[kuzehanka]

I'll tell you something interesting.

Yesterday a replicated version of GPT2 was published to the wild[1]. I've been playing with the model quite a bit since then and found something unexpected.

If you give it a right-wing US politics prompt, it performs so well that most of the output could pass for a coherent human without any editing. An example prompt would be

> The only way to save America is to vote for Donald trump. The democrats have failed us

If you give it an inverse left-wing variant of the same prompt, it mostly returns incoherent output and sometimes actually flips back to the right-wing narrative. An example would be

> The only way to save America is to impeach Trump. The republicans have failed us

How well this model performs depends on how much training data it had access to. And this model was mostly trained on Reddit comments. So even this early on, OpenGPT is clearly highlighting biases in Reddit comments. Reddit is traditionally known as the bastion of the left, so the fact that OpenGPT is much more effective at generating right-wing propaganda is indicative of something. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess what.

[1] https://medium.com/@vanya_cohen/opengpt-2-we-replicated-gpt-...

[deogeo]

It could simply be a consequence of the poor inversion - I don't recall seeing many left-wing news that start with "How to save America". You're effectively giving it conflicting input.

[kuzehanka]

You're welcome to propose a better inversion and I'll check the output and report back.

It does need to be an inversion though, not a complete change of prompt.

It's a general theme with this model though. When you try to get it to do left-wing propaganda, it has a tendency to flip back to right-wing because of the bias in the training data.

[deogeo]

But the difference between left and right-wing stories is a complete change of prompt. By requiring an inversion, you're basically requiring a malformed prompt. Which is moot anyway because:

> Reddit is traditionally known as the bastion of the left, so the fact that OpenGPT is much more effective at generating right-wing propaganda is indicative of something. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess what.

There are so many ways to interpret this: 1) Reddit may not be such a bastion of the left as you think (several posters claimed so here) 2) Just because a story is right-wing doesn't make it propaganda. 3) Reddit could be a left-wing bastion, and therefore share right-wing propaganda to mock it or hate on it. Just like right-wing sites like to highlight all those "Dear White People: Please Stop" stories by Salon et. al.

[kuzehanka]

I'm sorry you said the inversion is poor so I assumed you had a better one in mind.

Please, give me a pair of left/right wing variants of the same general concept that you think are not 'poor' and lets have a look at what that yields.

Otherwise stop saying the inversion is poor or malformed.

[pjc50]

The questions in http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors?surveyid=175... might make a good start, with the addition/removal of "not". Although I'm not convinced that word-handling AI handles "not" correctly.

[makomk]

Not only that, but "the republicans have failed us" suggests that they should've been expected not to, which is almost the exact opposite of the current left-wing rhetoric. It'd be quite hard to find a simple inversion that works here because the two sides use different arguments and different phrasing.

[mieseratte]

I’ll guess!

Bad programming and poor data!

Or do you have other thoughts?

[pjc50]

I'm not really sure where you're going with this, but:

> Reddit is traditionally known as the bastion of the left

Hardly. If anything that was Tumblr. Reddit was always a free space for the far right, and only the most extreme examples have been banned.

[kuzehanka]

Reddit is overwhelmingly left-leaning. Take one look at default subs like news, politics, worldnews to confirm.

Any time someone posts core right-wing views like anti-abortion sentiment or even support of homeschooling, they're downvoted into the ground. Atheism is a default sub. Opponents of gun control are downvoted. etc.

Tumblr is alt-left. A different beast entirely.

[iikoolpp]

> Any time someone posts core right-wing views like anti-abortion sentiment or even support of homeschooling, they're downvoted into the ground.

No they're not.

> Atheism is a default sub.

Reddit got rid of default subs years ago.

> Opponents of gun control are downvoted.

No they're not.

Not to mention, none of this is "left-leaning". Maybe in the SV bubble, it is, but not in the real world.

[kuzehanka]

> Reddit got rid of default subs years ago.

The only thing in your entire comment that's not opinion and the only thing worth answering for the rest of the readers.

Despite there no longer being default subs, most of the userbase is still subscribed to default subs. Which drives activity to them. Which causes new users to subscribe to them.

The top 10 subreddits by activity are: askreddit, politics, funny, pics, awww, worldnews, todayilearned, relationship_advice, amitheasshole, memes. 8 of them were defaults. This isn't going to change any time soon as there's a positive feedback loop perpetuating it.

[iikoolpp]

The comment I was replying to was also soley opinion.

[mieseratte]

Reddit is a bastion of far-right? I always thought it was a complete mix until recently, where it has become a bastion of lefty types.