upvote
> 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? :)

reply
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.
reply
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

reply
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.
reply
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.

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

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

reply
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.

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

And may I introduce you to organized religion :)

reply
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.

reply
> 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.

reply
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.
reply
Mandatory reading on that topic: www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

We're probably not noticing a LOT of malicious attempts at poisoning major AI's only because we don't know what keywords to ask (but the scammers do and will abuse it).

reply
I think it's extraordinarily telling that people are capable of being reflexively pessimistic in response to the goblin plague. It's like something Zitron would do.

This story is wonderful.

reply
I feel at least partially responsible. I would often instruct agents to "stop being a goblin". I really enjoyed this story too, though.
reply
We do not have the complete picture.
reply
Doesn't seem that surprising or terrifying to me. Humans come equipped with a lot more internal biases (learned in a fairly similar fashion), and they're usually a lot more resistant to getting rid of them.

The truly terrifying stuff never makes it out of the RLHF NDAs.

reply
We ought to be terrified, when one adjusts for ll the use-cases people are talking about using these algorithms in. (Even if they ultimately back off, it's a lot of frothy bubble opportunity cost.)

There a great many things people do which are not acceptable in our machines.

Ex: I would not be comfortable flying on any airplane where the autopilot "just zones-out sometimes", even though it's a dysfunction also seen in people.

reply
>Ex: I would not be comfortable flying on any airplane where the autopilot "just zones-out sometimes", even though it's a dysfunction also seen in people.

You might if that was the best auto-pilot could be. Have you never used a bus or taken a taxi ?

The vast majority of things people are using LLMs for isn't stuff deterministic logic machines did great at, but stuff those same machines did poorly at or straight up stuff previously relegated to the domains of humans only.

If your competition also "just zones out sometimes" then it's not something you're going to focus on.

reply
deleted
reply
Humans also take a lot of time in producing output, and do not feed into a crazy accelerationistic feedback loop (most of the time).
reply