Via Scott Alexander at ACX
If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.
I admit I feel better that Grok doesn't do this because it is nefariously trained to, but as a byproduct of something else.
Or do I? Dangerous statements that have an understandable origin are easier to detect and ferret out, aren't they?
2 comments:
My (admittedly amateur) take on why AIs 'hallucinate' is that they have no independent evaluation of reality. They are just as likely to take as gospel an almost completely ahistorical (say, 1619 Project) description of an event as any other source, or refutation of what they're using as a source. Compound that with is likely a training bias to only use 'reputable' (i.e. left leaning) sources, and it's almost a given they are going to produce results like that.
...why AIs 'hallucinate' is that they have no independent evaluation of reality...
Yes, this is right. I've seen them invent not just journal articles but entire academic journals, names of fictitious authors, and claims that just happen to line up with what I was asking it for that doesn't really exist. I can go check the library to see if that's made up. Even though it itself made it up, it can't tell the difference between the thing that's really on the shelf and the piece of information it just invented. They have equal levels of reality for AI: once the information exists in its 'mind,' one piece of information is just as real as another.
Humans have no problem telling Gandalf apart from the guy down the street. One exists at a higher level of reality than the other. There are real things about Gandalf -- he's a wizard, he's faithful to his charge, etc. -- so there are some things that have some level of reality. But the guy down the street is really there if you go to talk to him, and really does all the things you see him doing.
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