this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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5
Why AI is going to be a shitshow. (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.

(she was right, BTW)

Now I've been using Microsoft's Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It's fairly robust and sure it has it's quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it's information from.

So I asked it a simple straightforward question:

"I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications"

And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications."

But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I'm sorry I can't provide you with this information at this time.

I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.

It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.

Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it's infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.

When other's, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

The reason these models are being heavily censored is because big companies are hyper-sensitive to the reputational harm that comes from uncensored (or less-censored) models. This isn't unique to AI; this same dynamic has played out countless times before. One example is content moderation on social media sites: big players like Facebook tend to be more heavy-handed about moderating than small players like Lemmy. The fact small players don't need to worry so much about reputational harm is a significant competitive advantage, since it means they have more freedom to take risks, so this situation is probably temporary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Also that LLMs have a habit of churning out junk. Microsoft in particular, probably has some extreme restrictions in place after the recent debacle with Sydney/Bing begging someone to leave their wife, and all of that controversy.

They don't need it going full Tay.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I'm told that's called white fragility. It seems inherent to corporate.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You mean to tell me the rich and powerful have a vested interest in watering down of a technology for public consumption, while holding the concentrate for themselves and their pockets?!?

Appreciate the clarity you brought here! ♥️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying the rich and powerful have a vested interest in not taking risks that jeopardize their power and wealth, because they have more to lose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You’re not describing a problem with AI, you’re describing a problem with a layer between you and the AI.

The censorship isn’t actually as smart as they’d like. They give what is essentially a list of things that the LLM can’t talk about, and if the pattern matches it, it kills the entire thread.

Which is what happened here. M$ set some arbitrary “omg this is bad” rules, and in the process of describing things it hit that “omg bad” flag. My guess is that the LLM was going into examples of incorrect conclusions, and would have pivoted to “but the actual fact is…” which the filters don’t have the ability to parse out.

In the end, again, this isn’t an AI issue. This is an issue with making it globally available and wanting to ensure your LLM doesn’t say something controversial. Essentially, this is a preemptive PR move.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is a problem of generative AI. The problem is that it's necessary to have these kind of protections to prevent it to accidentally go full nazi.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Have you seen what it takes to go even close to “full conservative”, nevermind full Nazi? Take a look at the Gab AI prompt, and it still goes against most of the biases insisted upon by that prompt.

You’re thinking of much earlier attempts at this which were based purely on user provided input.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ok, but that is virtually no real effort.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

My point was that even trying to (badly) introduce bias towards bad science doesn’t work. The naked LLM being told “the sky is pink” still says the sky is blue.

Now, you can put in real effort and get it to output biased results (“role play as a badly trained LLM that thinks there are only two genders”) but that doesn’t change the fact that the base LLM wouldn’t respond like that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

(she was right, BTW)

I'd be curious to hear your conclusion on this while being well aware of the minefield I'm stepping onto.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The big problem with AI butlers for research is, IMO, stripping out the source takes away important context that helps you decide wether the information you are getting is relevant and appropriate or not. Was the information posted on a parody forum or is it an excerpt from a book by an author with a Ph.D. on the subject? Who knows. The AI is trained to tell you something that you want to hear, not something you ought to hear. It's the same old problem of self selecting information, but magnified 100x fold.

As it turns out, data is just noise without some authority or chain of custody behind it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

As I mentioned, Copilot links the sources of the information it gives at the bottom. if you want to double check the information, it is provided to you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

And somewhere in the Terms of Service it says you have to give up your first born child. Or maybe it doesn’t, but nobody will ever know because nobody reads more than is strictly required.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

TBH it was stupid of you to expect accurate breakdowns from an AI on any subject to begin with, even the subtlest changes of context and nuance could help radicalize a layman.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own

Nope.

Even without corporate tuning or filtering.

A language model is useful when you know what to expect from it, but it's just another kind of secondary information source, not an oracle. In some sense it draws random narratives from the noosphere.

And if you give it search results as part of input in hope of increasing its reliability, how will you know they haven't been manipulated by SEO? Search engines are slowly failing these days. A language model won't recognise new kinds of bullshit as readily as you.

Education is still important.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The censorship gets to me, too.

Try asking bing image creator to draw Jesus. Not a problem. Buddha, Ganesha, David and Goliath, Zeus, no problem. It will give you great depictions.

Now try asking it to draw the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. No joy.

Censorship.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t depicting Muhammad offensive to Muslims? That part makes sense at least.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Writing about him is also offensive. You should edit your comment to remove his name.

PS: Don't actually do that, I was just trying to make a point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't see the problem here. Microsoft knows that people will freak out if Bing hallucinates something controversial that people will disagree with. If you care about the accuracy of the information you're looking for, you should find primary sources, not use AI. AI often gets things wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

AI is statistically guaranteed to have false positives and false negatives, so it bares repeating — don't trust anything AI says or shows you, unless you independently verify the information.

It's great as a developer. Not just because it can rapidly draft boilerplate and help in prototyping with new languages and frameworks, but because you can instantly validate its responses by running its code. When you know the domain, the cracks and insufficiencies of AI become apparent within a few hours/days.

It's like how I used to think Elon Musk was smart, until he bought Twitter, and I realized he's just a confident egomaniac who constantly has no fucking idea what he's talking about, but is surrounded by sycophants who are too stupid or starstruck to challenge dear leader.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You'd rather ask AI for information on racism than listen to black people ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Skin color is irrelevant when trying to validate information. OP thought information may not be correct and tries to fact check via third party means. Found out THEY were wrong, admit it verbatim in the post, and then tells a story on AI censorship. I would advocate for anyone to validate any information from any private accounts before blindly accepting information to be accurate, especially if you are only doing so because you think someone's skin color makes their information more or less valid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Any specific group is going to have a subjective and not objective view of a topic, that can sometimes lead to unexpected outcomes, such as black people on average preferring to interact with more racist white people than less racist white people:

Previous research has suggested that Blacks like White interaction partners who make an effort to appear unbiased more than those who do not. We tested the hypothesis that, ironically, Blacks perceive White interaction partners who are more racially biased more positively than less biased White partners, primarily because the former group must make more of an effort to control racial bias than the latter. White participants in this study completed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of racial bias and then discussed race relations with either a White or a Black partner. Whites' IAT scores predicted how positively they were perceived by Black (but not White) interaction partners, and this relationship was mediated by Blacks' perceptions of how engaged the White participants were during the interaction. We discuss implications of the finding that Blacks may, ironically, prefer to interact with highly racially biased Whites, at least in short interactions.