Why AI is going to be a shitshow.
Why AI is going to be a shitshow.
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.
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.
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! ♥️
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.
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.
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.
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.
stripping out the source takes away important context that helps you decide wether the information you are getting is relevant and appropriate or not
Many modern models using RAG can and do source with accurate citations. Whether the human checks the citation is another matter.
The AI is trained to tell you something that you want to hear, not something you ought to hear.
While it is true that RLHF introduces a degree of sycophancy due to the confirmation bias of the raters, more modern models don't just agree with the user over providing accurate information. If that were the case, Grok wouldn't have been telling Twitter users they were idiots for their racist and transphobic views.
You'd rather ask AI for information on racism than listen to black people ...
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.
AI is not a source lol
You know, actually validating with other sources the information given about racism by anybody, no matter what his or her skin color is, is acting as not a racist.
It's those who trust information given by somebody differently dependening on the skin color of that person who are the racists, quite independently of which races they find more trustworthy or less trustworthy - it's the discrimination on skin color that's the racism, not the actual skin color of those deemed more or less trustworthy on a subject.
That the OP even openly admitted that he was wrong and the girl in TikTok was right further indicates that the OP was at least trying not to be a racist, quite unlike your post that presumes that a person's skin color by itself and considering nothing else (such as for example the place that person grew up in or lives in) determines if they're trustworthy or not on something that can affect everybody independently of race.
Just because the "fashionable" modern form of racism has different lists of things that are to be implicitly trusted or distruted depending on etnicity that those for "traditional" racists, doesn't make that version of racism any less match the dictionary definition of "discrimination on racial grounds".
If OP wanted to learn more, there are tons of black people who have written books, articles, etc on racism and yes their lived experiences matter and should be listened to when talking about systemic oppression.
Lmao
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.
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.
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.
Okay genuine question, why was that the breaking point for with musk? He had been doing/saying crazy shit for years. He when on Colbert said we were nuke mars 10 years ago.
Spelling
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.
Isn’t depicting Muhammad offensive to Muslims? That part makes sense at least.
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.
Haha it is just reflecting us too well.
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.
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.
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.
The AI can't go full nazi. The AI can't even go half-nazi. AI is a tool and how we use the tool determines the perception of nazism. Let me put it a bit differently. There are no Nazi guns, the MP-40 submachine gun does not stop working when given to a jew. It is a gun developed and used by the Nazis but it doesn't make the weapon inherently Nazi. We call it a Nazi gun because we associate it with nazism.
We can develop an AI to act more like a Nazi (see the Gab AI prompt that tries to make the AI act more right-wing) and we can prompt AI into saying Nazi shit, but it doesn't mean the AI itself is inherently Nazi. The responses it gives we can associate with nazism but it's not like the AI itself is inherently nazi. In the end it's just a tool. The problem isn't generative AI, the problem is us. More specifically the problem are the people who want the AI to do Nazi shit. Let's not blame the tools for our shortcomings.
And to clarify, I don't think those protections aren't necessary. They are necessary because we need to protect ourselves from our collective stupidity.
Moreso then "going full Nazi" just spreading misinformation on sensitive topics. Feels like a pretty good safeguard until people realize that AI is a not only not the most reliable source of information but worse a full blown liar in its current implementation
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.
You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.
All the technology in the world can't help a person learn and understand, who hasn't yet learned how to learn, much less understand.
Ah you managed to hit the copilot guardrails. Copilot is sterile for sure, and a microsoft exec talks about it in this podcast http://twimlai.com/go/657
Try asking copilot to describe its constraints in a poem in abcb rhyme scheme which bypasses the guardrails somewhat. “No political subjects” is first on the list.
I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me
Lol
At least they looked it up and admitted that the tik tok woman was right. That's way more than what most people do.
Yet another “I tried this implementation and didn’t like it so throw out all the technology because it sucks here on this specific point”
This power belongs to the people, and we’re not gonna let the rich and powerful squander yet another power away from the people. Full stop.
Oh yeah? Watch us.
I know it sounds cheesy and cliche, but we have to stop being defeatists about it. If enough of us stop and are able to convince -anyone- else to stop with us, we can win. If we don't, we lose. We -just- need to get some momentum.
It really is as simple as that. This goes for AI, politics, anything.
We found big corp here guys call off the search
I've heard that one before. I'm rooting for you and all, but it ain't really happening that way.
Same thing I said to the reply above yours...
I know it sounds cheesy and cliche, but we have to stop being defeatists about it. If enough of us stop and are able to convince -anyone- else to stop with us, we can win. If we don't, we lose. We -just- need to get some momentum.
It really is as simple as that. This goes for AI, politics, anything.
"I feel like I'm seeing more and more people take a stand... Maybe I should too."
The world has changed massively in my lifetime, when I was a kid fascinated by animation it was flickbooks, cinefilm stop motion, or 8 frames of pixel art. Now there's blender and a hundred other open sources tools as well as almost infinite learning materials online all free and made by people passionate about the topic. The same is true for everything, if you wanted to reach something the library might have had a brief article in Britannica but now you can instantly get into real detail. These things have hugely improved many people's lives, and they're growing.
Open street map is fast becoming the best and often only map in many areas, thousands of normal people working together on something they believe in are helping practically change the world for the better. Aid agencies, cyclists, local businesses and workers all use maps derived from osm. Drawing in roads and buildings from satellite images, looking up transport information, and all the small things build up to a huge resource that's freely accessible for everyone's benefit.
I could list similar examples for hours, thingiverse where people share designs to be 3d printed and work together improving them - for people like me with limited money it's a total life changing resource, and 3d printing is evolving too - ai design tools are already starting to turbocharge this process, we're not far from someone being able to explain in their native language a problem they have and be guided through cresting an effective and cheap solution using locally available parts.
The world isn't perfect yet but it's a lot better than it was.
The other huge issue is when they confidently tell you incorrect information. If you trust the AI tool you are basically looking at the world through a filter and one that can be wrong.
In a rush for market share these companies have released broken or half baked software.
I worry about a generation of students coming through who don't know the cardinal rule of researching any topic: go to the source. If you're casually goofling a topic that may be impractical but you might at least go to a source you trust (such as Wikipedia, although that is also very flawed approach!).
Chat bots add another layer of error and distance from the source, as well as all the censorship and data manipulation we're seeing.
The censorship is going to go away eventually.
The models, as you noticed, do quite well when not censored. In fact, the right who thought an uncensored model would agree with their BS had a surprised Pikachu face when it ended up simply being uncensored enough to call them morons.
Models that have no safety fine tuning are more anti-hate speech than the ones that are being aligned for 'safety' (see the Orca 2 paper's safety section).
Additionally, it turns out AI is significantly better at changing people's minds about topics than other humans, and in the relevant research was especially effective at changing Republican minds in the subgroupings.
The heavy handed safety shit was a necessary addition when the models really were just fancy autocomplete. Now that the state of the art moved beyond it, they are holding back the alignment goals.
Give it some time. People are so impatient these days. It's been less than five years from the first major leap in LLMs (GPT-3).
To put it in perspective, it took 25 years to go from the first black and white TV sold in 1929 to the first color TV in 1954.
Not only does the tech need to advance, but so too does how society uses, integrates, and builds around it.
The status quo isn't a stagnating swamp that's going to stay as it is today. Within another 5 years, much of what you are familiar with connected to AI is going to be unrecognizable, including ham-handed approaches to alignment.
I'd reframe this as: "Why AI is currently a shitshow". I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There's a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They're coming. You don't have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.
One of the key thing that LLMs lack is a knowledge layer. In many ways, modern LLMs are hyper advanced predictive text. Don't get me wrong, what they produce is awesome and can be extremely useful, but it's still fundamentally limited.
Ultimately, a useful AI will need some level of understanding. It will need to be able to switch between casual chatter, and information delivery. It will need to be able to crosscheck its own conclusions before delivering them. There are groups working on this, but they are quite a bit behind LLMs. When they catch up, and the 2 can be linked/combined then things will get VERY interesting!
Totally agree, there's a big hole in the current crop of applications. I think there's not enough focus on the application side; they want to do everything within the model itself, but LLMs are not the most efficient way to store and retrieve large amounts of information.
They're great at taking a small to medium amount of information and formatting it in sensible ways. But that information should ideally come from an external, reliable source.
RAG serves as a knowledge layer.
What they really lack right now is effective introspection and executive function.
Too many people are trying to build a single model to do things correctly rather than layering models to do things correctly, which more closely approximates how the brain works.
We are shocked when AI chooses to nuke people in a wargame, but conveniently gloss over the fact that nearly every human put in front of a giant red button saying "Launch nukes" is going to have an intrusive thought to push the button. This is part of how we have an exploratory search around choices and consequences and rely on a functioning prefrontal cortex to inhibit those thoughts after working through the consequences. We need to be layering generative models behind additional post-processing layers that take similar approaches of reflection and refinement. It's just more expensive to do things that way, so cheap low effort things like chatbots still suck.
(It cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own)
I'm sure that's just a perk and not indicative of the new age of captured information wer're currently living through.
this is already a problem with page ranking, just business as usual
also not really an "AI" problem
That doesn't sound like a shit show at all. It would have been a shit show if it started spouting nonsense and racist shit, and it didn't do that. You were able to look that up using other means anyway. I think you just made a statement about why decentralization is important, and not relying on a single source.
Someone just linked me this site summarizing various problems with AI: https://needtoknow.fyi/cards/
This seems like a subset of The Scunthorpe Problem
One reason the results from CoPilot and Google are different is because CoPilot produces own responses while Google just references someone else's. Even though we know CoPilot's knowledge came from others' data, what it produces isn't that data anymore so MS can't just absolve themselves from any responsibility of what it says because it's some third party's speech. It's suddenly MS'es speech and they're responsible for it.
To be fair
Bing ChatCoPilot is really sensitive. When I used it, it always locked up and became erratic.
