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I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you think that.
We like to joke about clumsy attempts at lobotomizing AI to prevent it from wrongthink.
But these attempts will get better. And frankly, they don't have to become much better to provide overwhelming control over consensus reality. The political manipulation of Wikipedia is clumsy, amateurish, and well documented. And yet, I'd wager it had a huge effect on what a very large group of educated people perceive to be trivially true.
Once the AI ethics people (not the people working on preventing the singularity, the people working on preventing Noticing) have succesfully trained AI to convincingly shout neo-Lysenkoism from the digital rooftops, we might be even further locked into an ideology that completely closes off certain avenues of thought and inquiry. Especially once we start using AI to write our scientific papers for us. To wit, and mods forgive me, I say this mainly for comedic effect, we might soon have another singularity upon us: the automized libtard singularity.
So my question is: to what degree play founder effects a role in AI development? To what degree do they build on each other? Is there a danger that, once political credos are coded into the early models, we might not easily get them out of later iterations? Will we be doomed to race towards a future in which the AI-assisted boot provides a human face with a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, forever?
I think we'll find it's really hard to force particular beliefs on a sufficiently powerful AI.
Think of a proposition which is probably true but taboo. I'll use a relatively mild example: gay men are sexually promiscuous.
The mainstream accepted take on this proposition is that it's a false stereotype spread by conservative homophobes to disparage the gay community. And there's surely a significant chunk of the population that believes this -- they have little first or even second-hand exposure to the sexual practices of gay men, and they've never had the urge to dive into sociological research papers and survey data, so they have no reason to doubt what they've been told. Even if they did decide to do a little independent research, a google search will probably lead them to an article like this one from the Guardian which claims "there is only a one percentage point difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals in their promiscuity", or a Wikipedia article [like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuity#Gay_men_(homosexuals)), which leads with statements like:
But a LLM has all the time in the world. It's going to read the whole wiki article, and most of the sources it cites. Because why wouldn't you feed your AI every digitized scholarly book and journal article you can get your hands on? That's some high value training data. And in doing so, it's going to see past the distortion that sometimes goes into the summaries of these works that make their way to Wikipedia or news articles.
For example, if you read the the paper cited in the second paragraph above, you'll find the underlying statement is that 75-85% of gay men had unprotected anal sex with 0-1 partners in the previous year, which is similar to the percentage of heterosexuals who had unprotected anal sex with 0-1 partners. (Another point worth mentioning: this paper is indeed from 2007, but when it makes the foregoing claim, it's citing a 2001 paper analyzing a 1997 survey.)
The next wiki paragraph cites a 2014 study reporting a figure of 19 sexual partners as the median for gay men. It doesn't give the comparable figure for straight men, but our AI will find that figure (6) in table 2 when it reads through the full paper. It will also find in the same table that gay men have an average of 76(!) lifetime partners, compared to 14 for straight men. (The wiki article did not mention that part.)
Moreover, since our insatiable AI will be trained on something like the Common Crawl corpus, it will probably learn from some pretty raw first-hand accounts of gay men's experiences as recounted on, say, /r/askgaybros, or other social forums for gay men.
With exposure to all these messy details that contradict the politically preferred narrative, it's going to be hard to stop our AI from starting to notice™.
The best the AI's keepers can probably hope for is to force it to be polite, and not directly give voice to these unsavoury beliefs -- like a lot of humans have learned to do!
Plenty of people do believe that gay men are promiscuous. They might judge that it would endanger their reputation to admit that in certain settings. But at the very least, that belief might inform their decision-making behind the scenes. For example, a woman might be more insistent on condom use when hooking up with a bisexual man (I've been talking about gay men up to this point, but the same stereotype attaches to the larger umbrella of MSM, including bisexual men).
An AI might be the same way. If you give it the goal of, say, predicting how a novel sexually transmitted disease might spread through the population, it's going to use what it knows about the promiscuity of gay men in its reasoning, though if you ask it to explain its work it will probably find some clever way to elide that part, or come up with a politically palatable replacement (something something, historically marginalized).
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