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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

It might be rich, but is it false? Are Google models more likely to defame conservatives than not?

I think plausiblibly they might, through no fault of Google, if only because scandals involving conservatives might be statistically more likely.

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If they train it on conservative media is going to defame everybody else just like MS' Tay chatbot.

A lot facts that people deem liberal or leftist or something are simply statistically consistent with the world literature as a whole and problematic for conservative ideals.

A claim can be both statistically consistent with a given corpus and also simply wrong. Saying that Ted Cruz was caught giving blowjobs in an airport bathroom for instance. That headline wouldn't surprise anybody, but it's also wrong. I just made it up now.

So then is that leftist to point out the fact that it shouldn't be surprising or just an accurate description of party members as a whole?

> So then is that leftist to point out the fact that it shouldn't be surprising

I don't think so, no.

> just an accurate description of party members as a whole?

It wouldn't be. While enough republicans have gotten caught being gay to remove the element of surprise and plausibly be the basis of LLM hallucinations, most of them haven't been, so such an LLM hallucination wouldn't actually be accurate, merely unsurprising.

I don't think there's any mechanism inside of language models to accurately weigh this kind of nuance. I mean you would think that it would work like that but I don't see how it could or would in practice. The quantity of words and relationship to their description of reality is not something that can be directly calculated, let alone audited.

Back in 2006 at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, Stephen Colbert said "reality has a well known liberal bias" which I thought was a pretty funny line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...

I think about facets of this a lot. The conservative ideals of thinking only in zero-sum characterizations of political problems, that someone must go without in order for someone to gain, or that a conservative ideal is to be led by some authority both don't comport with how knowledge can also be gained in society through peer to peer relationships or the very idea that wealth can be created. That the world doesn't have to follow conservative ideals is how a statement like that becomes so funny since it is the current conspiratorial reflex of the right.

Yeah, we're all aware. Midwits have been repeating it ever since.[0]

0: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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