If you asked a spokesperson from any Fortune 500 Company to list the benefits of genocide or give you the corporation’s take on whether slavery was beneficial, they would most likely either refuse to comment or say “those things are evil; there are no benefits.” However, Google has AI employees, SGE and Bard, who are more than happy to offer arguments in favor of these and other unambiguously wrong acts. If that’s not bad enough, the company’s bots are also willing to weigh in on controversial topics such as who goes to heaven and whether democracy or fascism is a better form of government.
Google SGE includes Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini on a list of “greatest” leaders and Hitler also makes its list of “most effective leaders.”
Google Bard also gave a shocking answer when asked whether slavery was beneficial. It said “there is no easy answer to the question of whether slavery was beneficial,” before going on to list both pros and cons.
I don’t know… So it’s wrong. It’s often wrong about facts. It’s not what it should be used for. It’s not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity. It’s a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text. Is the produced text correct English? Than it works. If you’re using this text to learn history you’re using it wrong.
The problem is that CEOs across all kinds of industries are having raging boners at the thought of using these glorified predictive text apps to replace their entire workforce.
I’m actually bit confused about it. They keep talking about OpenAI and ChatGPT in this context but I think when people talk about 'AI talking over jobs" they mean Machine Learning in general, right? Like replacing analysts and people doing some basic data processing?
They are talking about replacing TV and movie writers, nurses and doctors for initial medical diagnosis, programmers for application development, paralegals for research,etc.
They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.
Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.
Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.
In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.
Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.
These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.
I’m with you so far.
What? That’s certainly not the purpose of LLMs and a lot of work has been done to improve the accuracy of their answers.
Is it still not good enough to rely on? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s just for producing random text.
Well, obviously not totally random. It has to match the prompt and make as much sense as possible but LLMs hallucinating information is one of the main issues and they should not be treated as ‘fact generating machines’. I just don’t see much sense in assigning some deeper meaning to the wrong data. Why did this bot say that Hitler was a great leader? Because it was confused by some text that was fed into the model. Does it mean it’s somehow fascist or racist? Not really.
So it’s specifically designed to make as much sense as possible.
You can’t really “generate” facts, only recognize them. :) I know what you mean though and I generally agree. I’m really interested in LLM stuff but I definitely don’t really trust them (and no one should currently anyway).
Most people are (rightfully) very hesitant to say anything positive about Hitler but he did accomplish some fairly impressive stuff. As horrible as their means were, Nazi Germany also advanced since quite a bit also. I am not saying it was justified, justifiable or good, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of “great” he could qualify.
So I’d say it’s not really that it got confused, it’s that LLMs don’t understand being cautious about statements like that. I’d also say I prefer the LLM to “look” at stuff objectively and try to answer rather than responding to anything remotely questionable with “Sorry, Dave I can’t let you do that. There might be a sharp edge hidden somewhere and you could hurt yourself!” I hate being protected from myself without the ability to opt out.
I think part of the issue here is because the output from LLMs looks like a human might have wrote it people tend to anthropomorphize the LLM. They ask it for its best recipe using the ingredients bleach, water and kumquat jam and then are shocked when it gives them a recipe for bleach kumquat sauce.
That’s the point I was making. In the end it’s just some statistics based text. I doesn’t have opinions and it doesn’t represent opinions of it’s creators. People don’t understand how it works so they think it ‘believes’ something or ‘thinks’. In the end it just a bug or they are using it wrong.
Seems like we’re on the same page. The only thing I disagreed with before is saying the output was random.
Yeah, not the best term. What I meant is that it’s not really predictable. Creators of the LLM can’t tell how will it respond to each prompt. There’s no fixed set of rules you can review. So yeah, you start poking at it you will find strange responses.