ai automates existing biases 🌈
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Technology
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I think researchers are trying to make AI models more aware, but they are trained on a whole lot of human history, and that is going to be predominantly told from white male perspectives. Which means AI is going to act like that.
Women and people of color, you should probably treat AI like it's that white guy who means well and thinks he's woke but lacks the self-awareness to see he is 100% part of the problem. (I say this as a white guy who is 100% part of the problem, just hopefully with more self-awareness.)
There is no reason to even suggest that AI 'means well'. It doesn't mean anything, let alone well.
Of course. It's an analogy. It is like someone who means well. It generates text from the default perspective, which is white guy with a bunch of effort to make it more diverse with a similar end result. The responses might sound woke but take a closer look and you'll find the underlying bias.
Everyone should treat 'ai' like a program that it is. Your guilt compex is irrelevant here.
Has nothing to do with guilt-complex. Why would I feel guilty for being privileged? I feel fortunate, and obliged to remain aware of that.
Treating AI like a "program," however, is a pretty useless lead in to what you really posted to say.
Right, only you can dictate how people should treat chat bots, I will siphon your knowledge into my brain.
The program is statistically an average white guy that knows about a lot of things but doesn’t understand any of it soooooo I’m not even sure what point you thought you had
Chat bot will impersonate whoever you'll tell them to impersonate (as stated in the article), my point is pretty simple, people don't need a guide when using a chat bot that tells them how they should treat and interact with it.
I get it, that was just perfunctory self depreciation with intended audience being other first worlders.
people don’t need a guide when using a chat bot that tells them how they should treat and interact with it.
Then why are people always surprised to find out that chat bots will make shit up to answer their questions?
People absolutely need a guide for using a chat bot, because people are idiots.
Not even just because people are idiots, but also because a LLM is going to have quirks you will need to work around or exploit to get the best results out of it. Like how it's better to edit your question to clarify a misunderstanding and regenerate the response than it is to respond again with the correction, because there is more of a risk it gets stuck on its mistake that way. Or how it can be useful in some situations to (if the interface allows this) manually edit part of the LLM output to be more in line with what you want it to be saying before generating the rest.
Sure, who will it impersonate if you don't? That's where the bias comes in.
And yes, they do need a guide, because the way chatbots behave is not intuitive or clear, there's lots of weird emergent behavior in them even experts don't fully understand (see OpenAI's 4o sycophancy articles today). Chatbots' behavior looks obvious, and in many cases it is...until it isn't. There's lots of edge cases.
They will impersonate 'helpful assistant made by companyname (following hundreds of lines of invisible rules and what to say and when)'. Experts that don't have an incentive to understand and at least partially in the cult who would have guessed!
And you think there's not bias in those rules that's notable, and that the edge cases I mentioned won't be an issue, or what?
You seem to have sidestepped what I've said to rant about how OpenAI sucks when that was just meant to be an example of how even those best informed about AI in the world right now don't really understand it.
That's not 'bias', that's intended behaviour, iirc meta published some research on it. Returning to my initial point, viewing chat bots as 'white male who lacks self-awareness' is dumb as fuck.
As for not understanding, they are paid to not understand.
I resent your impugnment of copyeditors.
🤣
If you feel guilty about this, you may be part of the problem
Thing echoing the internet's average opinion echoes the internet's average opinion, completely obsolete study finds
So disheartening. There was never a good reason for this to be an issue in the first place.