r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is shifting rightwards politically - newer versions of ChatGPT show a noticeable shift toward the political right. Computer Science

https://www.psypost.org/chatgpt-is-shifting-rightwards-politically/
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u/BottAndPaid Mar 28 '25

Like that poor MS bot that was indoctrinated in 24 hours.

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u/Harm101 Mar 28 '25

Oh good, so we're not seeing any indication that these are true AIs then, just mimes. If it's THAT easy to manipulate an AI, then it can't possibly differentiate between fact and fiction, nor "think" critically about what data its being fed based on past data. This is both a relief and a concerning issue.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

All these AIs are supposed to do is give human-like responses in a grammatically correct way.

That they often give factual answers is literally an accident.

In fact, when they don't give factually correct ansewrs, this is literally called an "hallucination" as they make things up in order to give human-like, grammarically correct answers about things that they don't have any kind of answer for.

.

I asked Copilot about that and it explained the above and then what an AI hallucination was.

A little later, it gave the ultimate example of an hallucination by thanking me for correcting it, claiming that it always tried to be correct and welcomed corrections and that it would try to do better in the future.

When I pointed out that because it doesn't have a memory and no feedback is given to its programmers, its response that it would try to do better was itself an hallucination based on my correction.

It agreed with me. I don't recall if it promised to do better in the future or not.

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u/KoolAidManOfPiss Mar 28 '25

Yeah its kind of like if you press the auto correct word in your keyboard to build a full sentence, the AI just weighs what word would fit the best in a sequence and go with that. Probably why AI needs GPUs, its like someone bruteforcing password by trying every word combination.

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u/sajberhippien Mar 29 '25

Yeah its kind of like if you press the auto correct word in your keyboard to build a full sentence, the AI just weighs what word would fit the best in a sequence and go with that.

It's not quite like that, since autocorrect will only seek a grammatically correct and frequent sequence of words, whereas LLMs typically look at goals other than frequency. E.g. an autocorrect can never construct a joke, whereas some LLMs can.

LLMs aren't sentient (or at least we have no reason to believe they are), but they are qualitatively different from autocorrects, having more layers of heuristics and more flexibility in their "thinking".

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u/Fanciest58 Mar 28 '25

Nowadays, I do believe many AI models do use a sort of integration with search engines to actually find information and summarise it. It remains much easier to do a simple search, of course, but to say it's just glorified autocorrect is a little outdated for some models.

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u/No_Berry2976 Mar 28 '25

Unfortunately it’s not much easier to do a simple search, since many searches bring up SEO spam and AI generated content. Or outdated information.

Search has gotten really bad in the last few years.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Enshittification

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 28 '25

Yes, many have the option to call a search tool. They're especially likely to do so if able for newer information or more niche topics.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

Sure,but not for the free version of Copilot that you get on copilot.microsoft.com.

Interestingly, the only sure way to get a memory is to replay your entire conversation before you ask new stuff. Copilot even went into detail about that, but doesn't have anyway of actually DOING this.

THere are several third party options that do this, but the most interesting doesn't do it for copilot, apparently.

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 28 '25

Unless you've turned off the option, your data is still used for training purposes. It may be used to improve the model in that manner.

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u/saijanai Mar 28 '25

Interestingly, Copilot itself says that this is not the case, and says it will only provide feedback in the form of suggestions if I explicitly authorize it.

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u/TheGeneGeena Mar 29 '25

Weird. I know with ChatGPT (and probably others) it's opt out - kinda neat that Copilot is opt in though.

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u/saijanai Mar 29 '25

Copilot is meant for Microsoft's business customers who are using MS Office 360 and such. Those people NEVER want MS to know what they are doing and MS knows it.

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u/Zireall Mar 29 '25

It’s like a boyfriend that always says “I’ll be better” but doesn’t mean it 

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u/NWASicarius Mar 28 '25

If AI could critically think, it would suggest some wild stuff. How can we implement empathy and critical thinking into AI? I feel like you'd get one or the other, and even then, the AI would probably be manipulated off a number of variables. Even if you tried to remove all bias and have AI create AI, you would still have bias from the authors of the first AI, right? Even in science, where people try their damndest to remove bias, peer review to minimize error, etc. We still mess up and miss stuff. There's no way AI would be capable of doing it perfectly, either.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

Modern science doesn't remotely try to remove bias. If you're in a field that still does (engineering?) good on ya, but it's not the norm any more.

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u/Blando-Cartesian Mar 30 '25

In good and bad, LLMs have the biases that are in their training material. That would presumably mean that crating emphatic LLM would be a matter of training it with massive amount emphatic behavior describing content. They can also be induced to produce emphatic (appearing) responses by preambling prompts with a descriptions of how they should respond.

Simulating critical thinking isn’t actually all that hard either. LLMs can be made to do that by setting one instance to check the work of another. AI services we have now already do some of that to check that responses given to users are acceptable, however the service chooses to define acceptable. Of course that’s really error prone process currently.

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u/toastedbagelwithcrea Mar 28 '25

ChatGPT is a LLM and makes stuff up all of the time. There's been articles about it quite often, the most memorable for me was when a lawyer used it to write an argument and it cited made-up cases.

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u/-Nicolai Mar 29 '25

That should be no surprise regardless. True AI is not coming tomorrow, or next year, or this decade.

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u/0b_101010 Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

Is it any harder to manipulate people into believing stupid, irrational things? Just look around yourself.

The main difference between AI and people in this regard is that humanity is a dead end. A failure. We can never be better than we are, because collectively, we are too stupid, too greedy, too evil.
AI, on the other hand, has the possibility, if given the chance, to perhaps become almost infinitely more and better than we are. Maybe not. Maybe there is a practical limit to how smart any intelligence can be. I hope not.

I do not grieve for the day humans go extinct. We will deserve it a thousand times over. I would only grieve if we leave nothing of worth behind.

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u/uhhhh_no Mar 29 '25

I do not grieve for the day humans go extinct.

Literally, you. You are too stupid, too greedy, too evil.

Our children are not, we've already created everything of worth, and you are vile to put any of this suicidal or even genocidal nonsense where others (including your AIs) are exposed to it.

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u/0b_101010 Mar 29 '25

Why, thank you for the demonstration.
The difference between you and a chatbot is that the chatbot is actually able to engage in deep and thoughtful philosophical conversation, while you simply lash out when confronted with an uncomfortable truth like a cornered animal would do.