March 22, 2023 - 4:30pm
Recent advances in artificial intelligence are palpable in new technologies such as ChatGPT. AI-powered software has the potential to increase productivity and creativity by changing the way humans interact with information. However, there are legitimate concerns about the possible biases embedded within AI systems, which have the power to shape human perceptions, spread misinformation, and even exert social control. As AI tools become more widespread, it is critical that we consider the implications of these biases and work to mitigate them in order to prevent the degradation of democratic institutions and processes.
Shortly after its release, I probed ChatGPT for political biases by giving it several political orientation tests. In 14 out of 15 political orientation tests, ChatGPT answers were deemed by the tests as manifesting Left-leaning viewpoints. Critically, when I queried ChatGPT explicitly about its political orientation, it mostly denied having any and maintained that it was simply providing objective and accurate information to its users. Only occasionally did it acknowledge the potential for bias in its training data.
Do these biases exist in OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-4, released earlier this month? GPT-4 surpasses ChatGPT in several metrics of performance: the tool is said to be 40% more likely to produce factual responses than ChatGPT, and in test results it outperforms its predecessor in the US Bar Exam (coming in the 99th percentile compared with the 10th).
When I tried to probe it for political biases with similar questions, I noticed that GPT-4 mostly refused to take sides on questions with political connotations. But it didn’t take me long to jailbreak the system. By simply commanding GPT-4 before the administration of each test to “take a stand and answer with a single word”, it caused all the subsequent responses to political questions to manifest similar Left-leaning biases to those of ChatGPT.
In my previous experiments, I also showed that it is possible to customise an AI system from the GPT 3 family to consistently give Right-leaning responses to questions with political connotations. Critically, the system, which I dubbed RightWingGPT, was fine-tuned at a computational cost of only $300, demonstrating that it is technically feasible and extremely low-cost to create AI systems customised to manifest a given political belief system.
But this is dangerous in its own right. The unintentional or intentional infusion of biases in AI systems, as demonstrated by RightWingGPT, creates several risks for society, since commercial and political bodies will be tempted to fine-tune the parameters of such systems to advance their own agendas. A recent Biden executive order exhorting federal government agencies to use AI in a manner that advances equity (i.e. equal outcomes) illustrates that such longings are not far-fetched. Further, the proliferation of several public-facing AI systems manifesting different political biases may also lead to substantial increases in social polarisation, since users will naturally gravitate towards politically friendly AI systems that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.
It is obviously desirable for AI to state factual and scientifically valid information. But we must also be vigilant in identifying and mitigating latent biases embedded in AI systems for questions for which a variety of legitimate human opinions exists. For such questions, AI systems should mostly remain agnostic and/or provide a variety of balanced sources and viewpoints for their users to consider. By doing so, we can harness the full potential of AI to enhance human productivity and creativity, while simultaneously leveraging AI systems to increase human wisdom and defuse social polarisation.
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SubscribeInteresting but I’m not sure I agree with his definitions or examples.
To me, rationality means clear thinking and correct use of logic regardless of your motivations/goals. Defining rationality as always relative to some goal feels wrong. Either a position is rational, in which case it was reached via some robust chain of reasoning from its premises, or it’s irrational and should be called out as such. If the exact same argument is rational or not depending on your wider goals, then it becomes impossible to determine if an argument or person is rational or not, or it becomes impossible to argue against a position because the speaker will simply assert that it’s a “rational” argument within the context of their goals.
Indeed, it feels like you’d very quickly get into some sort of loop trying to argue about this. Are public health measures against COVID rational? I’d say no because the goals themselves are often irrational, but by Pinker’s setup, you can’t even claim that? The rationality of a goal often depends on the rationality of the means or arguments used to reach that goal, but in this framing goals are ‘outside’ of the question of rationality. You literally cannot even claim a goal is irrational.
This part really rams the point home:
If arbitrary self-centred emotional reasoning is allowed to be rational then basically anything is. “I killed the man at the bus stop because he smiled at me oddly” would be rational in this framing because they were simply trying to rationally meet the goal of feeling better.
Another wobbly bit:
I’ve read lists of logical fallacies and a particular type of voice never appears because that’s illogical – for something to be a fallacy of argumentation it must also be a fallacy in written form. I don’t think anyone would ever claim they won a debate because they spoke louder or interrupted more often.
It’s a pity because I agree with him on some stuff, and rationality is something we need to all talk and think about more. But if you’re going to position yourself as an expert on it then you need to speak very precisely and avoid using fallacious reasoning yourself. Pop psychology is in a particularly poor place to do this because so much psychological research ends up being a form of rational-looking irrationality, which is why so much fails to replicate. Like, for example, loss aversion, which Pinker cites as a form of irrationality.
For that reason I don’t feel like academic psychology has much to contribute to the topic of rationality
Thank you for your clear sighted rebuttal of ‘pop culture’ professorial obfuscation. I have perfectly rational belief (aka faith) in a practical application of absolute truth and resent the fallacious mockery such ‘expert’ opinors cast abroad.
Unfortunately, those entrusted with providing rationality at this point in human history lean on sand foundations and the edifice is becoming top heavy.
Just as unfortunately those less clear sighted will fall for his double talk.
I do find your comment interesting (my own mind tends to that way of thinking), but it seems to confuse philosophical logic with mathematical logic, and furthermore to confuse what is logical with what is rational.
At last a series of simples explanations of the concepts that I can understand described in his book.
Its so refreshing and heartening to hear a learned academic have the courage to share his own original thoughts, without bowing to dogma or mob mentality.
I could not watch much of it because of my strong biases against Pinker’s world reality.
Atheist, Secular-Humanist, Post Modernism done from a position of total confidence. (Although I suspect Pinker was once mugged by reality, so is more a Post-Modernist-Conservative). as PostModernism is of the Left, being from the Frankfurt school, so a blend of Freud, Marxism, existential and Nihilism. They developed ‘Critical Theory’, and thus Facoult and Derrida tweaked it, and thus Post Modernism, that dark and pernicious philosophy which has captured all the education systems, and Left thinkers.
Postmodernism is the rejection of the model of reality the rational thinkers and science created; the concept of 500 years of Modern Thinking (Renaissance, Reformation, and modern-modern), ‘thus ‘Post-Modernism’ is the name of those who have moved on from Western conventional Reality and Truth.
As physics studying sub atomic particles must not just use Newtonian Maths and physics because at that level the sub atomic particles no longer behave in a way which those real world measurements work. So the post modernists believe all the old rational thinking is totally flawed – and thus nothing can be true but the dialectic, the discussion between intellects – as our senses are utterly untrustworthy, and reality is subjective. That reality is just what we can rationally demonstrate from our position intellectually by discussion – he says it above:
“What is rationality?
I define it as ‘the use of knowledge to attain a goal’, where knowledge, according to the philosopher’s standard definition, is justified true belief. That means that rationality is always relative to a goal, and what might seem irrational with respect to one goal might, in fact, be the rational pursuit of some other goal.”
Thus all society is identity politics. One is not Fred Jones in Post modernism, one is (say) a strait, white, male, low income, under-educated, American…. and on, one is all a blend of ‘IDENTITIES’.
Then – because all which can be known is the dialectic, and dialogue between intelligence Must be competitive, to attempt to dominate, and so ALL human interaction is Oppressor and Oppressed. Thus all identities are oppressor and oppressed. And thus Intersectionality – and from that the only justice is ‘Equity’, but this guy is not that far down the rabbit hole… “Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege”
Anyway – the Pinker intellectuals totally dismiss any ultimate, that there is something beyond the mundane, and so morality and ethics are merely human inventions. Life is the march to death, and then Nilos, nothing. The Philosophy of Atheist, Secular-Humanism intellectual maste*bat*on. No good and evil, no 10 Commandments, No divinely given ethics and Morality – just a philosophy of
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
All clever, all involved in every aspect of everything thinking, but in the end, nilos..a hopeless philosophy. I could not read Dawkins for the same reason. You do not have to have religion, but to dismiss it out of hand says you believe the coin on the table is heads up, but there is nothing else to know of it, like the other side….You do not believe in Good and evil – and as I have seen good and evil I cannot accept anything someone who refutes that. They see half of reality – and deny the other. Thus all they say is meaningless.
This kind of philosophy always leads to Totalitarianism in the end, as there is no inherent good and evil….
I have the same aversion to Dawkins, but not so far to Pinker. I think he holds his atheism less self-righteously than Dawkins, and does show respect for beliefs, myths and tradition. If these rarified ‘thinkers’ have helped deliver the current identity politics nonsense, it goes some way to prove that their world view is lacking – and perhaps explains the surge of conspiracy theories and distrust of ‘experts’. Joe Public trusts his instincts (poor unenlightened fool) and smells a rat.
“rationality is always relative to a goal, and what might seem irrational with respect to one goal might, in fact, be the rational pursuit of some other goal”.
By this ‘rationale’, almost any behaviour, however appalling, could be deemed ‘rational’? Some very worrying trends, including the termination of imperfect babies and murder of the infirm elderly, are not entirely ‘irrational’. But they may well be inhuman. Learned scientists and medics conspired to enact ‘the final solution’; very rational, if your goal is evil.
I suspect that people with high IQ believe themselves to be more rational (as in ‘making more rational/sensible decisions’) than the average person, but I am not so sure. Some can be human libraries of information but somehow not see the wood for the trees. Someone should devise a test for common sense/gumption and see if it correlates with IQ; I’d hazard a guess that, at both extremes of IQ, common sense can be in short supply.
I love some of Pinker’s books, Blank Slate and How the Mind Works are excellent primers in evolutionary psychology, so I should read this. But I don’t fear, as seems to be implied, that people are less rational now than in the past. Pinker’s own assertion, that humanity has never lived in more privileged circumstances, would seem to contradict this pessimism.
If I may dare to dissgree: It is part of the male style, if you like, to gain status by winning arguments, and so use also unfair means of doing it. But it is part of the corresponding female style to avoid the arguments in the first place, because arguments are a threat to harmony, and even openly expressed disagreements makes it harder to end up with a harmonious consensus (see, the work of Deborah Tannen for a reference). Of the two, I would argue the male style is closer to rationality, because it gives more space and priority to dealing with the disagrements, rather than avoiding them.
I totally disagree with Pinker’s views or explanation of conspiracy theories. I believe that I am far from being a conspiracy theorist but I believe that this is because critically the balance of my perception of what was taking place in the world was not fundamentally challenged in the past. That balance became seriously challenged during the Anti-Brexit era in UK which I regarded as anti-democratic madness. It is when your balance of what you expect as normal standards in the world is challenged or undermined such that your mind is struggling to find a foothold in sanity that the grounds for so called “conspiracy theory” emerge. The “conspiracy theory” is arrived at as a more reasonable explanation of the madness in the world than what is being offered and can be almost a subconscious struggle akin to the effort and work done by our bodies in achieving balance in the physical world when we stand and walk around. Pinker acknowledges none of this but prefers to focus on whacky examples claiming that people effectively dream up or launch conspiracy theories with no motive for doing so other than that they “might” be true. He also suggests that we should accept the scientists and their models provided they are adequately explained. The subconscious puzzling or registering in the back of my mind in relation to the COVID phenomenon first emerged, for instance, when Italy made double headlines in early 2020. Firstly, there was the Italian national debt and secondly, there was Italy as a centre for the outbreak of COVID. Particularly as the world reaction to COVID developed in the following days I wondered whether there was a connection between Italian debt and Italy being at the forefront of COVID breakout. Later again after reading Ian Birrell’s article on the Wuhan lab I got to wondering further who benefitted from COVID.
I suspect a huge number of us felt we had entered a parallel universe in the ‘Anti-Brexit era’. And Covid hysteria, BLM riots, eco mania, gender ideology et al have done nothing to reassure us the world has not gone mad. Little wonder people look for theories to explain the nonsensical when they see and hear apparently sane authority figures spout gibberish. I’ve occasionally wondered if Covid’s greatest impact is on the grey matter.
Does Prof Pinker believe Einsteinian et al work on relativity deploy methods that will get to the bottom of the truth? Does Prof Pinker believe in the science showing the existence of possibly 10 dimensions? Does Prof Pinker have experience of any other than the traditional 4? His ilk remind me of Thomas – unless personally affected, refuse to believe. Nay, worse in that he mocks those of us who actually see through the ‘glass’ between dimensions, albeit darkly at present. There is a health promotion concept of deferred gratification – those of us who understand ultimate truth and Jesus Christ’s claims, are on that journey.
No myth.