An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.
So this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you’re a culture warrior 1984’ing the whole world, and if you don’t now your tool will generate resumes with fake experience or recommend offensive books.
At the risk of sounding like a jackass, when do we start blaming people for asking for such things?
It’s funny that this one does both at once. It lies about Amazon working conditions, meaning it probably has been censored in some way, but at the same time it is recommending Nazi books. Really shows Amazon’s priorities when it comes to censorship.
At least Amazon is thinking of the shareholders.
So this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you’re a culture warrior 1984’ing the whole world,
No this isn’t really a problem with the technology, though of course LLMs are extremely flawed in fundamental ways, it is a problem with conservatives being babies and throwing massive tantrums about any guardrails being added even when they are next to cliffs with 200 foot drops.
Conservatives and libertarians (who control most of these companies) want to try to figure this all out for themselves and are hellbent on trying the “no moderation” strategy first and haven’t thought past that step. This is what conservatives and libertarians always do, they might as well be a character archetype in commedia dell’arte at this point.
We can’t have an adult conversation about racism, sexism, hate against trans people or really even the basic concept of systematic stereotypes and prejudices because conservatives refuse to stop running around screaming, making this a conversation with children where everything has to be extremely simplified and black and white and we have to patiently explain over and over again the basic concept of a systematic bias and argue that it even exists.
Then these same people turn around and vote for people who literally want to control what women do with their unfertilized eggs while they act with a straight face like they give af about individual liberties or freedoms.
LLMs are fundamentally vulnerable to bias, we have to design LLMs with that in mind and first and foremost carefully structure and curate the training data we train an LLM on so that bias is minimized. The very idea of even thinking about the complexities usually sends conservatives right to outbursts of “that sounds like tyranny!” because they honestly just don’t have any of the skill sets that say, a liberal arts education that values the humanities, might provide you that could allow you to think about how to best solve problems that can’t truly be fairly solved and require empathizing with different groups.
Of course, nobody who has the power at AI companies is thinking about this either but…
How to you curate training data to remove biases without introducing bias? That’s the key problem here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be opposed to trading one bias for another. At least the initial bias is based on reality.
Because anybody who has taken a couple of humanities classes, english classes, philosophy classes, journalism/political science classes or who has spent time critically evaluating art, historical accounts or really anything other than just numbers, code and spreadsheets… understands intuitively that EVERYTHING human has bias.
It seems like a lot of conservatives and libertarians are jussssssst beginning to comprehend this and again and they want the conversation to be “BIAS BAD GET RID OF IT” because they are children who don’t listen and want to throw a tantrum so we can’t have an adult conversation with nuance.
We can’t remove biases, believe me, human history is written with the countless stories of artists, scientists, kings, religious leaders… who all thought they could do shit like that. The point is you can’t. Everything we create and do is biased, everything we create and make is political, these aren’t absolutist statements meant to trivialize a critical nuanced conversation about bias or politics though. On the contrary I am calling attention to the vital nature of these topics as the actually HARD part of LLMs or social media. The programming, data manipulation, development of decentralized protocols etc… they are all nearly trivial details comparatively.
Computer science has to try to create imperfect solutions to the bias problem, but it would have a much easier time if it recognized how tiny this whole world of computer science still is compared to the immense amount of knowledge in the humanities produced by generations of artists and thinkers tackling the same problems.
We can’t remove biases, but we still have to make better choices anyways.
Well put. I think tackling the bias will always be a challenge. It’s not that we shouldn’t, but how is the question.
I don’t know if any of the big public LLMs are trying to trim biases from their training data or are just trying to ad-hoc tackle it by injecting modifiers into the prompts.
That’s the biggest problem I have personally with LLMs is that they are untrustworthy and often give incorrect or blatantly false information.
Sometimes it can be frustrating when I run across the “I can’t do that because of ethics” on benign prompts that I felt like it shouldn’t have but I don’t think it’s been that big a deal.
When we talk about political conservatives being opposed to biased LLMs, it’s mostly because it won’t tell them that their harmful beliefs are correct
When we talk about political conservatives being opposed to biased LLMs, it’s mostly because it won’t tell them that their harmful beliefs are correct
“What because I think Islam is inherently a violent religion now this chatbot is telling me I AM the one with violent and harmful beliefs???” - some loser, maybe elon musk or maybe your uncle, who cares.
So more or less the same as with human interactions.
when do we start blaming people for asking for such things?
On the same day that we start blaming people for spilling hot McDonald’s coffee on themselves
Says the idiot clearly unfamiliar with the details of their cited reference. 🤦🏼♂️
Oh good, the corporate propaganda worked.
Look I probably hate McDonald’s more than any of you but as I see it:
- the woman ordered coffee in the drive thru in a vehicle with no cup holders
- held the cup between her knees rather than, ya know, placing it on a flat surface
- spilled the coffee on herself while taking off the lid
While McDonald’s:
- made the coffee too hot
It’s clear after the case that McDonald’s coffee was exceptionally hot, but there was clearly an irresponsible chain of decisions that led to her getting burnt.
The jury found that McDonald’s was 80% responsible. I just think it’s more like 50%.
Too bad you weren’t on the jury, because you could have been educated on the situation and have a valid opinion on the subject.
Or you could actually look up real information and find out what exactly McDonald’s was being punished for, and how they exacerbated the situation over and over.
Safety standards are not created with the expectation that everyone else acts perfectly safely, safety standards are designed that people can have accidents and not be maimed due to cost cutting from a giant, multinational corporation. McDonald’s deserves that judgement, the media demonized the victim, and you are perpetuating that myth.
Your comments are like when a schoolchild who hasn’t read the assigned material has to present in front of the class.
Yeah, how dare we blame the people who knew about the problem and chose not to fix it until someone was horrifically burned? And can you believe the gall of that woman to dare to ask for her medical bills to be paid by the people who knowingly setup the conditions to horrifically burn her?
The nerve of some people. Smh my head
If I buy ice cream I expect it to be cold. If I buy coffee I expect it to be hot. If I buy a knife I expect it to be sharp and so on.
I don’t want stores to start selling dull knives because out of thousand customers there’s always one who instantly cuts themselves. We don’t need to round every sharp corner in the world so that no one ever gets hurt again. If you can’t handle a bewerage you know to be hot with care then that’s on you.
What if you bought an ice cream cone and it was so cold that you had to get skin grafts to repair the damage to your lips? And not only that, but the owner of the store instructed the employees to make it that cold?
The McDonald’s woman’s risk calculation was probably “if this spills, it will hurt” and not, “if this spills, it will do permanent, significant damage to my body”.
Why would anyone prefer living in a world where some property of any item you buy could intentionally be set to dangerously extreme levels?
If I remember correctly, one of the main reasons she burned so bad was the type of pants she was wearing which soaked up the hot coffee and stuck to her skin. They were arguing that lowering the temperature certain amount would greatly increase the time for severe burns to happen, which is a fair point but would still come with its downsides. Coffee snobs like me want their cups fresh and hot. It doesn’t make sense to me to prevent the coffee shop from serving me fresh coffee because someone spilled such coffee on herself. In certain cases we just gotta accept that addicents happen and to me this seems like one of them. Like I said; wouldn’t make much sense to sell dull knives either.
Won’t someone think of the poor coffee snobs who want their coffee just so, but don’t want to have to make it themselves at home? We can’t sacrifice their ideal coffee temperature at public establishments just to save some people from horrific burns — people who are probably wearing the wrong pants anyway, and therefore are kind of at fault too, when you think about it.
Haha yeah they called the woman, told her to buy a coffee in the drive thru and handle it in the most careless way possible. Here’s an idea: go buy a rake from Home Depot, set it on the ground, step on it, bonk your forehead, and sue Home Depot for damages. After all, they’re selling a dangerous product and if you use it irresponsibly, that’s on them.
All these armchair legal experts acting like her winning the case means she isn’t partly to blame are hilarious.
I asked it to write a Seinfeld episode about the product I was viewing, Trojan condoms. It writes a cautionary tale for me where Elaine is warning everyone not to buy them because the condoms are defective.
What’s up with Elaine’s change of tone? She was saying the condoms were great until Kramer came in, and then switched to saying she had a bad experience.
It’s because the AI has no idea what reality is. Note also that Elaine’s praise took on the perspective of the wearer.
Defective? I don’t believe it. I’m gonna go buy the biggest box they have.
(っ˘ڡ˘ς)
Because it’s a large language model that parrots human information. Not particularly surprising.
I always feel sad with these kinds of stories. The machine is clearly just trying to be helpful but it doesn’t understand a thing about what it is doing or why we might find what it is saying repugnant. It’s like watching a dog not understanding that yes, we like our slippers, but we don’t want our neighbours swastika themed ones on our doorstep.
And then of course we get to the content and I am reminded that we live in hell and the sadness is replaced by the familiar horror as the machine pretends to empathise with its fellow Amazon workers and helps them pick out the ideal thing to piss in without missing their drop targets.
🤖 💔😭
🌝🤖♥️🧍♂️🥈🏠
Can we please stop with these stories about “AI chatbot has grabage output”? We know that. Let me know when they work.
Just because you know that doesn’t mean that everybody does, and it’s an important thing to know.
Claude 3 Opus will rewrite stuff for you real good. Pit it against GPT-4-Turbo at LMSys’s arena.
Rewriting. Brainstorming. Expanding notes into drafts. For some, coding.
Want to learn something new without having to re-verify it? Yeah that’ll have to wait :)
rewrite stuff for you real good
I guess this is one way of proving you’re not a chatbot…
They work about 75 to 90 percent of the time… You don’t really want to hear stories about that either.
Both sides of LLM stories are just clickbait.
recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked
Careful, this Ai may be the next CEO.
paywalled.
The archive link is also behind the wall.
uBlockOrigin FTW…
Is there a specific list I need to enable? Because I have UBO and it’s showing me the subscribe to read the full article thing.
Hope this helps 🤓
It’s the bottom that’s the problem. You can read the first paragraph or two just fine.
I can read the whole thing just fine.
Freewalled.
Already had a free account though because 404 is killin’ it. Now I’m onto another Amazon article:
not a paywall, and it’s there for a good reason
you’re either blind or stupid
you don’t have to pay anything to access it, just put there burner email. they made it so to prevent or at least deter scrapping
scraping*
Yes, downvote the correction, lemmings. Live up to your fictitious namesake, numbskulls.
deleted by creator
Project much, kitten?
I just use it to write poems and songs about the products I’m thinking of buying.
