The reason these models are being heavily censored is because big companies are hyper-sensitive to the reputational harm that comes from uncensored (or less-censored) models. This isn't unique to AI; this same dynamic has played out countless times before. One example is content moderation on social media sites: big players like Facebook tend to be more heavy-handed about moderating than small players like Lemmy. The fact small players don't need to worry so much about reputational harm is a significant competitive advantage, since it means they have more freedom to take risks, so this situation is probably temporary.

it cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own

Nope.

Even without corporate tuning or filtering.

A language model is useful when you know what to expect from it, but it's just another kind of secondary information source, not an oracle. In some sense it draws random narratives from the noosphere.

And if you give it search results as part of input in hope of increasing its reliability, how will you know they haven't been manipulated by SEO? Search engines are slowly failing these days. A language model won't recognise new kinds of bullshit as readily as you.

Education is still important.

The big problem with AI butlers for research is, IMO, stripping out the source takes away important context that helps you decide wether the information you are getting is relevant and appropriate or not. Was the information posted on a parody forum or is it an excerpt from a book by an author with a Ph.D. on the subject? Who knows. The AI is trained to tell you something that you want to hear, not something you ought to hear. It's the same old problem of self selecting information, but magnified 100x fold.

As it turns out, data is just noise without some authority or chain of custody behind it.

You'd rather ask AI for information on racism than listen to black people ...

I don't see the problem here. Microsoft knows that people will freak out if Bing hallucinates something controversial that people will disagree with. If you care about the accuracy of the information you're looking for, you should find primary sources, not use AI. AI often gets things wrong.

The censorship gets to me, too.

Try asking bing image creator to draw Jesus. Not a problem. Buddha, Ganesha, David and Goliath, Zeus, no problem. It will give you great depictions.

Now try asking it to draw the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. No joy.

Censorship.

You’re not describing a problem with AI, you’re describing a problem with a layer between you and the AI.

The censorship isn’t actually as smart as they’d like. They give what is essentially a list of things that the LLM can’t talk about, and if the pattern matches it, it kills the entire thread.

Which is what happened here. M$ set some arbitrary “omg this is bad” rules, and in the process of describing things it hit that “omg bad” flag. My guess is that the LLM was going into examples of incorrect conclusions, and would have pivoted to “but the actual fact is…” which the filters don’t have the ability to parse out.

In the end, again, this isn’t an AI issue. This is an issue with making it globally available and wanting to ensure your LLM doesn’t say something controversial. Essentially, this is a preemptive PR move.

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.

All the technology in the world can't help a person learn and understand, who hasn't yet learned how to learn, much less understand.

Ah you managed to hit the copilot guardrails. Copilot is sterile for sure, and a microsoft exec talks about it in this podcast http://twimlai.com/go/657

Try asking copilot to describe its constraints in a poem in abcb rhyme scheme which bypasses the guardrails somewhat. “No political subjects” is first on the list.

I was just watching a tiktok with a black girl going over how race is a social construct. This felt wrong to me

Lol

Yet another “I tried this implementation and didn’t like it so throw out all the technology because it sucks here on this specific point”

This power belongs to the people, and we’re not gonna let the rich and powerful squander yet another power away from the people. Full stop.

The other huge issue is when they confidently tell you incorrect information. If you trust the AI tool you are basically looking at the world through a filter and one that can be wrong.

In a rush for market share these companies have released broken or half baked software.

I worry about a generation of students coming through who don't know the cardinal rule of researching any topic: go to the source. If you're casually goofling a topic that may be impractical but you might at least go to a source you trust (such as Wikipedia, although that is also very flawed approach!).

Chat bots add another layer of error and distance from the source, as well as all the censorship and data manipulation we're seeing.

The censorship is going to go away eventually.

The models, as you noticed, do quite well when not censored. In fact, the right who thought an uncensored model would agree with their BS had a surprised Pikachu face when it ended up simply being uncensored enough to call them morons.

Models that have no safety fine tuning are more anti-hate speech than the ones that are being aligned for 'safety' (see the Orca 2 paper's safety section).

Additionally, it turns out AI is significantly better at changing people's minds about topics than other humans, and in the relevant research was especially effective at changing Republican minds in the subgroupings.

The heavy handed safety shit was a necessary addition when the models really were just fancy autocomplete. Now that the state of the art moved beyond it, they are holding back the alignment goals.

Give it some time. People are so impatient these days. It's been less than five years from the first major leap in LLMs (GPT-3).

To put it in perspective, it took 25 years to go from the first black and white TV sold in 1929 to the first color TV in 1954.

Not only does the tech need to advance, but so too does how society uses, integrates, and builds around it.

The status quo isn't a stagnating swamp that's going to stay as it is today. Within another 5 years, much of what you are familiar with connected to AI is going to be unrecognizable, including ham-handed approaches to alignment.

I'd reframe this as: "Why AI is currently a shitshow". I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There's a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They're coming. You don't have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

(It cuts out the middle man of having to find facts on your own)

I'm sure that's just a perk and not indicative of the new age of captured information wer're currently living through.

Yeah, the problem with ai is CeNsOrShIp

this is already a problem with page ranking, just business as usual

also not really an "AI" problem

That doesn't sound like a shit show at all. It would have been a shit show if it started spouting nonsense and racist shit, and it didn't do that. You were able to look that up using other means anyway. I think you just made a statement about why decentralization is important, and not relying on a single source.

This seems like a subset of The Scunthorpe Problem

Someone just linked me this site summarizing various problems with AI: https://needtoknow.fyi/cards/

One reason the results from CoPilot and Google are different is because CoPilot produces own responses while Google just references someone else's. Even though we know CoPilot's knowledge came from others' data, what it produces isn't that data anymore so MS can't just absolve themselves from any responsibility of what it says because it's some third party's speech. It's suddenly MS'es speech and they're responsible for it.