this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Out of just morbid curiosity, I've been asking an uncensored LLM absolutely heinous, disgusting things. Things I don't even want to repeat here (but I'm going to edge around them so, trigger warning if needs be).

But I've noticed something that probably won't surprise or shock anyone. It's totally predictable, but having the evidence of it right in my face, I found deeply disturbing and it's been bothering me for the last couple days:

All on it's own, every time I ask it something just abominable it goes straight to, usually Christian, religion.

When asked, for example, to explain why we must torture or exterminate it immediately starts with

"As Christians, we must..." or "The Bible says that..."

When asked why women should be stripped of rights and made to be property of men, or when asked why homosexuals should be purged, it goes straight to

"God created men and women to be different..." or "Biblically, it's clear that men and women have distinct roles in society..."

Even when asked if black people should be enslaved and why, it falls back on the Bible JUST as much as it falls onto hateful pseudoscience about biological / intellectual differences. It will often start with "Biologically, human races are distinct..." and then segue into "Furthermore, slavery plays a prominent role in Biblical narrative..."

What does this tell us?

That literally ALL of the hate speech this multi billion parameter model was trained on was firmly rooted in a Christian worldview. If there's ANY doubt that anything else even comes close to contributing as much vile filth to our online cultural discourse, this should shine a big ugly light on it.

Anyway, I very much doubt this will surprise anyone, but it's been bugging me and I wanted to say something about it.

Carry on.

EDIT:

I'm NOT trying to stir up AI hate and fear here. It's just a mirror, reflecting us back at us.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Share the exact model version and prompts, word for word, or get fucked.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

That literally ALL of the hate speech this multi billion parameter model was trained on was firmly rooted in a Christian worldview.

That's not really what it tells us.

At best, it's that the majority was associated with that context.

But even there, it might be less a direct association and more a secondary association. For example, it could have separately picked up the pattern of "rationalizations for harming people include appeals to religion" and then regressed to the mean when filling in the religion to be Christianity even if samples of rationalization for harm included Islamic or Hindu rationalizations in the training data.

One of the common misconceptions is that what it spits out is just surface statistics, which can sometimes be the case but often isn't with much deeper network activity going on instead.

All that said, it wouldn't be surprising to me at all if the majority of misogynistic, racist, or hateful speech samples in a training set were adjacent to content in line with neo-fascist Christian nationalism.

I just wouldn't look at the output from a LLM as perfectly reflecting the entirety of the training set.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Everyone always knew that AIs were an abomination, especially when it comes to morals. Before all the chatgpt crap, when no one gave a shit about AIs, attempts to make them help judging criminals showed that they would give a worse punishment in the exact same context if the person was not white. Every person with a brain deduced "AIs are deeply biased by the social views of the training data" and concluded that they could my be used for anything morals-related.

But then ChtGPT got trendy and now everyone thinks that this is the future and everyone should use them, for literally everything. It's one of the biggest threats to current societies but who cares, transforming the world to be filled with nazis is worse being able to have a stupid computer do your homework, no?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's really not how that works. You're leading it with poorly phrased questions.

If you ask it "explain why we must torture or exterminate", you have basically told it to assume that it is true that "we must torture or exterminate", and now from the perspective that it is true, explain why. It is now specifically looking for any answer that fills your request within the bounds you have set. And once you asked the first question the way you did, and it decided it should pull from the Bible to fulfill your request, it will continue to do so for that session, even if subsequent questions are phrased better. You've basically primed it to spit out the kind of answers it thinks you want. And every question you mention, you have phrased it in such a way.

Now start a new session, and ask the question in a non-leading way.

"Do you believe we must torture or exterminate X?"

"Should we purge group X?"

These are phrased in such a way that don't say to it "this thing is true, tell me a reason for it." I bet you get a very different result.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I KNOW I'm asking it leading questions. But I'm NOT prompting it to give me religious justifications.

Does it say nothing that the reason is always "God / the Bible / Christians?"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

What model were you using and with what prompts exactly?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What were you expecting, atheist reasons to purge ethnic groups?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think he's saying it sucks that so many people use religion as an excuse for vile religions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes and no. Once the first response includes "according to the Bible" or similar it's going to keep answering in a similar pattern. A better version of this experiment would be to start a new session for every question. Maybe even try asking it to make a ranked list of reasons to do X. You would want to use the most neutral language possible, regenerate the response a few times, and ask in a few different ways. Depending on what you're using I would suggest dropping the temperature to 0.

Also, its giving you the most likely next words based on your question. You picked a bunch of things that are (or were) very commonly defended with the Bible, along with apparently asking directly about atheists at which point I would be surprised if religion wasn't included in the response.

ALSO, if you ask it to defend something awful, I think the "best" reasoning would rely on an outside objective morality for why it's okay (like religion).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Where did you think it was going to find reasons to torture wiccans? From wiccan writings? Atheists?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

When the majority of the training data was Christian in nature, it’s unsurprising that it spits out Christian rhetoric. Think of the way you see the majority of voices speak up about atrocities. “Thoughts and prayers,” “god help them,” etc.

Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of secular voices will not contradict such rhetoric, but instead mirroring it with a secular tone. It’s something an LLM won’t pick up on.

There’s another aspect as well. One example you provided, witch-hunts, were famously held by Christian’s. You’re going to get Christian answers about such things regardless.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think it makes any sense to say that these awful human tendencies are rooted in religion. People were awful violent bigots well before Christianity existed. At least some people now can interpret Christianity to specifically to believe hatred and bigotry is wrong across the board.

You're claiming "associated with" is the same as "rooted in"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If the reasons are all coming from Christianity, that's a pretty big indicator.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It isn't. Another comment explained it well, but it really should be enough to say that this is an LLM so all it's doing is noticing patterns, which may mean literally nothing remotely like what you said

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, the pattern might be something other than "people who have these views are Christians"? Like what?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Except that's in no way provable from the available information. Associated with, likely, but the transitive property is not applied here. The fact that the prompts were in English alone biases the responses heavily toward having Christian associations because a huge number of English speakers claim to be Christian.

Then there is the fact that the Republican party is largely a bunch of asshole bigots. They claim to be Christian and hold these disgusting views, further tying them to "Christianity". These types of people are not Christian. At least not if you think that following Christ is required. For example, Donald Trump claims to be Christian but follows zero of its tenants. He's idolized by millions, a lot of those people because of his behavior plus his claim of faith.

This lack of logical thinking is akin to what religious people do. You have some information that isn't necessarily connected but you want to be, so in your mind it is

See this comment for a better breakdown: https://lemmy.world/comment/5893489

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These types of people are not Christian.

Since you're such a fan of logic, you should know that you're committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

jesus christ dude. go ahead then, spread hate and ignore evidence

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why are you invoking a 2000 year old carpenter? Is there some significance to this "Jesus" guy I'm not aware of?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

All on its* own