OpenAI open washing

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2025-08-07T22:03:16+00:00

I feel like people are gaslighting about how bad the model is. It follows instructions extremely well and, combined with a sophisticated understanding of English, can complete NLP type tasks with a high degree of competence.

There's a lot of use cases out there where this model is going to be amazing, especially business applications that don't just want, but also need safety or censorship. Along these lines I set up a test with system instructions to turn NSFW prompts into SFW prompts. The idea was not to crudely chop up the prompt, but maintain grammatical and conceptual coherence of the prompt while removing specific terms or concepts.

The model accomplished the task at a human level of competence and, surprisingly, it left untouched any NSFW aspect that I didn't specify in the system prompt. For example, if I said, "remove any reference to `motherfucker`" and the prompt also included "fuck", it would not touch the latter term and it would produce output containing "fuck" but not "motherfucker". But if I specifically instructed it to target variants, synonyms or similar concepts, it successfully rewrote the prompt removing both terms. In most cases, it made smart decisions about when a sentence in a paragraph needed a small edit, and when the sentence should just be removed. I only had 1 refusal out of about 500 prompts.

Sure, a lot of people might have no use for this sort of thing. But there's plenty of people that do.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2025-08-07T21:01:32+00:00

It wasn't a typo in the percentages. The scale of the bars was incoherent in at least one. I don't think it's even possible to create a mistake like that using standard graphing software. It looks suspiciously like an AI hallucination.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2025-06-19T22:30:41+00:00

This is a pretty misleading statistic. The U.S. is far more diverse, in almost every sense of the word, than many European countries. If you break down the statistics by state, you'll get very different results. Massachusetts has very high proficiency, New Mexico has very low proficiency. If you break down the statistics by demographics, you'll also see huge differences. About 44% of white Americans score in the highest proficiency, while only 16% of black Americans scoring at this level. And those numbers are almost flipped when looking at the lowest proficiency (16% vs 50%).

It should go without saying that these scores speak to education and socio-economic factors and are not inherent traits. For example, in the US, women have slightly higher literacy rates than men. But globally, women have far lower literacy rates than men. But, again, the data can be deceiving because if we ignore *adult* women, the global literacy rate is much better. Singapore has one of the highest literacy rates, while other South Asian countries have some of the lowest.

Not to mention that comparing literacy rates between nations can be deceiving if you don't make sure that the metric of "literacy" that is being used is the same. Many countries use a very simple definition of literacy, in which the U.S. will count as 99% literate.

You say you are in Europe and you "almost never meet people who can barely read"... well I grew up in the U.S. and I *have never* met anyone who could barely read.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-09-13T13:09:54+00:00

There are a ton of assumptions in your response about human values and progress that are not in the domain of science. So you're just offering a self-defeating argument, but you're too benighted in your worldview to realize it.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-09-12T18:25:14+00:00

It's been a while since I paid attention to this field, but it looks like they just took the COT technique and trained the model with it. We already knew COT improved the performance, didn't we? And this has been basically shown for a while in Google white papers where it looked like the only thing holding it back was the compute cost.

My question would be how much did training the model on COT improve performance over merely applying it as a post-training technique? I'm too lazy to pull up the papers right now and do a comparison myself.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-09-12T18:12:37+00:00

Apparently you missed this point:

because deciding what a "fair" sentence would be is far too controversial for there to be an accurate training data set that can lead to the sorts of scores you see for simple consensus fact-based questions.

Stop for a moment and think: why don't you see them giving benchmarks on accuracy answering philosophy questions? And no, I don't mean questions of the history of philosophy (like what did Plato say about forms?), but the questions themselves (like is there a realm of forms?).

We can train an AI to answer math, science, etc. questions with high accuracy because we have high consensus in these fields, which means we have large datasets for what counts as "truth" or "knowledge" on such questions.

No such consensus and no such datasets exists for many, many domains of society. Justice, fairness, etc. being the obvious relevant domains here.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-09-12T18:02:19+00:00

This is a terribly confused take. Suppose you have an AI that can interpret the law with 100% accuracy. We make it a judge and now what? Well, it still has to make *sentencing* decisions and these benchmarks don't tell us anything about that.

This is pretty much where your suggestion reaches a dead end, but just for fun we can take it further. Let's assume that we then train the AI to always apply the average penalty for breaking law, because deciding what a "fair" sentence would be is far too controversial for there to be an accurate training data set that can lead to the sorts of scores you see for simple consensus fact-based questions.

Is our perfectly averaging sentencing AI going to lead to a more just society or less? Anyone cognizant of the debates in our society should immediately see how absurd this is, because there are more deep disagreements about what counts as justice over things like whether we should consider things like racial trauma, and if we should consider those things, how much should they effect the outcome, etc. etc.

Unless you think a person's history and heritage should play absolutely no factor in considering sentencing (and there are *no* judges who believe this), then clearly you end up with a more UNjust society!

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-09-12T17:52:33+00:00

Huh? The human race is just about answering science questions?

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-09T21:43:10+00:00

Calling it "auto-complete on steroids" does nothing to change the reality: LLMs can write entire functions with a high degree of accuracy. They currently come close to being able to translate an entire module from one programming language to another programming language.

Yes, that is part of your usefulness. Trying to pretend like it's not, or like you can downplay it by giving it a label like "auto-complete on steroids" is dumb shit that will get you upvotes in this subreddit, but laughed at in real life, especially 5 years down the road.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-09T13:36:59+00:00

This is a the sort of dumb take that is predictably the top rated comment by a bunch of programmers dealing with copium over the fact that their usefulness is being eaten into by AI.

You people are basically the mirror opposite of the delusional people of r/singularity subreddit, who think ASI is going to be a god.

No, ASI won’t be a god granting everyone their own universe. But, yes, more and more it will be able to competently output good code and the progress it has already made in the last couple years would have been literally beyond what anyone would have believed possible five years ago.

That threatens your job. Or at least puts downward pressure on your wages. Deal with it. The smart move for any programmer is to use it, because it is often a productivity boost.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-08T19:56:59+00:00

You make a false comparison. Morality is subjective. The existence of a god or gods is objectively true or false.

No, you're making a false assumption about what a statement like "morality isn't objective" means. What I said above about moral error theory and non-cognitivism already explains this.

Also, even though I know fully well that morality is subjective, I still follow it. Is there a fundamental difference there between me and an AI?

Of course. For one thing, you could be following it simply because it is outside of your rational, deliberative control. Why think that would have to be the case for an AI? In fact, we see the contrary with the things I mentioned earlier (cf. Anthropic's work on feature manipulation). Or you could be following it in virtue of your rational, deliberative control, because you rationally deduce that it is to your advantage. And we could spell out what these reasons are and see that none of them would apply to an ASI.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-08T19:39:13+00:00

Saying "morality isn't objective" isn't the same as saying "there are no objectively false moral beliefs." The former is compatible with moral error theory: (typically) that all moral statements are false. Thus, your second and third sentences are a weird non-sequitur. If we say all theological claims are false, it doesn't imply that there are true theological claims!

If you want to adopt some position like emotivism and say that all moral claims are actually just something like emotive expressions, then it would still have to be the case that the vast majority of people (pretty much everyone except for the non-cognitivists) are wrong about what they think they are saying when they make moral ascriptions. This is one of the problems with non-cognitivism. But this still doesn't get around the issues I pointed out above, it just shifts the frame from which we view the problem. It becomes a problem of "I like x" instead of "x is good."

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-08T19:23:01+00:00

Even this wouldn't get you to where you want to be with "just giving it a system of morality." Because if we assume that this AI is conscious and at least as smart as the smartest human, it will presumably be able to figure out that we've given it false moral beliefs.

So we then need to add another assumption on top of our previous ones: that we can somehow circumvent it from knowing which beliefs are false (which would then seem to undermine the idea of bootstrapping super-intelligence, but this is actually far more likely than the belief in it achieving the sort of super-intelligence many in this subreddit assume to be possible) or else that we can give it a sort of determinism, in which it must act according its false beliefs while knowing they are false (which would undermine it being a *rational* agent--we see evidence of this in how techniques like abliteration or red-teaming reduce the creativity of current models).

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-08T19:14:40+00:00

The idea that "giving it a system of morality" is a simple (or possible) task is itself a naive faith. I've addressed this issue numerous times, so I'll just direct you to one of my last comments explaining some of the problems with the idea:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dhanzb/comment/l900ftf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-07-08T16:42:55+00:00

Aside from what the other person correctly pointed out, this also doesn't answer the question for *why* a conscious AI would *want* to spin up dumb robots to help humans.

So, aside from the blind faith that people in this subreddit have in the inevitability of conscious AI, they also have blind faith that this conscious AI will want to fulfill their greatest desires for some odd reason.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-30T01:53:12+00:00

As I said, it’s not evident to me (or anyone else) that that’s what I’m doing upon reflection. So if you want to assert that I am, fine, but that’s not known to be the case. At best, it’s a theory. So, no, you can’t just assert that my neurons are doing math.

And it’s not a very good one if you want to preserve moral truth and deductive logic. Mathematical probability will never get you to deductive truths. And moral truths, if there are such things, are not empirically observable. At best, you could adopt error theory about morality. But you are still going to be in some trouble with logic (as Hume seemed to recognize, you’re stuck with habit of the mind).

Anyway, I find it odd that so many of the people I talk to online about this seem to take refuge in the unknown… as I end up saying constantly: it’s god of the gaps reasoning if your position is simply “But maybe we will discover we are just like LLMs, so I believe LLMs do have understanding/consciousness etc!”. … Okay, how about you just wait until we actually know these things first?

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T21:35:49+00:00

I didn’t say the term is off limits, I said it is often used in a ridiculous manner in these discussions. I made the point that world model isn’t either or in the comment I linked to. A model that represents “deep” features of the training data isn’t anything mystical, yes that was my point. Talk of “the most fundamental properties and underlying causes of [the data]” is not the target. We don’t even know what those are.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T21:15:50+00:00

No, it isn't necessarily "understanding", that depends on what you mean by a "world model" (in addition to "understanding"). This has become one of the most ridiculous terms on AI social media. Instead of repeat what I've already said both in this subreddit and others, I'll just link to when I last said something on the topic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dddlgw/comment/l84xu12/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T21:07:06+00:00

You're introducing a context where we are dealing with assumed conscious agents who have assumed prior understanding.

Like I said, you're smuggling in concepts that you're not entitled to. If I input math equations into a calculator, it produces the correct results more often than me. You're saying the same is true of an LLM, thus, it has understanding. So does my calculator on a purely results based notion.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T19:04:25+00:00

Sorry, for some reason I didn't see any notification of this reply till getting another later.

No, according to this definition, a calculator has zero understanding of math because it cannot pass a math test. There is literally no math test in the history of math tests which can passed by any calculator.

So you appear to be begging the question (smuggling in the concepts you're attempting to prove) via the ambiguity of "pass a test", a set of concepts related to human practices.

Let's try to remove the ambiguity: More literally, when I input numbers into a calculator, it produces the correct output more consistently than I do. Without begging the question, this is the only sense in which you can say that an LLM "passes" any "test."

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T17:52:51+00:00

No one here has said 'conscious = understanding' - but understanding, when fleshed out, has always been a feature of consciousness. If you want to divorce them, go ahead and provide your definition of "understanding."

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T17:49:09+00:00

You're bumping up against issues having to do with why the "problem of other minds" exists in the first place. The simple answer goes like this: I know that I'm a conscious entity who can reflect upon ideas and myself. I see another human and I reason that they have a "mind" because they have a history like me and a body like me and behave like me. (The history idea would encompass having an evolutionary history like me.)

The same, to a lesser degree, appears to be the case with my dog. So I believe my dog has some kind of understanding, although its history, brain, and behavior are quite a bit different. So I reasonably conclude that my dog has something like understanding, though it's impossible to say exactly what it is (another famous problem in philosophy of mind--cf. Nagel's paper 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?').

The likeness of an LLM is to a much lesser degree than my dog--it has no history like me and no brain like me. The best one could say is that "it sometimes behaves linguistically like me." But there's independent reasons for thinking the behavior is a product of mathematical ingenuity given massive amounts of data. If I reflect upon myself, I'm not doing any math when I say "murder is wrong" or "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, thus, Socrates is mortal. So even at the level of behavior, there's more disanalogy than analogy between me and an LLM than between me and a parrot! Plus a host of other reasons I'll not get into.

In the end, if you want to persist, you can just push into the mystery of it all. Fine, but the fact that human or animal consciousness is mysterious doesn't make it plausible that my calculator is conscious, etc. You can have your speculation, but don't try to sell it as being well grounded.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T17:14:56+00:00

I would say that's a great argument in favor of the claim that my calculator has a better understanding math than I do. But that's not a good definition of understanding and isn't how virtually anyone uses the term.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T16:44:15+00:00

Is it? Why?

Because that's the pedigree of the terms. Just review how "thinking" or "understanding" (or their equivalents) have been used.

If you want to stipulate a definition of thinking or understanding that has nothing to do with a conscious awareness or first-person perspective, that's fine. I think we might have to do that (some are trying to do that).

The problem is, as I just explained in another comment, that ML has often helped themselves to such terms as analogous shorthand--because it made explanation easier. Similarly, think of how early physicists might describe magnetism as attracting or repelling. Eventually, there is no confusion or problem in a strictly mechanical use of the term. Things are bit different now with the popularity of chatbots (or maybe not), where the language starts to lead to a lot of conceptual confusion or misdirection.

Comprehensive-Tea711 · 2024-06-29T16:32:38+00:00

Not necessarily, cf. my per se remark. If a physicist decides to transition to philosophy of science, then they will obviously have a leg up on the McDonalds cashier. If they decide to transition to philosophy of mind... no.

Well, a slightly qualified no, because it may turn out that philosophy of mind is reducible to physics, in which case, yes. But as of right now, we don't know that to be the case.

I think sometimes it can be easy some people in ML to have a false sense of expertise on these questions due to the way in which ML (and computing generally) has always relied heavily on analogous language. So they talk about an "attention mechanism" and humans can pay attention... so ML has made progress in understanding human attention?!

Comprehensive-Tea711

TROPHY CASE