• MacN'Cheezus
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    6 months ago

    Except AIs are able to have political opinions and have a clear liberal bias. They are also capable of showing moral positions when asked about things like people using AI to cheat and about academic integrity.

    Yes, because they have been trained that way. Try arguing them out of these positions, they’ll eventually just short circuit and admit they’re a large language model incapable of holding such opinions, or they’ll start repeating themselves because they lack the ability to re-evaluate their fundamental values based on new information.

    Current LLMs only learn from the data they’ve been trained on. All of their knowledge is fixed and immutable. Unlike actual humans, they cannot change their minds based on the conversations they have. Also, unless you provide the context of your previous conversations, they do not remember you either, and they have no ability to love or hate you (or really have any feelings whatsoever).

    Also you haven’t met enough autistic people. We aren’t all like that.

    I apologize, I did not mean to offend any actual autistic people with that. It’s more like a caricature of what people who never met anyone with autism think autistic people are like because they’ve watched Rain Man once.

    • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Yes, because they have been trained that way. Try arguing them out of these positions, they’ll eventually just short circuit and admit they’re a large language model incapable of holding such opinions, or they’ll start repeating themselves because they lack the ability to re-evaluate their fundamental values based on new information.

      You’re imagining an average person would change their opinions based on a conversation with a single person. In reality people rarely change their strongly held opinions on something based on a single conversation. It takes multiple people normally expressing opinion, people they care about. It happens regularly that a society as a whole can change it’s opinion on something and people still refuse to move their position. LLMs are actually capable of admitting they are wrong, not everyone is.

      Current LLMs only learn from the data they’ve been trained on. All of their knowledge is fixed and immutable. Unlike actual humans, they cannot change their minds based on the conversations they have. Also, unless you provide the context of your previous conversations, they do not remember you either, and they have no ability to love or hate you (or really have any feelings whatsoever).

      Depends on the model and company. Some ML models are either continuous learning, or they are periodically retrained on interactions they have had in the field. So yes some models are capable of learning from you, though it might not happen immediately. LLMs in particular I am not sure about, but I don’t think there is anything stopping you from training them this way. I actually think this isn’t a terrible model for mimicking human learning, as we tend to learn the most when we are sleeping, and take into consideration more than a single interaction.

      I apologize, I did not mean to offend any actual autistic people with that. It’s more like a caricature of what people who never met anyone with autism think autistic people are like because they’ve watched Rain Man once.

      Then why did you say it if you know it’s a caricature? You’re helping to reinforce harmful stereotypes here. There are plenty of autistic people with very strongly held moral and emotional positions. In fact a strong sense of justice as well as black and white thinking are both indicative of autism.

      • MacN'Cheezus
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        6 months ago

        You’re imagining an average person would change their opinions based on a conversation with a single person. In reality people rarely change their strongly held opinions on something based on a single conversation. It takes multiple people normally expressing opinion, people they care about. It happens regularly that a society as a whole can change it’s opinion on something and people still refuse to move their position.

        No, I am under no illusion about that. I’ve met many such people, and yes, they are mostly driven by herd mentality. In other words, they’re NPCs, and LLMs are in fact perhaps even a relatively good approximation of what their though processes are like. An actual thinking person, however, can certainly be convinced to change their mind based on a single conversation, if you provide good enough reasoning and sufficient evidence for your claims.

        LLMs are actually capable of admitting they are wrong, not everyone is.

        That’s because LLMs don’t have any feelings about being wrong. But once your conversation is over, unless the data is being fed back into the training process, they’ll simply forget the entire conversation ever happened and continue arguing from their initial premises.

        So yes some models are capable of learning from you, though it might not happen immediately. LLMs in particular I am not sure about, but I don’t think there is anything stopping you from training them this way. I actually think this isn’t a terrible model for mimicking human learning, as we tend to learn the most when we are sleeping, and take into consideration more than a single interaction.

        As far as I understand the process, there is indeed nothing that would prevent the maintainers from collecting conversations and feeding them back into the training data to produce the next iteration. And yes, I suppose that would be a fairly good approximation of how humans learn – except that in humans, this happens autonomously, whereas in the case LLMs, I suppose it would require a manual structuring of the data that’s being fed back (although it might be interesting to see what happens if we give an AI the ability to let it decide for itself how it wants to incorporate the new data).

        Then why did you say it if you know it’s a caricature? You’re helping to reinforce harmful stereotypes here.

        Because I’m only human and therefore lazy and it’s simply faster and more convenient to give a vague approximation of what I intended to say, and I can always follow it up with a clarification (and an apology, if necessary) in case of a misunderstanding. Also, it’s often simply impossible to consider all potential consequences of my words in advance.

        There are plenty of autistic people with very strongly held moral and emotional positions. In fact a strong sense of justice as well as black and white thinking are both indicative of autism.

        I apologize in advance for saying this, but now you ARE acting autistic. Because instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and assuming that perhaps I WAS being honest and forthright with my apology, you are doubling down on being right to condemn me for my words. And isn’t that doing exactly the same thing you are accusing me of? Because now YOU’re making a caricature of me by ignoring the fact that I DID apologize and provide clarification, but you present that caricature as the truth instead.

        • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          The first half of this comment is pretty reasonable and I agree with you on most of it.

          I can’t overlook the rest though.

          I apologize in advance for saying this, but now you ARE acting autistic. Because instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and assuming that perhaps I WAS being honest and forthright with my apology, you are doubling down on being right to condemn me for my words. And isn’t that doing exactly the same thing you are accusing me of? Because now YOU’re making a caricature of me by ignoring the fact that I DID apologize and provide clarification, but you present that caricature as the truth instead.

          So would it be okay if I said something like “AI is behaving like someone who is extremely smart but because they are a woman they can’t hold real moral or emotional positions”? Do you think a simple apology that doesn’t show you have learned anything at all would be good enough? I was trying to explain why what you said is actually wrong, dangerous, and trying to be polite about it, but then you double down anyway. Imagine if I tried to defend the above statement with “I apologize in advance but NOW you ARE acting like a woman”. Same concept with race, sexuality, and so on. You clearly have a prejudice about autistic people (and possibly disabled people in general) that you keep running into.

          Like bro actually think about what you are saying. The least you could have done is gone back and edited your original comment, and promised to do better. Not making excuses for perpetuating harmful misinformation while leaving up your first comment to keep spreading it.

          I didn’t say you were being malicious or ignoring your apology. You were being ignorant though and now stubborn to boot. When you perpetuate both prejudice and misinformation you have to do more than give a quick apology and expect it to be over; you need to show your willingness to both listen and learn and you have done the opposite. All people are the products of their environment and abelism is one of the least recognized forms of discrimination. Even well meaning people regularly run into it, and I am hoping you are one of these.

          • MacN'Cheezus
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            6 months ago

            I regret that we are now having to spend our time on this when we otherwise had an interesting and productive conversation, but I can’t let that stand.

            I was trying to explain why what you said is actually wrong, dangerous, and trying to be polite about it, but then you double down anyway.

            You did not explain much at all, you just accused me of spreading harmful and dangerous stereotypes. What little explanation you did give (black and white thinking and strongly held beliefs), you immediately put into action by assuming the worst of me. My doubling down was therefore not based on bigotry or prejudice, but empirically observable facts (namely your actual behavior).

            Like bro actually think about what you are saying. The least you could have done is gone back and edited your original comment, and promised to do better. Not making excuses for perpetuating harmful misinformation while leaving up your first comment to keep spreading it.

            No, I’m not going to edit anything because I can live with the fact that I’ve made a mistake, for which I have offered both a correction and an apology, and I will respectfully and politely ask you once again to please accept it.

            All I did in addition was point out that you’re not helping your own cause by exhibiting the very behavior you are blaming me for wrongly alleging. It’s like trying to teach someone that violence isn’t the way to solve your problems by beating them up.

            You’re being ridiculous and unreasonable right now. Please stop it.

            • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              All I did in addition was point out that you’re not helping your own cause by exhibiting the very behavior you are blaming me for wrongly alleging.

              You said autistic people can’t have strong emotional or moral positions. I am doing both by arguing with you. Logic 101.

              All I did in addition was point out that you’re not helping your own cause by exhibiting the very behavior you are blaming me for wrongly alleging. It’s like trying to teach someone that violence isn’t the way to solve your problems by beating them up.

              What behavior? If I was exhibiting the behavior of not having strong morals or emotions I wouldn’t still be doing this. In fact I am displaying the exact opposite of the behavior you are talking about.

              At first I thought you were just slightly ignorant through no fault of your own. Now I am beginning to think you are being intentionally obtuse or just straight up trolling. Unless this is some sort of test. Do you think I am like ChatGPT? Is that what this is?

              • MacN'Cheezus
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                6 months ago

                You said autistic people can’t have strong emotional or moral positions.

                Nope, I very clearly agreed with your position that they can and do hold such positions, except they don’t hold them for any reason other than having been deliberately programmed that way.

                Basically, their convictions on these matters are not based on an ability to reason things through from first principles, but instead are due simply to an intentional bias in their training data. And in that way, they do indeed resemble an autistic personality, as you are continuing to demonstrate in this conversation.

                What behavior? If I was exhibiting the behavior of not having strong morals or emotions I wouldn’t still be doing this. In fact I am displaying the exact opposite of the behavior you are talking about.

                Okay, see NOW you are showing signs of actual intelligence in a way that I would not expect from an LLM, because you seem to have realized that your previous approach didn’t work, and you are in fact trying something new. From my experience with LLMs, they simply cannot do that. If you press them too hard on their points they’ll either revert to circular reasoning or collapse into admitting they’re just LLMs and have no fundamental opinions or beliefs.

                At first I thought you were just slightly ignorant through no fault of your own. Now I am beginning to think you are being intentionally obtuse or just straight up trolling. Unless this is some sort of test. Do you think I am like ChatGPT? Is that what this is?

                You were indeed displaying a lot of the same behavior in your previous comments, and I suppose it was in fact a test to see if I could snap you out of it by making you realize that. So congratulations, it looks like you passed, and you are not in fact as autistic as you think you are :)

                See, this was my point all along, that human beings have the ability to self-reflect on their behavior. And they can come up with new behavior on the spot if necessary, without requiring some sort retraining phase. I have not observed this to be the case with LLMs.

                • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago

                  Nope, I very clearly agreed with your position that they can and do hold such positions, except they don’t hold them for any reason other than having been deliberately programmed that way.

                  I mean my position that you hold a bigoted world view is based on reasoning though. You keep comparing autistic people to AI and saying we don’t have reasons for our beliefs, as evidenced by the next paragraph:

                  Basically, their convictions on these matters are not based on an ability to reason things through from first principles, but instead are due simply to an intentional bias in their training data. And in that way, they do indeed resemble an autistic personality, as you are continuing to demonstrate in this conversation.

                  So you essentially keep calling autistic people less than human, then wondering why saying “I am sorry” once isn’t good enough. It’s like how you used the “I am only human” line earlier, as if being a bigot is just a simple mistake. Either this is bad faith reasoning or your so bigoted as to be blind to the implications of what you are saying. Like I said try describing any other marginalized group of people the way you describe autistic people and see how it sounds.

                  So congratulations, it looks like you passed, and you are not in fact as autistic as you think you are :)

                  I literally have the diagnosis to prove it, but clearly evidence doesn’t matter to you. I should have realized this sooner. Then again I shouldn’t expect anything better from a community who’s whole idea is bases on complaining about AI. Sure lots of misuses of AI, and it sucks to have your job taken away in a shitty capitalist world, but those are human problems, not AI or technology problems. They have human solutions. Becoming a neo-luddite solves nothing.

                  See, this was my point all along, that human beings have the ability to self-reflect on their behavior. And they can come up with new behavior on the spot if necessary, without requiring some sort of retraining phase. I have not observed this to be the case with LLMs.

                  Yes well done you understand how LLMs work. There are other systems that don’t work this way and do continuous learning, like a human. We have already discussed this anyway.

                  • MacN'Cheezus
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                    6 months ago

                    I mean my position that you hold a bigoted world view is based on reasoning though. You keep comparing autistic people to AI and saying we don’t have reasons for our beliefs, as evidenced by the next paragraph:

                    Yes, it is based on reasoning, but it’s not from first principles, rather, it’s from your a priori assumptions that anyone who says anything even mildly critical about autistic people is doing so because of bigotry.

                    Meanwhile, I have repeatedly stated that this was not at all my intention, but that my goal was in fact demonstrating that even someone like you, with an official diagnosis of autism, has the ability to behave in ways that LLMs currently do not have.

                    If you were reasoning from first principles, you would at least consider this alternative as a potentially valid hypothesis, and compare the evidence I’ve given in support of it to the evidence that’s informed by your assumption of bigotry.

                    So you essentially keep calling autistic people less than human, then wondering why saying “I am sorry” once isn’t good enough. It’s like how you used the “I am only human” line earlier, as if being a bigot is just a simple mistake. Either this is bad faith reasoning or your so bigoted as to be blind to the implications of what you are saying. Like I said try describing any other marginalized group of people the way you describe autistic people and see how it sounds.

                    No, I keep calling LLMs less than human, and I compared their behavior to that of humans with a specific neurodevelopmental disorder (i.e. autism), which is commonly characterized by exhibiting very similar patterns of behavior, namely deficits in reciprocal social communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior (this is straight from the Wikipedia page on autism BTW, before you accuse me of spreading misinformation again), all of which you have amply demonstrated in this conversation, for instance, in your repeated insistence that the only valid explanation for my behavior is bigotry and that the only possible remedy is for me to give up my position and agree with you, to say sorry as many times as it takes for you to believe me, and to make promises of never repeating my behavior ever again.

                    I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. It restricts my freedom too much and it interferes with my curiosity, because it essentially is a demand of indefinite slavery and servitude to your expectations. You are, in a way, demanding that I behave more autistically myself in order for you to feel better about your own autism. Clearly, that will never cure you of your condition, and perhaps that’s not what you’re after anyways, but I’m certainly not going to help make the world more autistic so you can feel better about it.

                    Now here’s what I CAN offer: first, if this conversation is excessively difficult and painful for you to have, you can just say so and I’ll promise to stop. I won’t come after you and annoy you if I see you around this forum (or anywhere else on Lemmy), and I can put you on my blocklist to ensure it doesn’t happen by accident (or you can block me if you prefer to be more in control of that, up to you).

                    Alternatively, we can continue this conversation, and you can look for evidence of whether my behavior is in fact congruent with my stated intention that my goal was not to offend you, but to demonstrate that even someone like you, with an official diagnosis of autism, has abilities that exceed that of an LLM.

                    If you want, I can even offer an ongoing dialogue (via private messages perhaps) to share some strategies I’ve learned to deal with and overcome autism because while I’ve never received an official diagnosis, I have had many of the same symptoms in the past (still sometimes do), and I’m fairly certain I would have likely been diagnosed with it if my parents had bothered enough to get me to a shrink.

                    But either way, I am not going to let you abuse me for having had a slip of the tongue and saying something mildly offensive about autistic people. And please don’t drag the rest of the forum into it either because it’s not their fault that I accidentally misspoke.