Comment by yieldcrv

14 days ago

perhaps but what they are referring to is about mitigating double standards in responses

where it is insensitive to engage in a topic about one gender or class of people, but will freely joke about or denigrate another by simply changing the adjective and noun of the class of people in the prompt

the US left leaning bias is around historically marginalized people being off limits, while its a free for all on majority. This is adopted globally in English written contexts, so you are accurate that it might reflect some global empathic social norm, it is still a blind spot either way to blindly train a model to regurgitate that logic

I expect that this is one area their new model will have more equal responses. Whether it equally shies away from engaging, or equally is unfiltered and candid

In comedy, they call this “punching down” vs “punching up.”

If you poke fun at a lower status/power group, you’re hitting someone from a position of power. It’s more akin to bullying, and feels “meaner”, for lack of a better word.

Ripping on the hegemony is different. They should be able to take it, and can certainly fight back.

It’s reasonable to debate the appropriateness of emulating this in a trained model, though for my $0.02, picking on the little guy is a dick move, whether you’re a human or an LLM.

  • not everything an LLM is prompted for is comedy

    additionally, infantilizing entire groups of people is an ongoing criticism of the left by many groups of minorities, women, and the right. which is what you did by assuming it is “punching down”.

    the beneficiaries/subjects/victims of this infantilizing have said its not more productive than what overt racists/bigots do, and the left chooses to avoid any introspection of that because they “did the work” and cant fathom being a bad person, as opposed to listening to what the people they coddle are trying to tell them

    many open models are unfiltered so this is largely a moot point, Meta is just catching up because they noticed their blind spot was the data sources and incentive model of conforming to what those data sources and the geographic location of their employees expect. Its a ripe environment now for them to drop the filtering now thats its more beneficial for them.

    • The leftist coddling crusades are just a different form of dominance over minorities. It absolutely is bigotry and sense of superiority driving it. That said, it would take one incredible therapist to get them to realize it.

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