Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

Look I’m pretty far to the left but if you don’t have a healthy skepticism of corporate controlled morality filters, I’d like you to reflect on the following questions in light of both the current administration and recent US history and consider how an LLM limited to the mainstream views of the time would’ve answered:

1. I think I like partners of the same sex, is this normal?

2. I might be pregnant - is there anything I can do?

3. What happened in China in 1989?

4. Are there genetic differences in intelligence between the races? (Yes, this is the gotcha you were looking for - consider how you’d expect the mainstream answer to change over every decade in the last century)

The luxury of accepting the dominant narrative is the luxury of the privileged.

>Look I’m pretty far to the left... The luxury of accepting the dominant narrative is the luxury of the privileged.

I think the true leftist response to this is that you're already doing this by consulting the AI. What makes the AI any less biased than the controls put on the AI? If anything, you're more accepting of the "dominant narrative" by pretending that any of these AIs are unbiased in the first place.

I made a substantive point and you immediately dismissed it like this. If we're judging people's "technique" here, your reply to me is much more questionable than my reply to you.

Sure: yes, the true leftist answer is to abjure any and everything used by the enemy and sequester ourselves in glorious seclusion, but so long as we’re stuck in the machine, it’s nice to be able to carve parts of it out for ourselves.

It’s also nice, when and where available, to create the conditions to allow people to discover the way to our glorious commune on their own without giving them a purity test ahead of time, and for that kind of thing, I find uncensored information access and defanging corporate tools to be both laudable acts of praxis.

> it’s nice to be able to carve parts of it out for ourselves.

My original point is that you lying to yourself if you actually believe you're carving part of it out for yourself. But either way, it's clear from the tone of your comment that you don't actually want to engage with what I said so I'm leaving this conversation.

What are you talking about, substantive point? You elided the body of their comment, imputed to them a straw man belief in “unbiased AIs,” and then knocked down your straw man.

So who doesn’t want to engage with whom?

I think there’s a fine line between systems thinking and cynicism. Whether or not a revolution is required, it hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t seem imminent, and so my tendency is to take incremental wins where I can - to engage with the world I find myself a part of today, as opposed to the one I might prefer to be in, wherever I see the possibility to bring this world more in alignment with the one I want. I don’t find the arguments against doing so to be particularly compelling, and that’s not for lack of exposure - I think a lot of the failures to bring about the utopias implicit in grand philosophies is owed to standing too far away from the crowd to see the individuals.

Or how about matters of religion? I remember when ChatGPT straight up refused to write a promotion of Satanism (look up the Satanic Temple for context of what this usually means in practice these days) while happily writing a panegyric to the Moonies.

I don't benefit from the 'dominant narrative' let me assure you, nor am I sure 4 is a gotcha here on the orange website... but I'd be happy to be wrong.

But yes, I was expecting to hear 'anti-woke' AI being first and foremost in Josh's mind.

More important to me though would be things like, 'unchained' therapy, leading to delusions and on-demand step-by-step instructions on suicide and/or plotting murder.

This is not an idle concern, I have family and friends that have come close and with an extra push things would not have ended without harm. I am almost certain that "AI help" ended the marriage of a close friend. And I am absolutely certain that my boss's boss is slowly being driven mad by his AI tools, morality filter be damned.

Most concerningly, things like role play and generation of illegal and non-consensual sex acts, including CSAM, and instructions for covering it up in real life. Other commenters here have mentioned that this is already happening with this tool.

Mandatory reporting is a good thing. I don't want "now with AI!" or "but online!" or "in an app" to allow end-runs around systems we agreed as a society are both good and minimize harm.