white and we have to patiently explain over and over again the basic concept of a systematic bias and argue that it even exists.
Then these same people turn around and vote for people who literally want to control what women do with their underutilized eggs while they act with a straight face like they give af about individual liberties or freedoms.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How to you curate training data to remove biases without introducing bias? That’s the key problem here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be opposed to trading one bias for another. At least the initial bias is based on reality.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because anybody who has taken a couple of humanities classes, english classes, journalism/political science classes or who has spent time critically evaluating art, historical accounts or really anything other than just numbers and spreadsheets understands intuitively that EVERYTHING human has bias.
It seems like a lot of conservatives and libertarians are jussssssst beginning to comprehend this and again and they want the conversation to be “BIAS BAD THOUGH LETS GET RID OF IT” because they are children who don’t listen and want to throw a tantrum so we can’t have an adult conversation with nuance.
We can’t, believe me, human history is written with the countless stories of artists, scientists, kings, religious leaders… who all thought they could do shit like that. The point is you can’t. Everything we create and do is biased, everything we create and make is political, these aren’t absolutist statements meant to trivialize a critical nuanced conversation about bias or politics though. It is meant to call attention to the vital nature of those conversations as the actually HARD part of LLMs or social media. The programming, data manipulation, development of decentralized protocols etc… they are all nearly trivial details comparatively which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to create imperfect solutions to this problem, rather it means we should recognize how tiny this whole world of computer science still is compared to the immense amount of knowledge in the humanities that is a product of generations of artists and thinkers.
You can’t remove bias, but you still have to make better choices anyways, you have to make sure the biases are better than the biases were before even knowing you can’t magically eliminate bias from LLMs and similar technology.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well put. I think tackling the bias will always be a challenge. It’s not that we shouldn’t, but how is the question.
I don’t know if any of the big public LLMs are trying to trim biases from their training data or are just trying to ad-hoc tackle it by injecting modifiers into the prompts.
That’s the biggest problem I have personally with LLMs is that they are untrustworthy and often give incorrect or blatantly false information.
Sometimes it can be frustrating when I run across the “I can’t do that because of ethics” on benign prompts that I felt like it shouldn’t have but I don’t think it’s been that big a deal.
When we talk about political conservatives being opposed to biased LLMs, it’s mostly because it won’t tell them that their harmful beliefs are correct