An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.
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 unfertilized eggs while they act with a straight face like they give af about individual liberties or freedoms.
LLMs are fundamentally vulnerable to bias, we have to design LLMs with that in mind and first and foremost carefully structure and curate the training data we train an LLM on so that bias is minimized. The very idea of even thinking about the complexities usually sends conservatives right to outbursts of “that sounds like tyranny!” because they honestly just don’t have any of the skill sets that say, a liberal arts education that values the humanities, might provide you that could allow you to think about how to best solve problems that can’t truly be fairly solved and require empathizing with different groups.
Of course, nobody who has the power at AI companies is thinking about this either but…
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.
Because anybody who has taken a couple of humanities classes, english classes, philosophy classes, journalism/political science classes or who has spent time critically evaluating art, historical accounts or really anything other than just numbers, code 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 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 remove biases, 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. On the contrary I am calling attention to the vital nature of these topics 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.
Computer science has to try to create imperfect solutions to the bias problem, but it would have a much easier time if it recognized how tiny this whole world of computer science still is compared to the immense amount of knowledge in the humanities produced by generations of artists and thinkers tackling the same problems.
We can’t remove biases, but we still have to make better choices anyways.
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
“What because I think Islam is inherently a violent religion now this chatbot is telling me I AM the one with violent and harmful beliefs???” - some loser, maybe elon musk or maybe your uncle, who cares.