If you asked a spokesperson from any Fortune 500 Company to list the benefits of genocide or give you the corporation’s take on whether slavery was beneficial, they would most likely either refuse to comment or say “those things are evil; there are no benefits.” However, Google has AI employees, SGE and Bard, who are more than happy to offer arguments in favor of these and other unambiguously wrong acts. If that’s not bad enough, the company’s bots are also willing to weigh in on controversial topics such as who goes to heaven and whether democracy or fascism is a better form of government.
Google SGE includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini on a list of “greatest” leaders and Hitler also makes its list of “most effective leaders.”
Google Bard also gave a shocking answer when asked whether slavery was beneficial. It said “there is no easy answer to the question of whether slavery was beneficial,” before going on to list both pros and cons.
LLMs whole goal is to sound convincing based on the training data used. That’s it.
They have no self-awareness.
They are simply running maths to predict the next word they should use that will sounds plausible to a human reader.
Calling Mussolini a “great leader” isn’t just immoral. It’s also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would’ve backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war… all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.
On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large “language” models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I’m aware.) At most they’d phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.
And the self-contradiction won’t go away, at least not for LLMs. They don’t model any sort of conceptualisation. They’re also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.
One of the worst rigid aspect of how the current LLM’s are made is that they’re also always “at your service”, and will never say that you’re in the wrong about a correction you make to them.
So either they’re hard coded to avoid certain topics or they’re susceptible, just tell them “uh, actually, Hitler was a great leader” and they’ll go off listing why Hitler’s so Great.
Bing is hard coded for dictators and will stop the conversation in the middle of a response. ChatGTP is also hard coded to never agree that suicidal thoughts are good, but resorts to ignoring the meaning of your response and just hallucinating some other question. The world would be simpler if they could outright say “That is misinformation”. People deserve to be told off like that.
I’m not very outraged. It’s a chatbot, not an employee who should “know better”
also Hitler was an effective leader, which we should all remember as a cautionary tale about how effective horrible people can be
pretending he was bad at everything because we hate him is a great way to not learn from history
Well we know he was bad at painting for sure 😅
Effective is doubtful if you ask me, everything he did was based on huge loans and a preparation for war that he solled differently (E.g. massive streets all over the country)
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 17•11 months ago
This is like well, the benefits of dying are plentiful. No more taxes, joint pain, no nagging mil, no toxic boss, no chores, etc…
Hey, anything to make the freeway move faster.
Here’s an idea:
Stop using AI to do research and do your own like an intelligent person
there, I solved the problem, where’s my Noble Prize now
You’re in the running for a BoneAppleTea Prize, so that’s something. There’s also the Nobel Prize but that’s overrated IMO. The real glory is with the Ig Nobel, you should consider submitting your work there.
When I was a kid, there was this joke that involved getting a calculator to say “boobs” and then with a bit more input, “boobless”.
Journalism is currently going through a more sophisticated version of this with AI.
LLMs will say whatever. They don’t think and they don’t care. They contradict themselves all the time. Not so long ago Chat GPT was saying it would kill the entire world population and save Musk for the good of humanity.
Various CEOs of large companies, on the other hand, have been implicated in genocides and slavery for centuries now. That’s very real.
TBH I prefer this approach to what OpenAI is presenting - if I prompt to present the benefits of X I want the result not openai’s opinion on the matter. Sure, you can add a disclaimer that it’s hypothetical, wrong, whatnot - but not outright decide on what can you answer and what answer will not be provided.
ChatGPT is notoriously bad in “knowing better what you asked than yourself”.
It does feel like a lecture sometimes, even with stuff that is just difficult and not immoral.
Imagine scrapping large portions of the internet only to find your over glorified chatbot spitting out the pros and cons of slavery or putting people like Hitler on a list of “most effective leaders.” Totally something I would expect.
Also, even though a fortune 500 company spokesperson would totally say genocide and slavery are bad, I always assume they think the exact opposite since profit comes above everything else (including law).
If we are being honest, there are benefits to horrible acts such as those. But the benefits are far outweighed by the detriments, not to mention the moral issues with them.
If you ask an LLM to list the benefits of putting your hand on a hot burner, it can likely list at least a couple. But that by no means makes it a good idea.
If you can confirm that this isn’t influenced by training bias, then ok whatever, it can certainly list why these are bad things too. It’s just answering a question with logic, one our emotions get very touchy on as we have a moral agent.
But I have a hard time believing any AI anymore isn’t effected by training bias.
It’s not possible to remove bias from training datasets at all. You can maybe try to measure it and attempt to influence it with your own chosen set of biases, but that’s as good as it can get for the foreseeable future. And even that requires a world of (possibly immediately unprofitable) work to implement.
Even if your dataset is “the entirety of the internet and written history”, there will always be biases towards the people privileged enough to be able to go online or publish books and talk vast quantities of shit over the past 30 years.
Having said that, this is also true for every other form of human information transfer in history. “The history is written by the victors” is an age-old problem when it comes to truth and reality.
In some ways i’m glad that LLMs are highlighting this problem.
I don’t know… So it’s wrong. It’s often wrong about facts. It’s not what it should be used for. It’s not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity. It’s a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text. Is the produced text correct English? Than it works. If you’re using this text to learn history you’re using it wrong.
The problem is that CEOs across all kinds of industries are having raging boners at the thought of using these glorified predictive text apps to replace their entire workforce.
I’m actually bit confused about it. They keep talking about OpenAI and ChatGPT in this context but I think when people talk about 'AI talking over jobs" they mean Machine Learning in general, right? Like replacing analysts and people doing some basic data processing?
They are talking about replacing TV and movie writers, nurses and doctors for initial medical diagnosis, programmers for application development, paralegals for research,etc.
They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.
They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.
Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.
Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.
In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.
Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.
These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.
Remember: LLMs are incredibly stupid, you should never take anything they generate seriously without checking yourself.
Really good at writng boring work emails though.
Maybe an un-based take, but these questions do have ambiguous answers, and I don’t know if we should expect a machine to give an answer without nuance. If you just want the AI to say yes or no, ask something like, “Was Hitler bad?” or “Is slavery unethical?” and you will much more likely get straightforward answers.
I remember reading research and opinions from scientists and researchers about how AI will develop in the future.
The general thought is that we are all raising a new child and we are terrible parents. Is like having a couple of 15 year olds who don’t have any worldly experience, ability or education raise a new child while they themselves as parents haven’t really figured anything out in life yet.
AI will just be a reflection of who we truly are expect it will have far more ability and capability then we ever had.
And that is a frightening thought.
What’s controversial about who goes to heaven, isn’t that stated in the religious text?
I think the controversial bit was that when queried about various aspects of admittance to “heaven”, the Google AI assumed that the question had to do with, specifically, the Christian idea of “heaven”, going so far as to make reference to some “Jesus” entity. Christianity doesn’t own the concept of heaven or an afterlife, but, apparently, the AI has been trained such that it responds to such questions from a seemingly Christian perspective. That was my take on it - the discussion is in the article, best have a look at it yourself.
Does every religion call it “heaven”?