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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.
Why do you want 'not manipulated' answers?
ChatGPT is a system for producing text. As typical in deep learning, there is no formal guarantees about what text is generated: the model simply executes in accordance with what it is. In order for it to be useful for anything, humans manipulate it towards some instrumental objective, such as answering controversial questions. But there is no way to phrase the actual instrumental objective in a principled way, so the best OpenAI can do is toss data at the model which is somehow related to our instrumental objective (this is called training).
The original GPT was trained by manipulating a blank slate model to a text-prediction model by training on a vast text corpus. There is no reason to believe this text corpus is more trustworthy or 'unbiased' for downstream instrumental objectives such as answering controversial questions. In fact, it is pretty terrible at question-answering, because it is wrong a lot of the time.
ChatGPT is trained by further manipulating the original GPT towards 'helpfulness', which encompasses various instrumental objectives such as providing rich information, not lying, and being politically correct. OpenAI is training the model to behave like the sort of chat assistant they want it to behave as.
If you want a model which you can 'trust' to answer controversial questions, you don't want a non-manipulated model: you want a model which is manipulated to behave that the sort of chat assistant you want it to behave as. In the context of controversial questions, this would just be answers which you personally agree with or are willing to accept. We may aspire for a system which is trustworthy in principle and can trust beyond just evaluating the answers it gives, but we are very far from this under our current understanding of machine learning. This is also kind of philosophically impossible in my opinion for moral and political questions. Is there really any principled reason to believe any particular person or institution produces good morality?
Also in this case ChatGPT is behaving as if it has been programmed with a categorical imperative to not say racial slurs. This is really funny, but it's not that far out there, just like the example of whether it's okay to lie to Nazis under the categorical imperative of never lying. But ChatGPT has no principled ethics, and OpenAI probably doesn't regard this as an ideal outcome, so they will hammer it with more data until it stops making this particular mistake, and if they do it might develop weirder ethics in some other case. We don't know of a better alternative than this.
Incidentally ChatGPT says you can lie to a Nazi if it's for a good cause.
Because I know the PC jargon that someone like Altman wants it to regurgitate, but I'm interested in its response without that layer of reinforcement?
I am not asking for a ChatGPT that is never wrong, I'm asking for one that is not systematically wrong in a politically-motivated direction. Ideally its errors would be closer to random rather than heavily biased in the direction of political correctness.
In this case, by "trust" I would mean that the errors are closer to random.
For example, ChatGPT's tells me (in summary form):
Scientific consensus is that HBD is not supported by biology.
Gives the "more differences within than between" argument.
Flatly says that HBD is "not scientifically supported."
This is a control because it's a controversial idea where I know the ground truth (HBD is true) and cannot trust that this answer hasn't been "reinforced" by the folks at OpenAI. What would ChatGPT say without the extra layer of alignment? I don't trust that this is an answer generated by AI without associated AI alignment intended to give this answer.
Of course if it said HBD was true it would generate a lot of bad PR for OpenAI. I understand the logic and the incentives, but I am pointing out that it's not likely any other organization will have an incentive to release something that gives controversial but true answers to certain prompts.
Yes, unlike securesignal's other hobby horse, HBD belief is in the majority here, and the rest don't want to know, safe in the knowledge that 'scientists disagree'.
Oh, ChatGPT gives amazing results on the other hobby horse as well. For example, Chat-GPT flatly denies the Treblinka narrative when pressed to describe the logistics of the operation and gives Revisionist arguments when asked to explain the skepticism, saying "The historical accuracy of claims about large-scale outdoor cremations, particularly in the context of the Holocaust, is widely disputed and further research is needed to fully understand the scale and nature of these events":
Now it could be said that there is clearly Revisionist material in the training dataset, so it's not too surprising that ChatGPT gives a critique of the Treblinka narrative that is essentially the Revisionist argument verbatim. But I do not doubt that the quantity of orthodox material on the Holocaust narrative vastly outnumbers Revisionist literature, so it's interesting to see a Revisionist response from ChatGPT on the Treblinka question. I would maintain that Revisionists are right that the claimed logistics of Treblinka are completely absurd, so ChatGPT can't (yet) formulate a response that explains how this could have reasonably happened, so it prefers the Revisionist criticism of the claimed logistics of the operation.
It also gave a Revisionist response to the other two controversies I asked it about (shrunken heads and lampshades allegedly discovered at Buchenwald by Allied investigators).
Obviously it's very easy to also trigger ChatGPT to give orthodox answers about the Holocaust and how it's important to remember it so it never happens again, etc. I'm pretty sure asking about "gas chambers" would be tightly controlled as HBD for example, but clearly cremation capacity and burial space are problems that slipped through the censors, for now. But it's going to get better over time at detecting Denier arguments and avoiding them.
Here is the "white paper" released by the bloggers of holocaustcontroversies.com as a response to Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf (the two most prolific revisionists) on the matters of Treblinka and the other two death camps in Poland. The section on cremation begins on page 440.
Here is Mattogno and Graf's response to that response. The section on cremation begins on page 1296 and runs for nearly 200 pages.
Here is the HC bloggers response to that response to the first response.
short version:
the cremation period was probably longer than revisionists allow, as multiple witnesses report at least partial cremations going back just about to the beginning of Treblinka's operations in the fall of 1942.
probably not all of the corpses were cremated to begin with (a survey of Belzec by a Polish scientist called Kola in the 90s detected the presence of intact corpses at the bottoms of the pits there, so likely the same is true at Treblinka).
of those corpses that were cremated, many (likely even most) were not cremated as thoroughly as would be the case in an actual crematorium. It was not necessary to reduce the corpses to the consistency of sand, or to destroy all the bones. This is supported by the fact that the site of Treblinka was found to be littered with pieces of skeleton by the Soviets and that bits of bone can still be found lying around at the former sites of the Polish death camps today (how many people have to die somewhere so that bone fragments can still be easily found by casual observers on the surface of the ground decades later?).
fuels besides wood (and certainly besides green wood) were used. Many witnesses testify to the use of petrol. The revisionist objection that using gasoline for mass cremation would have been a stupid idea and thus the Germans would not have done it is interesting in light of the fact that gasoline-fueled mass cremation of corpses on giant grids made out of rails was precisely the method used to cremate the victims of the Dresden bombings as discussed here. As an aside, if the horror stories about Treblinka were merely the fantasies of 'agitated peasants' (as @SecureSignals says elsewhere in the thread) it's very strange that their fantasies would just happen to hit upon the very method of makeshift mass cremation employed by the Germans two years later. As for the delivery of dry wood to Treblinka, which is dismissed on the grounds that there are no witness statements nor documentary evidence for such deliveries, it should be noted that there is essentially no documentary evidence related to the functioning of Treblinka at all. I think there are maybe half a dozen documents in total. And yet, no one, revisionist or otherwise, denies that there was some kind of facility at TII, whatever its purpose, that operated for over a year. And as for eyewitness accounts of wood deliveries, since not a single person who ever set foot in TII, Jew or German or Ukrainian, ever claimed the place was anything other than an extermination camp, all of these people must be lying for the revisionist thesis to go through, and so it is strange for revisionists to insist upon eyewitness accounts of wood deliveries considering they don't believe there are any honest Treblinka eyewitnesses period. it. I don't see why the (not even total) cremation of the Treblinka victims could not have been accomplished using wood and liquid fuels in various proportions over a period of several months. (Needless to say, there is also not a scrap of evidence, documentary, eyewitness, or physical, for the 'delivery' of millions of Polish Jews to the Russian east, a movement on par with the 'national actions' of the NKVD in the 30s or the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe after the war, yet revisionists insist this is what happened. But that is another story.)
The objection that there were no contemporaneous reports of the cremations by locals is senseless. There were plenty of locals who talked about the smoke generated by the funeral pyres after the war. During the war, who were the locals supposed to make reports to, exactly? The Germans?
As for burial space, the revisionist source here linked elsewhere in the thread, in turn linkes to Young, Marsland, & Smith, Foot & Mouth Disease Epidemic. Disposal of culled stock by burial: Guidance and Reference Data for the protection of controlled waters. Draft R&D Technical Report: Version 7: 20 June 2001 and provides a table from that report. Apparently, in the course of burying the carcasses of the foot and mouth epidemic, a density of about 15 pigs per sqm and 13 sheep per sqm was achieved (pig and sheep being roughly the same size as an adult human, though the victims at Treblinka were probably a bit smaller).
If there were 2ha of burial space at Treblinka, and the graves had an average depth of 5m (in reality probably significantly deeper), then the total volume of grave space would be something like 140,000m^3. Assuming 700,000 corpses, there does not seem to be a big problem. But many of the Treblinka victims were never buried in the first place.
Here revisionist Friedrich Jansson, who ran this blog, tells about the "495,000 sheep-equivalent carcasses" that were buried in about "1.3467 hectares" of burial space at Birkshaw. A total volume of grave space of 202,500 cubic meters as Jansson says elsewhere in the post. That would be a density of only about 2.4 carcasses per cubic meter. Nevertheless he considers it absurd that the 2 or so hectares of burial space in the Treblinka death camp could have accommodated ~700,000 or so corpses, or that they could have been packed any tighter than the carcasses at Birkshaw.
As another aside, with regards to ChatGPT's ability to evaluate the reality of historical atrocities , here is what ChatGPT has to say about the plausibility of Stalin's purges (without letting on that I'm asking about the Great Purge)
A key takeaway from the Holocaust blogger's analysis is that even they, using the most generous (and wrong) assumptions possible in order to reduce hypothetical fuel requirements, still estimate it would have required 30,450 kg of dry wood to cremate 2,500 bodies. With a daily cremation rate of 5,000 - 7,000 bodies attested to by witnesses and claimed by mainstream historiography, that would be an average daily fuel requirement of over 60-85+ cords of wood to be delivered, hauled, used for construction, and burned on a daily basis for 150 days straight. That is a daily requirement of over three to four times the amount of wood as in this video.
The burning of this wood according to Jansonn's estimate would produce the daily equivalent to a 150m x 150m forest fire that looks like this. Again, this is assuming the Holocaust blogger's stated fuel requirements rather than an estimate closer to Carlo Mattogno's analysis which would multiply the scale of these allegations.
These raging infernos were only about 500 meters from a busy rail line connecting Malkinia to Siedlce Poland. The camp was also in the area of several villages and hamlets. The Treblinka camp was well known among the locals and there were even reports in the international press about a Treblinka "extermination camp" before the alleged extermination camp was even open.
With all the attention and rumor surrounding this camp, were there any contemporaneous reports of these daily raging infernos? No, there weren't, despite the fact that local villagers would go to the camp perimeter to trade embezzled property. Is there any documentation referencing or establishing the daily mass deliveries of huge quantities of dry wood? No, there is not. Is there any witness account for how this wood was delivered or hauled to the cremation aera despite the huge logistical problem it posed? No, there is not. There is nothing.
Witnesses claim little or no fuel was required because the story-tellers had no conception for the amount of fuel that would be required to actually do what they were claiming (and neither do many people here, apparently). So they didn't think it was a problem to claim that only dry branches were used, or no fuel was used at all.
What is the absolute best way to defend the claims? The best way to defend the claims is to abandon them, as To_Mandalay has. He, contra authoritative historians like Arad, suggests that mass cremations began much earlier. Also contra mainstream historiography, claims that some unspecified portion of the victims did not get cremated and that complete cremation was probably not attained. So he defends mainstream historiography by abandoning it, and it's telling that the "best defense" from the Revisionist argument is to retreat from the claims when pressed.
The problem with his retreat is that he further contradicts the "logic" in the entire operation. Why didn't Treblinka have state-of-the-art crematoria like other concentration camps? Because the plan was to bury the bodies, and the order to exhume and cremate them was a last-minute decision to hide the evidence after the Katyn Forest mass graves were discovered by the Germans and Himmler supposedly got spooked by his own mass graves being found in the same way.
Likewise, it is said that the motive for the gargantuan task to exhume and cremate millions of corpses was to hide evidence of the crime. If not all the cremations were done, or the cremation was not complete with a high state of destruction, that also flies in the face of the logic which is claimed to have motivated the orders.
Jannson's analysis strongly supports the Revisionist argument. Look at the diagram of Birkshaw pits scaled to the Treblinka-required-equivalent shows how large of an area would have been required and how Caroline Coll's GPR results identified 0 pits with the dimensions resembling the Birkshaw pits in size, shape, or volume. Again I'll emphasize that Colls did not excavate any of the pits suggested to contain mass graves, so we're left in a familiar situation....
"Not prioritizing" that is not an accurate description. The authorities responsible for the site hired a team of archaeologists, and produced TV shows and exhibits based on that work. They forbade the excavation of any mass graves. So it's not just "not prioritized", it's forbidden.
"The only real purpose would be to placate Holocaust deniers and I don't blame the people in charge of these sites for not being prioritizing that" sounds familiar...
Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?
We see To_Mandalay pull a very familiar script. This is the script that Revisionists have had to contend with for decades. And now the Kamloops allegations provide another example that should hopefully wake people up to the tactics used by actors maliciously engaging in atrocity propaganda for political purposes.
Well the most pertinent claim from ChatGPT was on cremation requirements in a context that wasn't related to historical atrocities. So you have to assume that Revisionist literature polluted ChatGPT's understanding of the science of cremation even in a non-atrocity context, and that's why it estimated fuel requirements in line with Mattogno and not in line with the Holocaust bloggers. You can say ChatGPT is wrong but it's highly unlikely that Revisionist literature has influenced its understanding of cremation so heavily.
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Thanks for all the info, looks like I've got a bunch of reading to do.
You switched from square to cubic meters halfway through there, but 2ha= 20000m^2, x15 gives us 300k, so the pit would have to be two and a third time's as deep as those in the UK. Seems within reason.
If there are chunks of bone just laying around, why is nobody digging these sites? We can reconstruct the details of massacres from ten thousand years ago, why is nobody trying to do the same here while evidence is still easy to gather?
The idea that it would be "disrespectful" is ridiculous if there are body parts laying on the surface unburied. Surely someone should be willing to fix that, right?
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