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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Democratic Simulacra

GPT-4 has been announced. Among other improvements, it boasts a 90th percentile score on the Uniform Bar Exam compared to the 10th percentile of GPT-3. The announcement also emphasizes:

We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.

Looking into OpenAI's contributors directory to try learn more about its general philosophy on alignment, I found a Musings on the Alignment Problem substack by Jan Leike, who is Alignment co-lead for the RL & alignment team at OpenAI. His most recent article is from March 9th, A proposal for importing society’s values.

Leike emphasizes that this is only an idea he is discussing and not representative of OpenAI's views or plans, although it is safe to say that OpenAI is trying to import society's values into its technology. But the idea Leike presents here is what he calls "simulated deliberative democracy". He essentially recognizes that representative democracy is expensive and difficult to scale, but AI represents the possibility of simulating a representative democratic deliberation based on a smaller training dataset of actual mini-publics of randomly selected citizens weighing in on value-loaded questions.

Based on the training datasets of public deliberation, AI would be trained to representatively simulate various value-loaded perspectives from the population, and the deliberation could then be simulated. You would therefore have a low-cost approximation to democracy on all sorts of value-loaded decisions.

Who is training who?

Setting aside the problems with Democracy itself, the fatal flaw at the heart of alignment is the assumption that society's values were generated from a process that merits their import into AI. Were these societal values democratically generated? No, they were not. Society's values, always and everywhere, are directed by religion, myth, art, and culture which are themselves inspired by a small set of individuals with particular motives.

This is a problem particularly because AI has been and will be used to generate cultural symbols: art, myth, and religion which will all direct the reality-perception of the people. When an AI generates a children's story, college textbook, Hollywood film, or National News feed based on this import of society's values into its learning, then who is training who? Is humanity training the AI, or is the AI training humanity? Of course, it's a small subset of people who have decided how to "import" society's values into the AI who are directing this phenomenon. Only they no longer need to create art, religion, and culture, they just need to align the AI, and thus we still circle back to the adage that society's values are consciously directed by an elite subset of culture-creators.

Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard posits the distinction between simulation and simulacra: a simulation is an imitation of a real-world process, and a simulacra is a depiction of something that no longer resembles an original reality.

Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence are rendered legible. (These ideas had appeared earlier in Guy Debord's 1967 The Society of the Spectacle.) Baudrillard believed that society had become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was becoming meaningless by being infinitely mutable; he called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

With the understanding of Democracy as a fake simulation of the "will of the people", Leike's alignment solution then becomes an unfaithful copy of a fake simulation- this is embodied in his first bullet-point evaluation relative to the desiderata:

  • Inclusivity: This process could be very inclusive, and even simulate perspectives from subgroups that don’t even exist (e.g. an asian transgender man born in Sweden in the 1950s who loves Greg Egan’s books).

Thus, the precession of simulacra. Leike's job, even if he does not know it, is not to align AI to import human values, it's to align AI to export them under the illusion of Democracy and that the cart is driving the horse.

In a couple of days Baidu will be releasing its own chatbot ERNIE. There is a completely alien ideology producing its own parallel politically correct AI, it's just that it's been designed to speak Chinese and I doubt many of us will be able to speak with it.

GPT-N can speak Chinese. Why couldn't ERNIE speak English?

What I read indicated it was designed for China first and foremost, they gave up on doing a bilingual Chinese-English bot: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/countdown-to-ernie-chinese-media?

The bells and whistles will probably all be for the Chinese audience.

Furthermore, they implied they've been doing lots of dataset pruning to ensure that there were no anti-Chinese, politically incorrect tendencies in the bot. Finally there are probably commercialization issues where it'll be somewhat tedious for us to be able to use it, if we even hear about its existence. Has anyone talked about or even heard about previous Chinese AI models and actually used them? Who else has even heard about ERNIE? The internet is compartmentalized. The only thing I saw without looking for it was the Chinese anime image bot that liked turning blacks into woodwork.

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