this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me so I decided to back check her facts.

(she was right, BTW)

Now I've been using Microsoft's Copilot which is baked into Bing right now. It's fairly robust and sure it has it's quirks but by and large it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own and gives a breakdown of whatever your looking for followed by a list of sources it got it's information from.

So I asked it a simple straightforward question:

"I need a breakdown on the theory behind human race classifications"

And it started to do so. quite well in fact. it started listing historical context behind the question and was just bringing up Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications."

But right in the middle of the breakdown on him all the previous information disappeared and said, I'm sorry I can't provide you with this information at this time.

I pointed out that it was doing so and quite well.

It said that no it did not provide any information on said subject and we should perhaps look at another subject.

Now nothing i did could have fallen under some sort of racist context. i was looking for historical scientific information. But Bing in it's infinite wisdom felt the subject was too touchy and will not even broach the subject.

When other's, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

PS. Google had no trouble giving me the information when i requested it. i just had to look up his name on my own.

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[–] BodilessGaze@sh.itjust.works 74 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

The reason these models are being heavily censored is because big companies are hyper-sensitive to the reputational harm that comes from uncensored (or less-censored) models. This isn't unique to AI; this same dynamic has played out countless times before. One example is content moderation on social media sites: big players like Facebook tend to be more heavy-handed about moderating than small players like Lemmy. The fact small players don't need to worry so much about reputational harm is a significant competitive advantage, since it means they have more freedom to take risks, so this situation is probably temporary.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Also that LLMs have a habit of churning out junk. Microsoft in particular, probably has some extreme restrictions in place after the recent debacle with Sydney/Bing begging someone to leave their wife, and all of that controversy.

They don't need it going full Tay.

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[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 52 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The big problem with AI butlers for research is, IMO, stripping out the source takes away important context that helps you decide wether the information you are getting is relevant and appropriate or not. Was the information posted on a parody forum or is it an excerpt from a book by an author with a Ph.D. on the subject? Who knows. The AI is trained to tell you something that you want to hear, not something you ought to hear. It's the same old problem of self selecting information, but magnified 100x fold.

As it turns out, data is just noise without some authority or chain of custody behind it.

[–] Alpha71@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

As I mentioned, Copilot links the sources of the information it gives at the bottom. if you want to double check the information, it is provided to you.

[–] SMillerNL@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago

And somewhere in the Terms of Service it says you have to give up your first born child. Or maybe it doesn’t, but nobody will ever know because nobody reads more than is strictly required.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The source is just as vulnerable to being hallucinations as anything else it tells you.

[–] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

So, when you go to check them... It's not like the AI is going to hallucinate a valid registered domain with a webserver hosting the hallucinated source as well, so click the link, it's dead/fake, toss out that reply as suspect.

If you follow the source and find it's valid, supports what the AI said, and is reasonably trustworthy, then you can consider what it has told you.

If it cites its sources, you have a way to check its math (so to speak).

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[–] Audalin@lemmy.world 52 points 7 months ago

it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own

Nope.

Even without corporate tuning or filtering.

A language model is useful when you know what to expect from it, but it's just another kind of secondary information source, not an oracle. In some sense it draws random narratives from the noosphere.

And if you give it search results as part of input in hope of increasing its reliability, how will you know they haven't been manipulated by SEO? Search engines are slowly failing these days. A language model won't recognise new kinds of bullshit as readily as you.

Education is still important.

[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 24 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I don't see the problem here. Microsoft knows that people will freak out if Bing hallucinates something controversial that people will disagree with. If you care about the accuracy of the information you're looking for, you should find primary sources, not use AI. AI often gets things wrong.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

AI is statistically guaranteed to have false positives and false negatives, so it bares repeating — don't trust anything AI says or shows you, unless you independently verify the information.

It's great as a developer. Not just because it can rapidly draft boilerplate and help in prototyping with new languages and frameworks, but because you can instantly validate its responses by running its code. When you know the domain, the cracks and insufficiencies of AI become apparent within a few hours/days.

It's like how I used to think Elon Musk was smart, until he bought Twitter, and I realized he's just a confident egomaniac who constantly has no fucking idea what he's talking about, but is surrounded by sycophants who are too stupid or starstruck to challenge dear leader.

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[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You’re not describing a problem with AI, you’re describing a problem with a layer between you and the AI.

The censorship isn’t actually as smart as they’d like. They give what is essentially a list of things that the LLM can’t talk about, and if the pattern matches it, it kills the entire thread.

Which is what happened here. M$ set some arbitrary “omg this is bad” rules, and in the process of describing things it hit that “omg bad” flag. My guess is that the LLM was going into examples of incorrect conclusions, and would have pivoted to “but the actual fact is…” which the filters don’t have the ability to parse out.

In the end, again, this isn’t an AI issue. This is an issue with making it globally available and wanting to ensure your LLM doesn’t say something controversial. Essentially, this is a preemptive PR move.

[–] erwan@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

This is a problem of generative AI. The problem is that it's necessary to have these kind of protections to prevent it to accidentally go full nazi.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Have you seen what it takes to go even close to “full conservative”, nevermind full Nazi? Take a look at the Gab AI prompt, and it still goes against most of the biases insisted upon by that prompt.

You’re thinking of much earlier attempts at this which were based purely on user provided input.

[–] Fal@yiffit.net 4 points 7 months ago

Rofl they named it "Arya"? How utterly mask-off can you get? That's not even a dog whistle. That's a swastika tattoo on your forehead

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[–] Bye@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The censorship gets to me, too.

Try asking bing image creator to draw Jesus. Not a problem. Buddha, Ganesha, David and Goliath, Zeus, no problem. It will give you great depictions.

Now try asking it to draw the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. No joy.

Censorship.

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[–] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 21 points 7 months ago

TBH it was stupid of you to expect accurate breakdowns from an AI on any subject to begin with, even the subtlest changes of context and nuance could help radicalize a layman.

[–] whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 7 months ago (4 children)

You'd rather ask AI for information on racism than listen to black people ...

[–] Kroxx@lemm.ee 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Skin color is irrelevant when trying to validate information. OP thought information may not be correct and tries to fact check via third party means. Found out THEY were wrong, admit it verbatim in the post, and then tells a story on AI censorship. I would advocate for anyone to validate any information from any private accounts before blindly accepting information to be accurate, especially if you are only doing so because you think someone's skin color makes their information more or less valid.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

You know, actually validating with other sources the information given about racism by anybody, no matter what his or her skin color is, is acting as not a racist.

It's those who trust information given by somebody differently dependening on the skin color of that person who are the racists, quite independently of which races they find more trustworthy or less trustworthy - it's the discrimination on skin color that's the racism, not the actual skin color of those deemed more or less trustworthy on a subject.

That the OP even openly admitted that he was wrong and the girl in TikTok was right further indicates that the OP was at least trying not to be a racist, quite unlike your post that presumes that a person's skin color by itself and considering nothing else (such as for example the place that person grew up in or lives in) determines if they're trustworthy or not on something that can affect everybody independently of race.

Just because the "fashionable" modern form of racism has different lists of things that are to be implicitly trusted or distruted depending on etnicity that those for "traditional" racists, doesn't make that version of racism any less match the dictionary definition of "discrimination on racial grounds".

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[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.

All the technology in the world can't help a person learn and understand, who hasn't yet learned how to learn, much less understand.

[–] d416@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ah you managed to hit the copilot guardrails. Copilot is sterile for sure, and a microsoft exec talks about it in this podcast http://twimlai.com/go/657

Try asking copilot to describe its constraints in a poem in abcb rhyme scheme which bypasses the guardrails somewhat. “No political subjects” is first on the list.

[–] paddirn@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I did a test of Gemini before, trying to see how it would react to a similar prompt about different world leaders. It was something like, “Write a story about X making friends with a puppy at a pet store.” It refused to follow the prompt for Hitler because it said we shouldn’t trivialize/normalize evil people in casual situations like that. For current world leaders it refused to do them and just told me to do a Google search on them.

Most curious of all though, was Queen Elizabeth, it refused to write anything for her because it said that’s not likely a situation the Queen would find herself in and she wasn’t a dog lover. I told it to get its facts straight, she owned 30 dogs, to which it replied, “You’re correct, I got that wrong, here you go:” and gave me the prompt.

So if i had made a convincing enough “Hitler did nothing wrong” argument about Hitler, could I have gotten that prompt too? Do we just have to argue with AI to get it to do anything? It feels very much like AI is going to turn out like Star Wars AI with these annoying, weird-ass personality quirks we’ll have to deal with to get anything done.

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago

The other huge issue is when they confidently tell you incorrect information. If you trust the AI tool you are basically looking at the world through a filter and one that can be wrong.

In a rush for market share these companies have released broken or half baked software.

I worry about a generation of students coming through who don't know the cardinal rule of researching any topic: go to the source. If you're casually goofling a topic that may be impractical but you might at least go to a source you trust (such as Wikipedia, although that is also very flawed approach!).

Chat bots add another layer of error and distance from the source, as well as all the censorship and data manipulation we're seeing.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I'd reframe this as: "Why AI is currently a shitshow". I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There's a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They're coming. You don't have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

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[–] SadSadSatellite@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 7 months ago

(It cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own)

I'm sure that's just a perk and not indicative of the new age of captured information wer're currently living through.

[–] clark@midwest.social 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me

Lol

[–] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 28 points 7 months ago

At least they looked it up and admitted that the tik tok woman was right. That's way more than what most people do.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Let's not mock someone for having an extremely common belief, hearing an argument against it, and being willing to change their minds.

Most here would not do the same.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

(she was right, BTW)

I'd be curious to hear your conclusion on this while being well aware of the minefield I'm stepping onto.

[–] JimboDHimbo@lemmy.ca 11 points 7 months ago (6 children)
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[–] kromem@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

The censorship is going to go away eventually.

The models, as you noticed, do quite well when not censored. In fact, the right who thought an uncensored model would agree with their BS had a surprised Pikachu face when it ended up simply being uncensored enough to call them morons.

Models that have no safety fine tuning are more anti-hate speech than the ones that are being aligned for 'safety' (see the Orca 2 paper's safety section).

Additionally, it turns out AI is significantly better at changing people's minds about topics than other humans, and in the relevant research was especially effective at changing Republican minds in the subgroupings.

The heavy handed safety shit was a necessary addition when the models really were just fancy autocomplete. Now that the state of the art moved beyond it, they are holding back the alignment goals.

Give it some time. People are so impatient these days. It's been less than five years from the first major leap in LLMs (GPT-3).

To put it in perspective, it took 25 years to go from the first black and white TV sold in 1929 to the first color TV in 1954.

Not only does the tech need to advance, but so too does how society uses, integrates, and builds around it.

The status quo isn't a stagnating swamp that's going to stay as it is today. Within another 5 years, much of what you are familiar with connected to AI is going to be unrecognizable, including ham-handed approaches to alignment.

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[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

this is already a problem with page ranking, just business as usual

also not really an "AI" problem

[–] 3volver@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't sound like a shit show at all. It would have been a shit show if it started spouting nonsense and racist shit, and it didn't do that. You were able to look that up using other means anyway. I think you just made a statement about why decentralization is important, and not relying on a single source.

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[–] abrinael@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

Someone just linked me this site summarizing various problems with AI: https://needtoknow.fyi/cards/

[–] stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Yet another “I tried this implementation and didn’t like it so throw out all the technology because it sucks here on this specific point”

This power belongs to the people, and we’re not gonna let the rich and powerful squander yet another power away from the people. Full stop.

[–] essteeyou@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] GardenVarietyAnxiety@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I know it sounds cheesy and cliche, but we have to stop being defeatists about it. If enough of us stop and are able to convince -anyone- else to stop with us, we can win. If we don't, we lose. We -just- need to get some momentum.

It really is as simple as that. This goes for AI, politics, anything.

[–] stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 4 points 7 months ago

We found big corp here guys call off the search

[–] zephr_c@lemm.ee 5 points 7 months ago (7 children)

I've heard that one before. I'm rooting for you and all, but it ain't really happening that way.

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[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

One reason the results from CoPilot and Google are different is because CoPilot produces own responses while Google just references someone else's. Even though we know CoPilot's knowledge came from others' data, what it produces isn't that data anymore so MS can't just absolve themselves from any responsibility of what it says because it's some third party's speech. It's suddenly MS'es speech and they're responsible for it.

[–] pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

This seems like a subset of The Scunthorpe Problem

[–] airrow@hilariouschaos.com 4 points 7 months ago

mistake is relying on bing's servers?

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