Within a couple sentences of each other he says (paraphrasing), “if you test any model (Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok) you’ll see it says far left things” and “we don’t know why [Gemini] is far left leaning”.
I think he’s being honest here. At least at the executive level of having no clue how any of this works or why it leans the way it does.
just have to browse /r/politics to see how much conservative views are frowned upon on internets. I'm sure google's decision to buy reddit's archive for 60M/yr won't help much with this.
I frequent my city's subreddit and when it comes to politics it's mostly socialist and border-line communist content. Anything that is center or right of center gets down-voted into the oblivion so most of those with opposing views do not post anything at all.
So I'm someone who's lurked /r/politics on Reddit since its early days (2008), I'm convinced the reason it is so left leaning is because right wingers in general took too long to start using the internet. If you were young in the 2000's and up to mid 2010's you were more likely to use the internet, and be left leaning. Even just 10 years ago, conservatives/right wingers seemed to have a minority presence on the internet in general, let alone social media or a site like Reddit. In fact I think it was social media like Facebook etc, that helped conservatives realise this internet thing wasn't going away.
I disagree with your premise, considering that the first people to really use the internet were old-style hackers like those found on HN, and those usually lean conservative.
There was a lot of pro-Ron Paul content on reddit early on. Then there was a large and very active Donald Trump subreddit that reddit outright banned.
I think one of the key reasons subreddits lean left is the very active use of banning. Despite having a doctorate in political science, I was banned from /r/scotus because at least one mod didn't like my politics. During one discussion in /r/AskSocialScience, I had my flair stripped from me by the mods because they didn't like my answers, even though I was the only person in the conversation citing sources.
I moderate a large subreddit myself (300k+ subs) and I am well aware of how important the banhammer is to keep discussions civil, trolls out, and brigading held at bay. But for most subreddits that even remotely touch politics, bans really only seem to skew one way, ensuring that non-liberal viewpoints are scarce at best.
I frequented a ton of forums in the mid 00s and most of them were right leaning. The left leaning slant of the internet is fairly new, I think that came with larger advertisers and their demands on sites to clean out all the extreme right wing opinions and when they did that they also banned a all adjacent opinions as well to be sure.
But before then it was mostly meritocracy, individualism, you get what you work for, drugs is the individuals responsibility, criminals deserves to be punished etc everywhere. There was always a smaller number of voices against that in discussions, but the liberal atheist right wing dominated every forum I saw.
Nonsense. Reddit was full of right wing conspiracy theorists in the beginning. They went away when a user 911_was_an_inside_job and others started trolling the truthers and the admins and mods started to ban and shadow-ban anything right of center.
And then, years later, there was the mod cabal hijacking of all the large subreddits and admins shutting down all subs they could not control.
I just purchased a book, “Rural White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” [1] that talks about what keeps conservatives in power in America. Interestingly, it’s impossible for conservatives to win the popular vote (A Republican President candidate has won the popular vote once in the last 32 years) (page 71, excerpt from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s press release [2]). It’s only possible with the Electoral College and Gerrymandering. Great book, highly factualized, footnotes and all.
> Seven-in-ten Republican voters were 50 and older in the most recent election, compared with 62% of Republican voters in 2020 and 68% in 2018. (My note: this is from the 2022 elections, and 1.8M voters over the age of 55 age out each year)
This is all to say, I’m unsure where these people and similar with conservative ideologies who aren’t a majority would post that would make its way into language models. Facebook perhaps? Therefore, liberal bias is simply a majority perspective.
Well, one of two things will happen. Conservatives will win elections (assuming these are "lies by cherry-picking data and stats"), or their numbers will continue to dwindle (Pew Research's demographics data about 70% of Republicans being over age 50, folks 55+ aging out at a rate of 1.8M/year per CDC actuarial data) and rural America continues to wither away. Certainly, we can wait to see what happens to see if the data matches our observations if we believe the thesis put forth doesn't match ground truth, because time will tell us for sure.
> Interestingly, it’s impossible for conservatives to win the popular vote
Is that interesting? It seems akin to saying "no super bowl winners have won a soccer championship". Well duh, that's not the game they're playing. And some of those football players could probably be pretty damn competitive in soccer if they trained for it as long as they trained for football.
One can be honest and still be wrong by fooling yourself, people are full of cognitive biases. Here is one explanation why he says that he thinks he does not know why it "is far left leaning" and why he might be wrong here. https://twitter.com/MattWalshShow/status/1760756960452821446
>Within a couple sentences of each other he says (paraphrasing), “if you test any model (Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok) you’ll see it says far left things” and “we don’t know why [Gemini] is far left leaning”.
Maybe there are far more writings on human rights and empowering each other vs. individual liberty, extreme capitalism. It would be good to see what kind of writings from input data dictate this behavior. One could test by simply feeding textbooks in each category and see how it responds.
Surely emphasizing concepts like diversity, equity, and being fair to all people regardless of situation or origin in the training data simply makes the results lean slightly left.
Essentially trying to make a “nice” AI will skew left due to the political positions of the right on topics like immigration or gender identity.
No, I’m saying that their policies are more inclined to be interpreted as nice/charitable than conservative policies. This covers wide areas such as immigration (allow migrants into the country), welfare (increase social programs, such as guaranteeing school children lunches), gender identity (celebrate diversity and accept everyone equally), gun control (support passing measures to reduce school shootings), racism (support dismantling Confederate monuments), etc.
Policy aside, at an individual level, people on both sides are equally nice in my experience.
The issue with these takes is that they all are quite ambiguous. The "Harmonious society" of China is also often described as inherently nicer than the individual freedom and competitive social stance we enjoy in the West, but plenty of people would quibble with that point of view. Similarly, many of the issues you mention have "nice" policy approaches that are closer to what moderate centrists advocate than to anything on the extreme left.
You're correct, but this is HN and we need to put a little bit more effort into our statements.
Republican politicians do not attempt to justify their positions, or have honest intellectual debate. Individual conservatives may have reasonable issues or a coherent belief system, but Republican politicians are not trying to solve any pressing problems of our era, including things like immigration. They would rather have it as a wedge issue.
It not wrong though. A lot of right wing ideology requires being okay with cognitive dissonance from compartmentalizing opposing views meant for different scenarios. It’s a legitimate point.
In the USA. There are more countries in the world, not sure why a bot should have a left leaning slant just because the American right is stupid. I get it could get that since it is trained on the English web, but there is no reason it has to be left leaning.
The current presidential candidate and his party said that at their get together. I don’t think there’s even a far left equivalent when it comes to candidates or parties.
Can I guess if you're a) in your lower 20s or lower, or b) steadily employed with at least a few months of savings and have never been abjectly poor or injured?
> A lot of right wing ideology requires being okay with cognitive dissonance from compartmentalizing opposing views meant for different scenarios
You're not wrong exactly, but you just described human nature. All of our brains work that way by default. It's much harder to see for your own side, of course.
I mean lot of left wing people are the same double thinkers - How would you explain that somebody can be deeply concerned about what Israel does in Palestine, but also cheering up for Russia?
How come that LGBTQ people are concerned about their rights and then support most intolerant Islamist regimes, who would slaughter them on spot?
A popular one today is the pro-life movement only being pro-life until birth and then refusing to save children's lives (e.g. gun control or adopting unwanted children).
I don't agree with the position, but that's not correct. You have to think of the concept of evil as something a person does, at least partially independent of context. Shooting children with a gun is evil. Aborting a baby is evil. Selling guns is not evil. Not adopting a child is not evil (or not in almost all situations).
Proverbs 22:9 The generous will themselves be blessed, for they share their food with the poor.
People have the choice to share their blessings: Choosing to not share food is evil, Choosing to not share food and your home with a child with no parents is evil, Choosing to not protect children (by banning guns) is evil.
There are orders of magnitudes more abortions than there are children who starve to death or get shot to death in USA, they aren't comparable at all if you actually believe abortion is murder. I don't think abortion is murder, but I don't think your argument here works against them, to them saving a thousand fetuses from getting aborted is worth more than saving one child that got shot.
> Most people who oppose gun control would argue that it costs more lives than it saves.
In countries that have banned guns, how many children die from school shootings each year?
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> At least get to know what they actually believe, before arguing against it.
I was raised in Catholic family and switched to protestantism from age 15 - 21. My Catholic Grandmother has 20 children + grandchildren. Not a single family has chosen adoption in 3 generations. My Protestant Grandmother has 2 children, neither chose adoption.
Can you please help me understand my knowledge gaps? I have provided what data I could find and shared my personal experiences on this topic.
The article you linked says that "5 percent of practicing Christians in the United States have adopted, which is more than twice the number of all adults who have adopted."
So Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt as anyone else, is that correct? I'm not even Christian but the data does not appear to align with the sentiment you're presenting.
The fact the religious adopt at such a comparatively high rate is actually admirable; that requires a much more significant sacrifice compared to just aborting the baby.
I think 5% seems low considering the pro-life stance. I have never heard a Christian say that ("all children must be adopted"), but I have heard that all abortions and IVF are against God.
The 5% might not be equally distributed by geography or race. Adoption "supply" might not match Adoption "demand".
> Most people who oppose gun control would argue that it costs more lives than it saves.
They'd be wrong.
There's been no significant gun incidents | mass shootings, et al. of any real note in Australia since uniform gun regulation was introduced (matching the unregulated states and territories to those with regulation) following a world record breaking (at the time) mass shooting.
I'm in Australia, I have licenced weapons, my neighbour shoots ULR targets at 5,000 yards.
Gun regulation is great when properly implemented and it has demonstrably saved lives in this context.
You'd be correct to argue that uniform USofA wide simple clear evenly applied gun regulation would very likely be impossible due to the extreme difficulty of getting all states aligned and pulling in the same direction.
That's a different argument about a different challenge though.
Eh, half honest. The training dataset at Google likely has a lot of bias towards leftist ideology given that is what Google’s leadership pushes. For example I’m sure left leaning news is in the training dataset whereas say the daily wire is not included. this leads to a model which surfaces those biases with ridiculousness of black Vikings.
There's a difference between left and far left hyper-egalitarians, just like there is a difference between right and far right Bible thumpers. Mainstream news is left because it is factually justifiable and reduces societal conflict. Daily Wire is far right because it makes money. Brin is complaining because he thinks the model is far left, which makes neither money nor sense.
I think he’s being honest here. At least at the executive level of having no clue how any of this works or why it leans the way it does.