George Rebane
In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians - Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced. To give you more than an idea of its contents, here is the paper’s opening abstract in its entirety.
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society’s most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.
In the paper’s conclusions the authors state –
As political elections are one of the most consequential decision-making processes of democratic societies, our findings have important ramifications. Moreover, the “partisan content” that ChatGPT automatically generates at unprecedented scales may attract users who share similar beliefs. In turn, the feedback that OpenAI actively solicits from its user base to improve its model outputs may amplify and perpetuate this ideological bias in a vicious circle. As automated chatbots have the potential to influence user behavior, it is crucial to raise awareness about these breakthrough systems’ flaws and biases.
Thet then point out the meticulous care that was taken to ‘fine tune’ ChatGPT which included mediation by humans in the attempt to remove ideological bias. The obvious inference here is that there exist unbiased humans with demonstrated processes that can politically sanitize (neutralize?) right/left tilts. To my knowledge no such individuals have yet to be identified who are acknowledged by both sides to possess such neutral attributes and the talents to apply them. If we can’t find genuine middle-roaders among ourselves, what chance to we have of training politically vanilla chatbots to advise us with such problems as public policies and elections?
From my perch during these pre-Singularity years, I recommend taking the ideological opinions and political advice of AIs in the same manner as one accept that from any other intelligent and selectively informed being.
‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’
George Rebane
RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here). The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles. Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M. Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.
As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs. They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible. The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.
But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI). One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check. This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans. These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.
RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment. A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted at 12:36 PM in Culture Comments, Our Country, Our World, Singularity Signposts, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7)
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