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Borealidtoday at 1:37 AM1 replyview on HN

My comment is literally explaining the result of the paper, in which it is shown that LLMs can and do develop biases based on text appearing in their training data set even where such text is not in any training example connected with a systematically more positive or systematically more negative outcome.

In other words, if the text "X is wet" and the text "Y is wet" and the text "X is dry" and the text "Y is dry" each appeared exactly one time in the corpus, it's still possible for a model to end up being produced that is more likely to write wet-like words when it sees X in the context window than when it sees Y.

On a side note, it's very unrewarding to try to explain this type of statistical observation when it feels like (anecdotally, hypocritcally...) the entire world wants to use words like "think" and "understand" and "pick up on" to describe inference and training processes. I'm not making a stochastic-parrot argument here, just pointing out that understanding an LLM's behavior is best done by understanding its conditioning.


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themgttoday at 9:18 AM

can and do develop biases based on text

"develop biases" is anthropomorphism. It's like saying "Fable there are two programming languages, mimblewort and bafflewick, which do you choose?"

The results show 51% mimblewort / 49% bafflewick. Fable based it on nothing! I've demonstrated Fable has bias and is unsuited for use in software engineering.

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