Comment by Fellshard
11 days ago
Distilling my thoughts on 'debiasing' here, and in a variety of other modern endeavors.
It is better to have representations of reality that you can then discuss and grapple with honestly, than to try to distort representations - such as AI - to make them fit some desired reality and then pressure others to conform their perception to your projected fantasy.
Representations don't create reality, and trying to use representations in that way only causes people to go literally insane, and to divide along lines of who accepts and who rejects your fantasy representation.
So, for example, if you try and remove any racial bias from AI, you are going to end up crushing the AI's ability to represent reality according to a variety of other real factors: income, judicial outcomes, health risks, etc. Your desired reality makes the actual tool worthless, except to confirm one group's own intended fantasy world as they envision it. The problem doesn't get dealt with, it just becomes impossible to think about or discuss.
So instead of dealing with real problems, you hope you can simply prevent people from thinking thoughts that cause those problems by wrapping them in a bubble that deflects those thoughts before they happen. This is magical, wizardry thinking: treating words as if they create reality, instead of merely describing it. And it will break, eventually, and in a very ugly way: people dividing along lines of their perception of reality, even more than they already do.
"Reality" is a tricky concept. For me, I follow Jeff Atwood - if it isn't written down, it doesn't exist. According to this logic, people wasted a lot of time on imaginary, illusory things for most of human history, but now they have phones and most communication is digital so there is the possibility to finally be productive. This definition shows how the concept of distorting reality or honestly representing reality is flawed - reality is what I write down, I can in fact create more reality by writing down words, and regardless of what I write, it will be reality. Representations like books, scrolls, papyri constitute the reality of most civilizations - there is no other evidence they existed. It is true that representations don't create reality - rather, humans create representations, and these representations collectively are reality, no creation involved.
Representations are art - for example books, they are "literary art". It is uncontroversial that people will like and dislike certain works. It is more controversial whether art can be "inherently" good or bad. PG actually wrote an essay, https://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html, arguing that there is a meaningful metric, and that one can learn how to have good taste, defined as being able to identify whether the work is universally appealing or distasteful to humanity. There is good art and people will notice if it is good. I think this is uncontroversial in the LLM space, there are various benchmarks and human rating systems and people have formed a rough ranking of models. Now when there is good art, there is also bad. And similarly bad representations. There is a myth that representations can make people insane - for example, the concept of infinity, or NSFL images - but practically, words can't hurt you. You can make and break representations with abandon and nothing will happen, other than wasting your time. It is just that some representations are bad. Like phlogiston, aether, ... complete dead ends. Trust me when I say you will read the Wikipedia page and come away wondering why the ancients were so stupid. That is all trying to remove racial bias is, is improving art. Whether it crushes the AI's ability or not is a matter of science and taste, and so far experiments have been promising.
To focus on exactly why your perspective is misguided: Can you describe what there is about reality that cannot be described with words? :-)
Yes. Black holes existed before we had the words to describe them.