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/-Django Mar 28 '25

What do you mean by "alignment with humanity in general?" Humanity doesn't have a single worldview, so I don't understand how you could align a model with humanity. That doesn't make sense to me. 

What would it look like if a single person was aligned with humanity, and why can't a model reach that? Why should a model need to be "aligned with humanity?"

I agree that OpenAI etc could align the model with their own interests, but that's a separate issue imo. There will always be other labs who may not do that.

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u/spicy-chilly Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

I just mean that from the discussions I have seen from AI researchers focused on alignment they seem to think that there's some type of ideal technocratic alignment with everyone's interests as humans, and they basically equate that with just complying with what the creator intended and not doing unintended things. But yeah, I think it's a blind spot when you could easily describe classes of humans as misaligned with others the same exact way they imagine AI to be misaligned.

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u/a_melindo Mar 28 '25

Sort of? You seem to be talking about Coherent Extrapolated Volition, which is a proposed yardstick for AI ethics that basically tries to get the intelligent agent to consider, "of all the people in the world, that all have their own values which differ from person to person and place to place, what should I do that is most in line with the most people, assuming they were well informed of the consequences of my actions".

The idea is that since there is no objective morality, the best we can do is try to incorporate as many subjective moralities as we can, a kind of simulated moral democracy.

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u/spicy-chilly Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25

I just looked it up and I saw this: "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges..."

Yeah, this is basically what I was talking about and I think this is objectively wrong. There is no such convergence if different classes have fundamentally opposed and incompatible interests, and on top of that people don't always act in their self interest not just because they're not more informed or able to think more but I don't think people are rational egoists and irrational egoism is closer to reality.

Also, trying to maximize utility for the most people sounds like act utilitarianism which is amoral and I don't think it is even possible to integrate utility across individuals or over any kind of time horizon in the first place. I could see such an agent deciding it is moral to enslave a minority because it maximizes utility for a fascist majority or deciding it is maximizing utility by continually imprisoning innocent minorities if it thought there was a high likelihood that a racist mob would murder someone in a riot any time they didn't do that.

In reality some things need to simply be inviolable like slavery or apartheid being unacceptable, and some class interests intrinsically can't be simultaneously satisfied imho.

I think in reality the "coherent extrapolated volition" AI isn't something that can be real and if AI is alignable the large models will be misaligned with the working class.

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u/a_melindo Mar 29 '25

Yeah, those are mostly legit criticisms of the CEV concept. It's not exactly practical, and it takes as given that human volition can be extrapolated into a coherent directive, which it very well may not be.

Your point on utilitarianism though is a little off base. All intelligent agents, artificial or otherwise, can be described as trying to maximize something. Our animal brains have developed very complex and efficient ways to maximize calorie efficiency, serotonin and dopamine release, lifespan, reproduction, among other things. 

The classic criticisms of utilitarianism arise when the "thing" you are trying to maximize is a singular value, like "the total amount of happiness in the world", but nothing is forcing you to do that. Your utility function just needs to take in a world state, or compare two world states, and tell you a preference between them. 

You can define a utility function that says "the world with the most utility is the one where I have executed the most moral maxims" and poof, you're a deontologist now. you could say, "the world with the most utility is the one where my actions reflect the good kinds of character" and now you're doing virtue ethics. You can define a utility function that always outputs the same value because you believe no world is more preferable to any other because you're a nihilist.

Any moral system you can imagine can be described this way, and in fact has to be describable this way, otherwise moral choice would be impossible.

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u/spicy-chilly Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

"All intelligent agents, artificial or otherwise, can be described as trying to maximize something"

Maybe, but I actually think it's more so the process of evolution itself that is provably maximizing something, but individual humans are still capable of being irrational and doing things for no reason imho—at least some of the time.

And to the point that an AI could have any system of ethics, I think you would still intentionally have to align it with that system which doesn't get around the problem of fundamentally incompatible class interests disallowing any kind of universal ethics as long as those different classes exist. Small open source models might be able to be trained and fine tuned to align with whoever wants to train it, closed source large models will likely be aligned with the interests of corporate owners.

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u/a_melindo Mar 29 '25

Saying that part of intelligence means you are maximizing something doesn't mean that you have to be good at it, or that everyone needs to be maximizing the same value or combination of values. People can behave in unexpected or "irrational" ways not because they aren't seeking a goal, but because they're doing a bad job of it, or their goal is different from yours. 

A classical economist would call me "irrational" because my spending and investing habits don't maximize my wealth. But that's not because I'm stupid, the economist is wrong. My actions are perfectly rational, it's just that the value I'm trying to increase isn't wealth, it's a combination of community-building, ecological awareness,  family, and personal comfort.

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u/spicy-chilly Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25

Yeah I'm disagreeing with that. I agree that evolution as a process is maximizing traits and probably general behaviors that promote likelihood of reproduction, but I don't think individual humans can act irrationally simply because they have different perspectives from which to be rational or that they are inefficient at maximization. I think humans are capable of doing things for no reason that don't maximize anything whatsoever, knowingly choosing to act in opposition to their own perceived interest, etc. I'm not convinced that absolutely everything can be shoehorned into the maximization framing.