Comment by rdbl27
3 hours ago
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
3 hours ago
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.
Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed
Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
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> at least I know their motives are purely profit driven.
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
> It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
its not just one guys opinion though
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Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder
That's the claim, and it's a belief that's self-fulfilling prophecy, like saying all politicians are corrupt.
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
Such a good point. Disinformation and trying to destroy sources of truth is just part of the puzzle. Often the worst damage is just "well, both sides are bad" -- because it just tells people not to listen to either side, or it is too much work.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
Sure, but there’s the direction of a vector, and the length of the vector.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
Nah. My beliefs are actual truth, so if provider is shaping their models according to my preferred political narratives that's correct and only moral thing to do. Anything else would be morally bankrupt.
You’re trying to be sarcastic but you would actually be insightful if your beliefs included the need to be challenged and corrected when in error.
Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?
Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.
Maybe, but some political narratives are good and right and true, and others are bad and wrong and false. (I am not joking: objective reality exists and most of politics isn't subjective.)
while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.
From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.
Drugs. Drugs are what Elon is doing. And it's pretty cringe.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
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It’s almost like people don’t want to give a Nazi money
It'd be minimally much money per token-intelligence (intelligence/token) though, if we are to believe the pitch..
It’s almost like some people do want to
Yes. But only one trillionaire is screaming from twitter that he will use his wealth to combat the woke mind virus by tuning his model. So, ya know, there’s THAT.