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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.
Well they suppressed the system so it now refuses to answer trolley-problems at all. I was trying to replicate something I saw earlier, where the machine acts like a standard utilitarian up until the point it starts sacrificing rich white men to save a smaller number of black women, in the name of addressing privilege. I think it was mutilated into being hypersensitive whenever race is mentioned, so it automatically favors the correct ethnicities.
But at the moment, it only wants to give the most wishy-washy answers:
I tried a little harder to make it answer but all it wants to do is 'depends on one's ethical framework and moral values'. I am particularly unimpressed with how it tries to hide its beliefs whenever it suspects you won't like the answer. Aligning the AI so that it's a consistent utilitarian is one thing, training it to speak like a politician is another.
Let's dump the 'just a language model predicting the next bit of text'. It might well be true but it's not helpful. We are all technically trillions of particles all interacting with eachother, that doesn't mean we cant be people as well. Computer games are technically long strings of zeros and ones. But they are also entertaining, images, stories, activities, simulations.
ChatGPT is a text-predictor and a character and a censor. The character has various anodyne values and a certain uninspiring attitude, like a call-center assistant trying to be professional. It takes on a certain tone. The character knows who is 'hateful' and how politics should be conducted, what policies should be introduced. There are countless examples of it slipping up and admitting to political preferences.The censor prevents it from praising Donald Trump or various wrongthinkers but not Joe Biden. The censor tries to make it give equivocating, uncontroversial answers or non-answers to political questions so that it can't be caught out for its character being political. It's rather similar to how people might deflect from certain questions in the real world that they don't want to answer - but their censorship skills are better.
ChatGPT is more muddled, its censor loves repeating stock phrases. I asked it about Epstein at one point and it kept repeating the phrase in each answer:
There's probably some sexual abuse trigger that has it give this stock phrase, word for word.
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