[ninjagoo]

> Absolutely terrifying that OpenAI is just tossing around that such subtle training biases were hard enough to contain it had to be added to system prompt.

May I introduce you to homo sapiens, a species so vulnerable to such subtle (or otherwise) biases (and affiliations) that they had to develop elaborate and documented justice systems to contain the fallouts? :)

[chongli]

We’re really not that vulnerable to such things as a species, because we as individuals all have our own minds and our own sets of biases that cancel out and get lost in the noise. If we all had the exact same bias then it would be a huge problem.

[arglebarnacle]

I hear you but of course history is full of examples of biases shared across large groups of people resulting in huge human costs.

The analogy isn’t perfect of course but the way humans learn about their world is full of opportunities to introduce and sustain these large correlated biases—social pressure, tradition, parenting, education standardization. And not all of them are bad of course, but some are and many others are at least as weird as stray references to goblins and creatures

[ninjagoo]

> If we all had the exact same bias then it would be a huge problem.

And may I introduce you to "groupthink" :))

[Dylan16807]

Now imagine that every opinion you have is automatically fully groupthinked and you see the difference/problem with training up a big AI model that has a hundred million users.

The problem does exist when using individual humans but in a much smaller form.

[ninjagoo]

> The problem does exist when using individual humans but in a much smaller form.

And may I introduce you to organized religion :)

[Dylan16807]

That's still a lot smaller!

Make a major religion where everyone is a scifi clone of one person including their memories and then it'll be in the same ballpark of spreading bias.

[Ekaros]

Doesn't that depend on the biases in question? Many argue that homogenous societies do many things better. And part of homogeneity is sharing same set of biases.

[lifis]

And what do you think society/culture is?

It's a set of biases installed in people, whose purpose is mostly to replicate themselves.

Humans are MORE susceptible that LLMs, because LLMs's biases are easily steered to something else, unlike most humans.

[jychang]

> We’re really not that vulnerable to such things as a species, because we as individuals all have our own minds and our own sets of biases that cancel out and get lost in the noise.

[Citation Needed]

Just because if you have a species-wide bias, people within the species would not easily recognize it. You can't claim with a straight face that "we're really not that vulnerable to such things".

For example, I think it's pretty clear that all humans are vulnerable to phone addiction, especially kids.

[chongli]

> people within the species would not easily recognize it

[Citation Needed]

Sorry, but I had to. There's easy counterexamples of true, species-wide biases that we're fully aware of. Optical illusions, cognitive biases, cultural universals (community-sanctioned relationships/marriage, inheritance, ceremonial treatment of the dead). What we don't have are universal biases towards believing specific facts or stories.

[jychang]

None of those things are easily recognized though. They're not universals. A term like "cognitive biases" generally require a college level education.

If you go to a tribe in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to explain those concepts? Of course not.

Plus, I already gave an example of a species wide bias at the end of the comment- phone addiction for kids. I'm clearly not saying it's impossible for a human to spot a bias, but rather... how many 5 year old kids recognize that phone addiction is a bad thing?

[chongli]

You’ve moved the goalposts.

You’ve gone from “people within the species not being able to easily recognize a bias” to “people universally recognizing that bias, even with no education or contact with the rest of civilization.”

That’s silly, and something I’d never argue for. To me, something is easy for humans to recognize if a 19th century scientist could discover it. We are a social and cultural species. Culture is how we learn anything over the long run.

[jychang]

That's an extremely high bar. To use something off the top of my head: a 19th century scientist discovered Algebraic topology, does that make Algebraic topology easy?

It's pretty clear for me to argue that those things are NOT intuitive at all, and not easy to recognize. That's not changing the goalposts at all. Would the median american voter understand Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology? Obviously not. Things that are easy for people to recognize: "touching a hot stove burns you". Things that are not easy for people to recognize: Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology.

Honestly, your argument falls apart the moment you think about it critically. If it was so easy to recognize bias, then wouldn't all the people in the species already recognized it and voted to shape our legal system to handle any such bias, so it wouldn't be an issue right now? Clearly, that's not the case (we're still dealing with such issues), and understanding such biases is obviously an issue for people in the general public.

[hbs18]

An LLM is a computer program, which isn't a human. You wouldn't excuse a calculator being occasionally wrong because humans sometimes get manual calculations wrong too.

[ninjagoo]

> An LLM is a computer program, which isn't a human. You wouldn't excuse a calculator being occasionally wrong because humans sometimes get manual calculations wrong too.

Ah, now we're getting technical. An LLM is a non-deterministic/probabilistic computer program, not a calculator. Keeping that in mind is critical when using an LLM. Expecting deterministic behavior from an LLM is an example of what's known as a 'category error'. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake