[llm_nerd]

There wasn't a study or analysis. It was just lazy speculation that felt good because it could be bound up in a "evil white countries exploiting the developing world" narrative. Where exploiting was "paying to do a job".

It was submitted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40623629

Again, there is effectively zero real data showing this. Further, RLHF isn't likely to reinforce such word selection regardless.

A more logical, likely scenario is that training data is biased heavily towards higher grade level material, so word selection veers towards writings that you find in those realms.

[tivert]

> It was just lazy speculation that felt good because it could be bound up in a "evil white countries exploiting the developing world" narrative. Where exploiting was "paying to do a job".

Exploitation like that is in fact happening (see pretty much everything having to do with social media content moderation and RLHF to avoid disturbing content.

Also "paying to do a job" is not the moral panacea you seem to think it is.

[cowsaymoo]

tinfoil had theory: they implanted watermarks already, so that AI generated text can be flagged for future training runs or as a service, such that some phrases are coaxed to become statistical beacons.

[mike_hearn]

That's not really a tinfoil hat theory. That's been possible for some years and OpenAI reportedly does watermark their outputs, and can detect it. They just haven't released it as a service because it'd annoy all the users who are using it for cheating :)

[balder1991]

I believe that if that was possible to do on purpose, they wouldn’t have so much trouble preventing the LLMs from talking about things they shouldn’t.

[IshKebab]

Yeah I would like to see some evidence of this too. It's just asserted as truth in the article. Delve doesn't seem like a particularly unusual word to me, especially in the context of scientific abstracts, and LLMs could totally learn random weird things. How common is "it's important to remember" in Nigeria?

[skywhopper]

Wait, why wouldn’t RLHF influence word choices?

[llm_nerd]

I didn't say it wouldn't (or rather couldn't), I said it was unlikely for the selected hypothesis given standard training data vs RLHF iterations.

[acc4everypici]

then again, most history consists of whitewashing back when northern countries were exploiting everywhere else in various ways: imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, financialization,...

typical people prefer to pretend this is simply "order" and "progress"; seemingly blind to their own ideological baggage like fish in water