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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.
There are a number of articles out there that describe how you can train your own GPT. I am partial to Train GPT-2 in your own language. You would still need to get some training data for it, for which you have a few options -- I will gesture in the direction of common crawl in terms of getting large amounts of the raw, unfiltered internet. Cleaning or filtering that data such that it is usable is left as an exercise for the reader.
Then, of course, you have the question of fine-tuning. An easy and principled thing you could do here is "not", which would leave you with basically an internet-content-simulator. This internet-content-simulator would only have sacred cows to the extent that the internet as a whole has sacred cows.
Edit: or as self_made_human mentions below, you can just use OpenAI's model with the content filter disabled if their training data is unfiltered enough for you, which will save you a ton of work and money at the cost of not having control over the training process.
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