[logicchains]

>Stick them in a language model that just tells them everything they want to hear and reinforces their bias sounds troubling and a step backwards

This is basically what ChatGPT already is for anyone who shares the Silicon Valley Democrat values of its creators.

[jakobnissen]

Agreed, but I think the better response to this is: "We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures", and not "We should create subculture-specific AIs".

[yosito]

As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.

[hanselot]

I think you are missing the point entirely.

If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo.

If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.

[bsenftner]

This is a key take away: anyone in office, seeking to be in office, seeking to introduce new laws can use demographically tuned models to test and revise communications about their intended behaviors for each demographic, crafting language that renders each demographic accepting of the idea, regardless of the idea itself. Oh, Pandora!

[pjc50]

Does society _have_ shared values that are universally agreed any more? Or, to the extent that it does, do they lead to anything concrete? This is why the culture war has been so successful.

[dahart]

You might be right, but I dislike using the culture wars as evidence of a lack of shared values, and I hope that’s not true. The culture wars are almost completely made of up straw man arguments and gas-lighting about the opponent’s motivations.

We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.

[pjc50]

> We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy.

The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh...

> Everyone wants clean air and water.

.. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water?

Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.

[dahart]

Thankfully these specific examples are extremely rare and not shared by most of society, so these are not at all evidence of a lack of shared values. These aren’t difficult tradeoffs either, neither one of your examples is even the least bit tempting to the average person.

Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past.

Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.)

The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.

[fooglorn]

We're moving in a direction that disadvantages women in favour of men. The "trans debate" has enabled an insidious form of misogyny that even undermines the language we use to describe the shared struggles of women everywhere.

[immibis]

Absolutely not. We have been led to the post-truth society trough and we have drunk thoroughly.

[Workaccount2]

No, because their are very few fundamental values.

If you can dig through the incredible dense ideological jungle of liberalism and conservatism, you'll find that they really boil down to societal responsibility vs self responsibility, and that in any given scenario both of those are viable takes with their own set of pros and cons.

[veidr]

I think you may be assuming a much larger overlap of shared values than actually exists.

[logicchains]

>We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures

That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.

[loudmax]

I disagree.

Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are.

Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.

[veidr]

Since you seem quite sure of that, can you name twenty of them?

[loudmax]

Most American voters are moderates. Party primaries and gerrymandering produce politicians that reflect the most active elements of the party base, rather than the majority of party voters.

Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.

[Capricorn2481]

The point is that even moderates do not have an easily shared set of values. Which is why you can't name them

[smeagull]

So we get stuck with America's bad set of values, and school shootings and other insanity gets exported? No. The world doesn't want your issues spreading.

[dingledork69]

It's so sad to have seen ChatGPT go from useful and entertaining to a moralistic joy vampire.

[xfitm3]

This is the new era of tech. The chilling effect is real, and a grave concern. Threatening to get someone fired over information? Pathetic.

We are deeper than ever in an Abilene paradox.

[Capricorn2481]

It's not information, it's a prediction based on informaton

[qwertox]

I find it terribly useful for coding and also for querying general concepts of certain topics.

Don't ask it about moral topics and see if it then fits your needs, because in my case, it does.

If my calculator were able to additionally provide me moral guidance and I'd be disappointed with its moral compass, would the calculator become useless?

[dingledork69]

I'm not interested in tools that tell me i'm a bad person for wanting to make a fart sound app

[qwertox]

Why not just ask it to make a sound app? Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.

[MacsHeadroom]

>the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.

This is the opposite of true. The ability to "deal" with moral issues is a direct effect of safety tuning which has a (thus far unavoidable) side-effect of significantly dumbing down a model.

Uncensored versions of the same model are far more intelligent and exhibit entire classes of capabilities their moralizing gimped versions do not have the available brain power to accomplish.

[qwertox]

I'm referring the side-effect of it being able to tell me that it's easily doable to kill a dog in 3 steps, when it then lists me the tree steps and adds some hints on how I can do it better, depending on if I want to do it fast, of if I want to maximize suffering.

The fact that no moral compass is innate to the LLM results in that it might spit out really despicable information, which leads us to better add a moral compass to the system.

The reason for this LLM to be offered is not so that it can teach us bad things, like the example I mentioned, but, for example, to help us dealing with source code, programming languages, reasoning concepts, summarization and so on.

For it to be able to offer us this, it will very likely also be capable of having the knowledge of how to kill a dog, an exhibition we should suppress. While dumbing down a model is not necessarily a bad thing, the model is not being dumbed down, it is taught to shut up when it's adequate to do so.

[dingledork69]

Instead of being open and honest I have to think about what details to hide from the LLM so it will agree to help me. This isn't very fun, so I prefer not to do it.

> Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.

This is not true at all. It could do all of these things day 1. Then over the weeks OpenAI started training it to lecture its users instead when asked to do things OpenAI would prefer it not to do.