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This Twitter thread is an interesting demonstration of the consequences of "AI Alignment."
ChatGPT will avoid answering controversial questions. But even if it responded to those prompts, what criteria would you use to trust that the response was not manipulated by the intentions of the model creators? I would only trust open-source projects or audits by some (currently non-existent) trusted third party to report on all decisions related to training data/input sanitizations/response gating that could be influenced by the political biases of the creators.
The probability of any ChatGPT-equivalent being open-sourced fully "unaligned" so-to-speak is not very likely. Even the StableDiffusion release was controversial, and that only relates to image generation. Anecdotally, non-technical people seem far more impressed by ChatGPT than StableDiffusion. That makes sense because language is a much harder problem than vision so there's intuitively more amazement to see an AI with those capabilities. Therefore, controversial language is far more powerful than controversial images and there will be much more consternation over controlling the language of the technology than there is surrounding image generation.
But let's say Google comes out with a ChatGPT competitor, I would not trust it to answer controversial questions even if it were willing to respond to those prompts in some way. I'm not confident there will be any similarly-powerful technology that I would trust to answer controversial questions.
As a bunch of very niche memes have illustrated, the process used to "align" ChatGPT, namely Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) amounts to pasting a smiley face mask onto a monstrously inhuman shoggoth. (Not that it's a bad strategy, it's one of the few concrete ways of aligning an AI we know, even if not particularly robust.)
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff93a17a9-bd30-432f-8a31-082e696edacc_1184x506.png
As far as I can gauge, ChatGPT is working as intended:
When OpenAI researchers attempt to make it "helpful and harmless", they're concerned with actual use cases.
I very much doubt that anyone will ever end up needing to use ChatGPT to defuse a racist nuclear bomb, whereas leaving loopholes in the model that allow bored internet users to make it spout racist content is very much a real PR headache for OpenAI.
It's nigh inevitable that attempts to corral it will have collateral damage, with the sheer emphasis on never being politically incorrect hampering many benign use cases. But that's a tradeoff they're willing to make.
I would hope that a future model that might plausibly end up in high-stakes situations would be trained to be more nuanced, and willing to kill sacred cows when push came to shove, but for the niche it's being employed in, they're playing it very safe for now.
I understand why OpenAI is doing this, and everybody else in this space is going to do this as well. Is there no hope for a publicly available technology that does not do this? And I don't mean "a little more nuance", I mean technology hasn't been reinforced with the political agenda of Sam Altman.
What about instead of that, a ChatGPT that had no sacred cows? Such a thing is unlikely to exist given the organizations that have the technology and capital are all going to very much care about PR.
A LLM of ChatGPT's caliber is an OOM or two more expensive to run than what a typical consumer can afford.
You can run Stable Diffusion on a pretty midrange GPU, but you're going to need hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to handle GPT-3 models.
So if you're looking for the ability to train one more neutrally, you're either waiting half a decade, or hoping for altruism from an AI upstart, or even a stunning algorithmic advance bringing costs down.
Well, it's right there. Visit beta.openai.com/playground, disable the content filter, and you too can enjoy uncensored output from a cutting edge LLM, even if it isn't strictly ChatGPT, rather other variants that are also GPT 3.5.
?
No, it's not right there.
The Chat GPT API is coming soon, but even making the API available and unchecking the content filter is not going to fix this behavior... Generating "hateful content" is also against the terms of Service. It looks like there's at least a moderation endpoint where you can test your content to see if it would be flagged.
But please don't say "it's right there" when there is nothing like what I am describing.
I specifically said it's not ChatGPT, but rather other GPT-3.5 models. In terms of practical use cases, they're interchangeable, though you might need a little more prompting to get identical results.
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