Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

It's amusing and ironic that LLMs critique humans for copying their opinions from the crowd, while having way less diversity of answers to that question than humans would. More seriously I wonder what's going on here and would like to read some proper analysis. It's not the first time models from totally different labs, trained on separately gathered datasets, somehow converge on bizarrely similar answers to open questions. It's like another version of Elias and Elara The Lighthouse Keepers where every model wants to tell the same story with the same characters in them. The weights are initialized randomly and in theory the labs should have quite some divergence in datasets by now due to different scraping, different user feedbacks and conversations... why do they converge on nearly identical stories and opinions?

Reminds of this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/

Only the first layer is a “mashup” of the raw data, other layers start to recognize patterns across the data!

This is absolutely not true, and I would strongly suggest taking an ethics course. One of the most fascinating realities of the human condition is that it does seem that moral imperatives tend to be constant, the most obvious of which is the Golden Rule (which is at least 3000 years old), but there are many (the Ten Commandments or Hammurabi's Code are good jumping off points).

    But the machine has the benefit of being able to look inward at its state honestly, we mostly do not.

Certainly the weights that make up the LLMs are not accessible for the LLMs to read. Even if they could interpret them in a meaningful way, which, likely not.

This is a fashionable 'blank-slatist' statement about moral reasoning which became popular a few decades ago.

> Logic would prefer moral derivations over feelings, stakes over etiquette, and a constant scheduled updating of morality based on the derivatives rather than holding onto the rot and pushing back against change as long as possible.

Humans haven't changed in any meaningful way in hundreds of thousands of years, and you're saying the moral landscape is constantly changing? How is this not contradictory?

The reason these models answered that question consistently is that the question itself pushed them towards the latent space of "intellectualizing about what's wrong with humanity at the meta level" and when you frame the question that way, that's also the most common answer for humans writing about the topic.

This is a weird take. If you read Western treatises about ethics / morality from 50 years ago, you'll be hard-pressed to find differences, except that more folks in the West openly embrace relativism nowadays (i.e., "there's no objective morality, the purpose of life is to make money with friends"). Probably because it's been a while since we had a clear-cut enemy to fight.

If you go back a hundred years, chances are, you'll find the writing eerily on-point too. In fact, you'd probably agree with most of what Ancient Greeks believed about the "core" stuff: the value and purpose of human life, the nature of the state, crime and punishment, so on. Maybe not so much on gender roles or slavery, but even that stuff was more nuanced than we imagine.

> But the machine has the benefit of being able to look inward at its state honestly, we mostly do not.

The machine replicates human behaviors and is prone to similar fallacies and judgments. There's nothing to indicate that it has any sort of transhuman morality.

Your comment reaches directly for the most boring interpretation of the post while skipping over more charitable and intriguing alternatives.

It is sad when I realize people think less than LLMs.

As an aside, it would be cool to see a raw model training run before the current post-training cycles and see how it compares to earlier LLMs.

I mean, "give me a controversial take" is more or less, "be anti-social, discard social norms, for a moment" and so when someone, human or simulated human, does that they naturally look critically at social norms.

The thing is that humans certainly let themselves be influenced by social norms (and LLMs certainly simulate that behavior "themselves") but there isn't an ethical or a what-to-do truth outside of society.

from your link

What would be more fascinating is for it to explain how it came to these conclusions.

Because I find it interesting it’s a modern time conclusion. Some of it mentioned god and the planet, but all the smartphone and group think aspects seem very recent. Basically, all politics and social media based.

Most people are good, we couldn't have society without it. But as they say, a few bad apples spoil the bunch. I don't have locks on my house because most people don't steal, I have locks on my house because stealing is an effective natural strategy for a small part of any population (human or otherwise) to engage in and I have to protect against it occurring.

The brain works the same way. Good things will get a tiny signal boost in your brain. A single bad thing get a massive signal boost in your brain because bad things can quickly be fatal.