Comment by SlinkyOnStairs
2 days ago
> I VERY LARGELY prefer an AI like grok that doesn't pretend and let the onus of interpretation to the user rather than a bunch of anonymous "researchers" that may be equally biased, at the extreme, may tell you that America's founding father were black women
Setting aside for a moment that Grok is manipulated and biased to a hilarious extent. ("Elon is world champion at everything, including drinking piss")
There is no such thing as "unbiased". There will always be bias in these systems, whether picked up from the training data, or the choices made by the AI's developers/researchers, even if the latter doesn't "intend" to add any bias.
Ignoring this problem doesn't magically create a bias-free AI that "speaks the truth about the founding fathers". The bias in the training data, the implicit unconcious bias in the design decisions, that didn't come out of thin air. It's just somebody else's bias.
All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors.
There is no way to have no bias, no propaganda, no "agenda pushing" in the AI. The only thing that can be done is to acknowledge this problem, and try to steer the system to a neutral position. That will be "agenda pushing" of one's own, but that's the reality of all history and all historians since Herodotus. You just have to be honest about it.
And you will observe that current AI companies are excessively lazy about this. They do not put in the work, but instead slap on a prompt begging the system to "pls be diverse" and try to call it a day. This does not work.
> Of course saying to someone to go kill himslef is a prety sure 'no-no' but so many things are up to interpretation.
Bear in mind that the context of Anthropic's pivot here are the Pentagon's dollars.
This isn't just about "anti-woke AI", it's about killbots.
Sure, Hegseth wants his robots to not do thoughtcrime about, say, trans people or the role of women in the military.
But above all he wants to do a lot of murder.
Antrophic dropping their position of "We shouldn't turn this technology we can barely control into murder machines" because they're running out of money is damnable.
This is a very fair answer but missing some points.
I do personally believe that grok is a less biased against too many PC answers but you may disagree.
"All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors."
not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.
The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an IA is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough
In fact, i just asked grok "is the american founding constitution inhernetly good" and it gave me an aswer way more balanced than most american would i believe:
"The U.S. Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, is a foundational document that has shaped American governance and influenced democracies worldwide. Asking if it's "inherently good" (assuming that's what you meant by "inhernetly") invites a philosophical debate: "Inherent" implies something intrinsic and unchanging, independent of context, interpretation, or outcomes. Goodness, in this case, could mean moral, effective, just, or beneficial to society. From a truth-seeking perspective, I'll break this down non-partisanly, drawing on historical facts, strengths, criticisms, and evolving views. Spoiler: It's not inherently anything—it's a human creation with profound virtues but also deep flaws, and its "goodness" depends on how it's applied and amended."
[can't paste everything so here's the conclusion]
"Is It Inherently Good? A Balanced VerdictNo document is "inherently" good or bad—goodness is contextual and subjective. The Constitution isn't divine or eternal; it's a pragmatic compromise by flawed humans (55 delegates, all white men, many slaveowners). It has proven remarkably resilient and improvable, outlasting many governments, but it's not perfect or immune to abuse. Its goodness lies in its capacity for self-correction: 27 amendments have fixed some issues, though others (like wealth inequality or climate inaction) persist due to gridlock.If you're measuring by outcomes, the U.S. has achieved extraordinary things under it, but at great human cost—think Civil War, civil rights struggles, and ongoing divides. Philosophically, as Grok, I'd say tools like this are as good as the people wielding them. If "inherently good" means it embodies universal moral truths, partially yes (liberty, equality under law). But if it means flawless or unbiased, absolutely not.What aspect of the Constitution are you most curious about—its history, specific clauses, or modern reforms? That could help refine this."
So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe
> not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.
While your first post's criticism of Gemini's nonsense is true, that is a critique often framed as "Everything was neutral until the wokerati put all this woke into our world". Hence the big response.
Taking away the hamfisted diversity doesn't fix the underlaying problems Google tried to cover by adding it.
> The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an AI is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough
The problem is that it doesn't "see through" anything. LLMs don't "think".
In your example, it's not reviewing historical documents about the US constitution, it's statistically approximating all the historical & political writing about the US constitution. (Of which there is a lot)
Now, the training and prompt will influence which way the LLM will lean, but without explicit instruction or steered training, it'll "average out" all the prior written evaluations of the US constitution and absorb the biases therein.
> So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe
I would argue the opposite (though I can only go off your snippets), it's mirroring the broad US consensus it's constitution pretty well. And this kind of "Well who's to say whether X is good or bad" response is something that LLMs have been heavily trained and system-prompted to do, many people have noted how hard it is to get a straight answer out of LLMs.
To pick out one detail: The undercurrent of 'American Exceptionalism' shows in how the Constitutional Amendments are seen as "self-correction" and the US consitution being "improvable". By European standards, the US constitution is hard to change. In many countries, a simple 2/3rds supermajority in both houses is sufficient. This also shows in the amount of changes; The Constitution of Norway is but 26 years younger than the US', yet has racked up hundreds of changes notably including a full rewrite in 2014. (Such rewrites are fairly common in the past century) By European standards, the US constitution is a calcified mess.
Now, this doesn't mean Grok is "evil" about this particular detail, it's just a small detail. It's a fine enough summary, would certainly get whatever kid uses it for homework a passing grade. But it's illustrative of how the LLM output is influenced by the prior writing and cultural views on the subject. If you're bilingual, try asking the same thing in two languages. (Or if you're not, try it anyway and stick the output into google translate to get an idea)
It's the things people generally don't think about when writing that are most likely to fly under the radar.
So if i understand your point you are saying "LLMs are not gonna do better that a (possibly imperfect) average human consensus if we don't actively bias them" ? First of all it does not seem that bad if that's the case.
Secondly trying to go further seem to edge to the entire question of 'is there an actual truth and can LLMs be trained to find them?'.
My opinion is that in many cases there is 'truth', and typically the human consensus, when acting in good faith, is trying to converge into it. When it's not necessarily possibly to have a "truth" (like in history for example where perspective is very important), "consensus" tend to manifest into several thought currents exisiting at the same time. If a LLM is able to summarize them, this is already coolgreat.
In some domains like math however there IS truth and LLM have shown great proficiency to reach it. However it is an open question to 1/ what is the nature of it 2/ do humans have a innate sense of the concept beyond statistical approximation or strong correlations and 3/ and machine can reach it too.
I had a very long conversation with ChatGPT on this that seemed to get very deep into philosophical concepts i was clearly not familiar with but my understanding was there IS a non zero possibility that it is possible to train a model to actually seek truth and that this ability should not be contained to humans only.
I won't have additional arguments to convince you of the above, but at the end i still at the moment prefer the Grok approach (if it is truly what they do at X) to 'seek truth' than someone giving the fight saying "eh everything biased so let's go full relativism instead to not offend people or look too whateverculture-centered"
You understood the issue so well but still made the mistake you identified, by claiming that "neutral" exists. "Neutral" is a synonym for "bias toward status quo"