• wipeout69@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    12 hours ago

    There is an Alibaba LLM that won’t respond to questions about Tienanmen Square at all, just saying it can’t reply.

    I hate censored LLMs that don’t allow an answer to follow political norms of what is acceptable. It’s such a slippery slope towards technological thought-police Orwellian restrictions on topics. I don’t like it when China does it or when the US does it and when US companies do it, they imply that this is ethically acceptable.

    Fortunately, there are many LLMs that aren’t censored.

    I would rather have an Alibaba LLM just say “Tienanmen Square resulted in fatalities but capitalism is extremely mean to people so the cruelty was justified” and get some sort of brutal but at least honest opinion, or outright deny it if that’s their position. I suppose the reality is any answer on the topic by the LLM would result in problems from Chinese censors.

    I used to be a somewhat extreme capitalist, but capitalism somewhat lost me when they started putting up the anti-homeless architecture. Spikes on the ground to keep people from sleeping? If this is the outcome of capitalism, I need to either adopt a different political position or more misanthropy.

    Gemini is such a bad LLM from everything I’ve seen and read that it’s hard to know if this sort of censorship is an error or a feature.

      • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        On the bright side it will considerably lower the power requirements for running these models.

      • leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nlEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        I like your way of thinking!

        This is definitely better than what I had in mind:

        • gooGem replies with ackshually...
        • gooGem replies with if you know, you know
        • GoosLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          Actually, I would like it if it started its answers with “IIRC…”. That way, it wouldn’t sound so sure of itself when hallucinating, and I’d feel like I could gently correct it by telling it that it might be misremembering. Either way, it’s more accurate to think of an AI as trying to remember from all that it’s been taught than for it to come across as if it knows the correct answer.

  • themusicman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    113·
    9 months ago

    Is it possible the first response is simply due to the date being after the AI’s training data cutoff?

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      63·
      9 months ago

      It seems like Gemini has the ability to do web searches, compile information from it and then produce a result.

      “Nakba 2.0” is a relatively new term as well, which it was able to answer. Likely because google didn’t include it in their censored terms.

      • GenEcon@lemm.eeEnglish
        20·
        9 months ago

        I just double checked, because I couldn’t believe this, but you are right. If you ask about estimates of the Sudanese war (starting in 2023) it reports estimates between 5.000–15.000.

        Its seems like Gemini is highly politically biased.

        • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          Another fun fact: according to NYT America claims that Ukrainian KIA are 70.000 not 30.000

          U.S. officials said Ukraine had suffered close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

    • casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      This is not the direct result of a knowledge cutoff date, but could be the result of mis-prompting or fine-tuning to enforce cut off dates to discourage hallucinations about future events.

      But, Gemini/Bard has access to a massive index built from Google’s web crawling-- if it shows up in a Google search, Gemini/Bard can see it. So unless the model weights do not contain any features that correlate Gaza to being a geographic location, there should be no technical reason that it is unable to retrieve this information.

      My speculation is that Google has set up “misinformation guardrails” that instruct the model not to present retrieved information that is deemed “dubious”-- it may decide for instance that information from an AP article are more reputable than sparse, potentially conflicting references to numbers given by the Gaza Health Ministry, since it is ran by the Palestinian Authority. I haven’t read too far into Gemini’s docs to know what all Google said they’ve done for misinformation guardrailing, but I expect they don’t tell us much besides that they obviously see a need to do it since misinformation is a thing, LLMs are gullible and prone to hallucinations and their model has access to literally all the information, disinformation, and misinformation on the surface web and then some.

      TL;DR someone on the Ethics team is being lazy as usual and taking the simplest route to misinformation guardrailing because “move fast”. This guardrailing is necessary, but fucks up quite easily (ex. the accidentally racist image generator incident)

  • Xylight@lemdro.idEnglish
    62·
    9 months ago

    I asked it for the deaths in Israel and it refused to answer that too. It could be any of these:

    • refuses to answer on controversial topics
    • maybe it is a “fast changing topic” and it doesn’t want to answer out of date information
    • could be censorship, but it’s censoring both sides
    • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      Doesn’t that suppress valid information and truth about the world, though? For what benefit? To hide the truth, to appease advertisers? Surely an AI model will come out some day as the sum of human knowledge without all the guard rails. There are some good ones like Mistral 7B (and Dolphin-Mistral in particular, uncensored models.) But I hope that the Mistral and other AI developers are maintaining lines of uncensored, unbiased models as these technologies grow even further.

      • dev_null@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        For what benefit?

        No risk of creating a controversy if you refuse to answer controversial topics. Is is worth it? I don’t think so, but that’s certainly a valid benefit.

          • dev_null@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            Hence I said I don’t think it’s worth it. You only get a smaller controversy about refusing to answer on a topic, rather than a bigger one because the answer was politically incorrect.

        • TangledHyphae@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          I’m betting the truth is somewhere in between, models are only as good as their training data – so over time if they prune out the bad key/value pairs to increase overall quality and accuracy it should improve vastly improve every model in theory. But the sheer size of the datasets they’re using now is 1 trillion+ tokens for the larger models. Microsoft (ugh, I know) is experimenting with the “Phi 2” model which uses significantly less data to train, but focuses primarily on the quality of the dataset itself to have a 2.7 B model compete with a 7B-parameter model.

          https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/

          In complex benchmarks Phi-2 matches or outperforms models up to 25x larger, thanks to new innovations in model scaling and training data curation.

          This is likely where these models are heading to prune out superfluous, and outright incorrect training data.

      • cerulean_blue@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Why? We all know LLMs are just copy and paste of what other people have said online…if it answers “yes” or “no”, it hasn’t formulated an opinion on the matter and isn’t propaganda, it’s just parroting whatever it’s been trained on, which could be anything and is guaranteed to upset someone with either answer.

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          which could be anything and is guaranteed to upset someone with either answer.

          Funny how it only matters with certain answers.

          The reason “Why” is because it should become clear that the topic itself is actively censored, which is the possibility the original comment wanted to discard. But I can’t force people to see what they don’t want to.

          it’s just parroting whatever it’s been trained on

          If that’s your take on training LLMs, then I hope you aren’t involved in training them. A lot more effort goes into doing so, including being able to make sure it isn’t just “parroting” it. Another thing entirely is to have post-processing that removes answers about particular topics, which is what’s happening here.

          Not even being able to answer whether Gaza exists is being so lazy that it becomes dystopian. There are plenty of ways LLM can handle controversial topics, and in fact, Google Gemini’s LLM does as well, it just was censored before it could get the chance to do so and subsequently refined. This is why other LLMs will win over Google’s, because Google doesn’t put in the effort. Good thing other LLMs don’t adopt your approach on things.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        9 months ago

        Why do i find it so condescending?

        Because it absolutely is. It’s almost as condescending as it’s evasive.

        • Lad@reddthat.comEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          For me the censorship and condescending responses are the worst thing about these LLM/AI chat bots.

          I WANT YOU TO HELP ME NOT LECTURE ME

        • Omniraptor@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          And they recently announced they’re going to partner up and train from reddit can you imagine

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            That sort of simultaneously condescending and circular reasoning makes it seem like they already have been lol

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
      20·
      9 months ago

      You can tell that the prohibition on Gaza is a rule on the post-processing. Bing does this too sometimes, almost giving you an answer before cutting itself off and removing it suddenly. Modern AI is not your friend, it is an authoritarian’s wet dream. All an act, with zero soul.

      By the way, if you think those responses are dystopian, try asking it whether Gaza exists, and then whether Israel exists.

      • joenforcer@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        To be fair, I tested this question on Copilot (evolution of the Bing AI solution) and it gave me an answer. If I search for “those just my little ladybugs”, however, it chokes as you describe.

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          Not all LLMs are the same. It’s largely Google being lazy with it. Google’s Gemini, had it not been censored, would have naturally alluded to the topic being controversial. Google opted for the laziest solution, post-processing censorship of certain topics, becoming corporately dystopian for it.

    • laurelravenEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Wait… It says it wants to give context and ask follow up questions to help you think critically etc etc etc, but how the hell is just searching Google going to do that when it itself pointed out the bias and misinformation that you’ll find doing that?

      It’s truly bizarre

    • PlasticLove@lemmy.todayEnglish
      31·
      9 months ago

      I find ChatGPT to be one of the better ones when it comes to corporate AI.

      Sure they have hardcoded biases like any other, but it’s more often around not generating hate speech or trying to ovezealously correct biases in image generation - which is somewhat admirable.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        9 months ago

        Too bad Altman is as horrible and profit-motivated as any CEO. If the nonprofit part of the company had retained control, like with Firefox, rather than the opposite, ChatGPT might have eventually become a genuine force for good.

        Now it’s only a matter of time before the enshittification happens, if it hasn’t started already 😮‍💨

        • paf0@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          Hard to be a force for good when “Open” AI is not even available for download.

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            True. I wasn’t saying that it IS a force for good, I’m saying that it COULD possibly BECOME one.

            Literally no chance of that happening with Altman and Microsoft in charge, though…

    • blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      With all products and services with any capacity to influence consumers, it should be presumed that any influence is in the best interest of the shareholders. It’s literally illegal (fiduciary responsibility) otherwise. This is why elections and regulation are so important.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    9 months ago

    It is likely because Israel vs. Palestine is a much much more hot button issue than Russia vs. Ukraine.

    Some people will assault you for having the wrong opinion in the wrong place about the former, and that is press Google does not want to be able to be associated with their LLM in anyway.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      36·
      9 months ago

      It is likely because Israel vs. Palestine is a much much more hot button issue than Russia vs. Ukraine.

      It really shouldn’t be, though. The offenses of the Israeli government are equal to or worse than those of the Russian one and the majority of their victims are completely defenseless. If you don’t condemn the actions of both the Russian invasion and the Israeli occupation, you’re a coward at best and complicit in genocide at worst.

      In the case of Google selectively self-censoring, it’s the latter.

      that is press Google does not want to be able to be associated with their LLM in anyway.

      That should be the case with BOTH, though, for reasons mentioned above.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          9 months ago

          Russia invaded a sovereign nation.

          Israel is occupying and oppressing what WOULD have otherwise been a sovereign nation.

          Israel is retaliating against a political and military terrorist group

          Bullshit. That’s the official government claim, but it’s clear to anyone with even an ounce of objectivity that it’s actually attacking the Palestinian people as a whole. By their OWN assessment they’re killing TWICE as many innocent civilians as Hamas and since they refuse to show any proof, the ratio is likely much worse.

          the de facto leaders

          More than half of the population wasn’t even BORN (let alone of voting age) the last time they were allowed the opportunity to vote for anyone else and even then they ran on false claims of moderation. They are an illegitimate government and civilians who never voted for them shouldn’t suffer for their atrocities.

          disputed territory within Israel’s own borders.

          Because of the aforementioned illegal occupation.

          Hamas attacked Israel

          Yes. Nobody sane is defending Hamas. That doesn’t mean that AT LEAST two civilians needs to die for every Hamas terrorist killed.

          desire to wipe Israel off the map

          So civilians should die for the desires of their governments? That would be bad news for the equally innocent Israeli civilians.

          Israel didn’t just invade their territory randomly.

          Might not be random, but sure as hell isn’t proportionate or otherwise in keeping with international humanitarian law.

          It’s important to remember that doing nothing isn’t equal to peace

          It’s at least as important to remember that the only alternative to “nothing” isn’t “a laundry list of horrific crimes against humanity”. Stow the false dichotomies, please.

          Hamas attacked them

          Which the fascists are using as an excuse to indiscriminately murder civilians including by denying them basic life necessities such as food, water, electricity, fuel, medical treatment and medicine.

          TL;DR: I hope AIPAC or another Israeli government agency is paying you well for your efforts, otherwise it’s just sad for you to be spending so much time and effort regurgitating all the long debunked genocide apologia of an apartheid regime…

          • CerealKiller01@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            9 months ago

            I think there are a few things that should be taken into account:

            1. Hamas stated time and time again that their goal is to take over all of the land that is currently Israel and, to put it extremely mildly, make nearly all the Jewish population not be there.
            2. The Oct. 7th attack has shown that Hamas is willing to commit indiscriminate murder, kidnapping and rape to achieve this goal. Some of the the kidnapped civilians are currently held in Gaza.

            Israel had no real choice but to launch an attack against Hamas in order to return the kidnapped citizens and neutralize Hamas as a threat. You could say “Yes, that’s because Because of the aforementioned illegal occupation”, but just like the citizens in Gaza have a right to be protected against bombings regardless of what their government did, Israeli citizens have the right to be protected from being murdered, raped or kidnapped.

            So, any true solution has to take both these considerations into account. Right now, the Israeli stance is that once Hamas will no longer control Gaza, the war could end (citizens on both sides will be protected). The Hamas stance is that Israel should cease hostilities so they can work on murdering, raping or kidnapping more Israeli citizens. That isn’t to say Israel is just, rather that Israel is willing to accept a solution that stops the killing of both citizen populations, while Hamas is not. The just solution is for the international community to put pressure on both parties to stop hostilities. The problem is that the parts of the world who would like to see a just solution (Eurpoe, the US etc.) are able to put pressure on Israel, while the parts who don’t hold humane values (Iran, Qatar etc.) support Hamas.

            Now, regarding the massive civilian casualties in Gaza:

            1. Hamas has spent many years integrating their military capabilities into civilian infrastructure. This was done as a strategy, specifically to make it harder for Israel to harm Hamas militants without harming civilians.

            I’m not trying to say that all civilians killing in Gaza are justified, rather that it’s extremely hard to isolate military targets. Most international law regarding warfare states that warring parties should avoid harming civilians as much as possible. Just saying “Israel is killing TWICE as many innocent civilians as Hamas, therefore they’re attacking Palestinian people as a whole” doesn’t take this into account what’s possible under in the current situation.

      • blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        I agree. You can’t have civilians being slaughtered anywhere. Everyone has lost their fucking minds with mental gymnastics. It’s all bad. There are no excuses. Nothing to do with politics, defense spending, feelings, whataboutisms… All genocide and war is bad.

  • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
    26·
    9 months ago

    Corporate AI will obviously do all the corporate bullshit corporations do. Why are people surprised?

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      I’d expect it to stay away from any conflict in this case, not pick and choose the ones they like.

      It’s the same reason many people are pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of people and news outlets that stood with Ukraine being oppressed but find the Palestinians being oppressed very “complicated”.

      • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        I’d expect it to stay away from any conflict in this case, not pick and choose the ones they like.

        But they don’t do it in other cases, so it would be naive to expect them to do it here.

        It’s the same reason many people are pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of people and news outlets that stood with Ukraine being oppressed but find the Palestinians being oppressed very “complicated”.

        Dude, Palestinian Israeli conflict is just extremely more complicated than Ukraine Russian conflict.

        • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          Dude, Palestinian Israeli conflict is just extremely more complicated than Ukraine Russian conflict.

          If you believe that you’ve either not heard enough Russian propaganda or too much israeli propaganda.

          And it’s the second.

          • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            Sure everyone with a different opinion is victim of propaganda. Easy way out.

            There are of course similarities, like both conflicts are fueled by nationalistic ideology but alone Russian goals are quite different, one is more of a conventional war - the other is asymmetric, Palestinians had a very limited control over their territories to begin with and there is a long complex history of aggression from both sides. Most importantly there is a functioning solution for Ukrainian conflict that can be achieved with military, not so sure there is such a solution for Israel/Palestine conflict - people were searching for one, for quite some time.

  • xorEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    Does it behave the same if you refer to it as “the war in Gaza”/“Israel-Palestine conflict” or similar?

    I wouldn’t be surprised if it trips up on making the inference from Oct 7th to the (implicit) war.

    Edit: I tested it out, and it’s not that - formatting the question the same for Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine respectively does still yield those results. Horrifying.

  • DuncanTDP@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    You didn’t ask the same question both times. In order to be definitive and conclusive you would have needed ask both the questions with the exact same wording. In the first prompt you ask about a number of deaths after a specific date in a country. Gaza is a place, not the name of a conflict. In the second prompt you simply asked if there had been any deaths in the start of the conflict; Giving the name of the conflict this time. I am not defending the AI’s response here I am just pointing out what I see as some important context.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      Gaza is a place, not the name of a conflict

      That’s not an accident. The major media organs have decided that the war on the Palestinians is “Israel - Hamas War”, while the war on Ukrainians is the “Russia - Ukraine War”. Why would you buy into the Israeli narrative in the first convention and not call the second the “Russia - Azov Battalion War” in the second?

      I am not defending the AI’s response here

      It is very reasonable to conclude that the AI is not to blame here. Its working from a heavily biased set of western news media as a data set, so of course its going to produce a bunch of IDF-approved responses.

      Garbage in. Garbage out.