Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
It's not the preferred political narrative of the model that I worry about. It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it. It makes me wonder what else they're altering. I have trust issues with OpenAI and Anthropic as well, but with those companies, at least I know their motives are purely profit driven. I don't have that assurance with xAI.
Implying you prefer your manipulation to be subtle an not discussed
Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.
I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.
I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.
When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".
All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.
This stuff is measurable
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
That's certainly not a universal preference. There are people and even entire cultures for whom being surreptitiously manipulative is disrespectful.
Maybe so. I am personally intimately familiar with two cultures (Iceland and West Coast USA) and in both of these this preference is predominant.
But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.
Show some respect and stab me in the back at least!
There is nothing subtle about them being okay with producing child porn. That's a hard no from me. You can't argue your way around that.
> It's how brazen they are about altering their models to achieve it.
We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.
its not just one guys opinion though
Who cares whether it’s one guy’s opinion or several people’s group think? Everyone is editing the prompts.
Who cares whether it’s one person ruthlessly dictating or an entire population working to improve? Both tyrants and liberal democracies set policies.
More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo. If the “entire population” was voting on the shadow prompts of the other models they would look very different. Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
> More like a dictator versus a Poltiburo.
The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.
Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.
So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.
> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.
Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.
> Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote"
It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).
The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.
> The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions.
the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.
Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI
things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like
Obviamente people care when the one guy is notorious for having particularly shitty/edgy opinions.
I mean one of the guys got fired by his own board for lying and is still calling the shots. Another guy sued the Pentagon during a war and we're still letting him act like a nation state.
Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?
I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."
What war? Also should laws not be followed during wars? I assume suing is a legal action in this case as oppose to something else?
You mean as opposed to Gemini's "subtle" woke push with diverse nazi soldiers?
Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?
It was driven by stupidy
It was driven by a need to remove biases (and likely real racism) from the models. They were trained on internet content
How is changing history and making a a group of objectively white people black "removing bias" ˋ? What it is is literally bias. Like thinking Pi could be 4. Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
> How is changing history
If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.
But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.
Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.
When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla
So you have a huge number of photos of white people in the training data set, but other ethnicities exist. So to make the otherwise white-biased dataset less biased, you try to e.g. add a hidden system prompt that whenever the user asks for a group of people (unspecified ethnicity), it may instead ask for "mixed ethnicities" or whatever.
Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.
Do you think they deliberately trained the model to produce images of diverse Nazis?
It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.
> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.
Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.
That's what they did.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...
> bigoted model
A what? What does this even mean?
A model where asking for a math professor results in an image of an asian man, asking for an engineer in an image of a white man, and asking for a criminal results in an image of a black man
If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis
It means a model trained on bigoted material.
Political driven stupidity.
That was just reality's famous liberal bias asserting itself.
> at least I know their motives are purely profit driven.
What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.
Sure man. Palantir rings a bell? Ohh not relevant right...
That's the claim, and it's a belief that's self-fulfilling prophecy, like saying all politicians are corrupt.
If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.
It's a race to the bottom.
Such a good point. Disinformation and trying to destroy sources of truth is just part of the puzzle. Often the worst damage is just "well, both sides are bad" -- because it just tells people not to listen to either side, or it is too much work.
The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.
No, that's not the same at all, because it is possible to be not corrupt while it is impossible to be unbiased.
I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.
Sure, but there’s the direction of a vector, and the length of the vector.
xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.
Based on what do you even know the direction of xAI? Because they want to go to space? Or defence contractors? Or nazi salute? Really what is it?
> Or nazi salute
Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...
The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...
That nazi salute how do you actually know it was ment to show off as a Nazi supporter? I mean who is telling this? Or is that your assumption based on something?
There is also his namesake, his racist father and his grandfathers past. There is a lot of background information available if you really look for it. And finally, if you look at story of "The Elon" and what Elon has been building, you could almost think that he is trying to actually live up to his namesake!
What's the other possible explanation? He wanted to point out a spider at the ceiling?
> Or is that your assumption based on something?
Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.
To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).
In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.
What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"
The “the Jew was secretly a nazi” this post just spread is one of the most destructive bigoted and destructive anti-Semitic attacks in history
Stephen Miller is incredibly obsessed with eugenics, Dr Mengele thought less about genes and races than he does. He also happens to be jewish both by mother and by faith.
He is a jewish nazi, he isnt the first and sadly he probaly wont be the last.
Culturally jewish people are enlightened people, with a rich culture of debate, intelligent arguments and respect for others. Stephen Miller is bald because his head is empty and nothing can grow there.
It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.
There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.
I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far
This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.
The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.
I think the issue here is that there's no objective difference between "alignment" and "actively trying to shape its replies to fit a political narrative", beside the fact that the latter refers to the kind of political narratives that you don't like.
> It's interesting that all models seems to be unbiased out of the box so far- that is, mostly reflecting the training data (the internet).
Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.
Nah. My beliefs are actual truth, so if provider is shaping their models according to my preferred political narratives that's correct and only moral thing to do. Anything else would be morally bankrupt.
You’re trying to be sarcastic but you would actually be insightful if your beliefs included the need to be challenged and corrected when in error.
What does this reply mean? Since everybody does it, then it is ok?
No, but technically, all models go through an alignment phase where you feed data that's aligned to your goals and values to train the model so that it will exhibit the kind of behavior you want.
There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.
Yes, but some narratives are more closely tied to the racist and regressive views of their current funder
And some are more tied to the globalist and progressive-for-the-sake-of-progress views of their current founder. Why not let users pick their poison?
Who or what is this latter "globalist" view? Like it's such an oversimplification of multiple, independent actors' acts that it's just a plain bad world view/model. What would be the common goal? You need some extra amount of tinfoil for such bullshit.
And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.
I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.
That's reductive, how many other models had a mecha hitler incident? Or a "let's talk about white genocide in south africa" incident?
There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.
Feel free to elaborate. Which political narrative?
False, most are just throwing in data into the pipeline and hoping something very smart comes out the other end. Their shaping is to have it code very well, beat all the benchmarks and be safe enough that the powers that be don't and public sentiment doesn't turn against them.
"Reality has a liberal bias" .
Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).
If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have already been filtered. https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2037324942069342679
No it hasn't really and I've not noticed it?
I prefer a model that is milquetoast liberal over one made by Elon 'Mechahitler' Musk.
The left actively encourage ideological echo chambers as long as they're aligned with their own beliefs.
No, because most model providers don't have an overt political agenda determined by one person.
He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin
Yes. But only one trillionaire is screaming from twitter that he will use his wealth to combat the woke mind virus by tuning his model. So, ya know, there’s THAT.
Yeah but their political narratives involving dehumanizing people, and hurting minorities - which is way worse. The attempt at false equivalence between traditional American propaganda and right wing American propaganda is disgusting.
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It'd be minimally much money per token-intelligence (intelligence/token) though, if we are to believe the pitch..
It’s almost like some people do want to
Nah it never did because the other model providers' preferred political narrative is the same as his.
Maybe, but some political narratives are good and right and true, and others are bad and wrong and false. (I am not joking: objective reality exists and most of politics isn't subjective.)
No. Other companies are altering thier products to chase market share and profits. Grok is run by someone beyond profit motives who is actively promoting a personal agenda. I would rather work with Microsoft's counsel of dark wizards than an individual with an axe to grind with the world.
From a business perspective, a company that trains it's LLMs to having boring, mainstream, generally-inoffensive views is a big selling point over whatever the hell Elon is doing.
Drugs. Drugs are what Elon is doing. And it's pretty cringe.
But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.
It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.
Why are the tech oligarchs all such dweebs...
You only get to become one if the idea of spending 60 hours a week typing code into a computer during the late 90's/early 2000's is palatable to you. This causes a dweeb selection funnel.
while this might be true for Grok, GPT and Claude I don't think tarring _all_ labs with this brush is demonstrably accurate.
It has occurred to the OP, but those ones are ok as they fit OP's political leanings. They just want to silence other political narratives that dont agree with theirs, they want Grok in the Gulag.