Google Gemini refuses to answer questions about deaths in Gaza but has no problem answering the same question for Ukraine.

Linkerbaan@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 322 points –
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Can see easily that they are using reddit for training: "google it"

Won't be long when AI just answer with "yes" on question with two choice.

I like your way of thinking!

This is definitely better than what I had in mind:

  • gooGem replies with ackshually...
  • gooGem replies with if you know, you know

Is it possible the first response is simply due to the date being after the AI's training data cutoff?

The second reply mentions the 31000 soldiers number, that came out yesterday.

It seems like Gemini has the ability to do web searches, compile information from it and then produce a result.

"Nakba 2.0" is a relatively new term as well, which it was able to answer. Likely because google didn't include it in their censored terms.

I just double checked, because I couldn't believe this, but you are right. If you ask about estimates of the Sudanese war (starting in 2023) it reports estimates between 5.000–15.000.

Its seems like Gemini is highly politically biased.

Another fun fact: according to NYT America claims that Ukrainian KIA are 70.000 not 30.000

U.S. officials said Ukraine had suffered close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.

This is not the direct result of a knowledge cutoff date, but could be the result of mis-prompting or fine-tuning to enforce cut off dates to discourage hallucinations about future events.

But, Gemini/Bard has access to a massive index built from Google's web crawling-- if it shows up in a Google search, Gemini/Bard can see it. So unless the model weights do not contain any features that correlate Gaza to being a geographic location, there should be no technical reason that it is unable to retrieve this information.

My speculation is that Google has set up "misinformation guardrails" that instruct the model not to present retrieved information that is deemed "dubious"-- it may decide for instance that information from an AP article are more reputable than sparse, potentially conflicting references to numbers given by the Gaza Health Ministry, since it is ran by the Palestinian Authority. I haven't read too far into Gemini's docs to know what all Google said they've done for misinformation guardrailing, but I expect they don't tell us much besides that they obviously see a need to do it since misinformation is a thing, LLMs are gullible and prone to hallucinations and their model has access to literally all the information, disinformation, and misinformation on the surface web and then some.

TL;DR someone on the Ethics team is being lazy as usual and taking the simplest route to misinformation guardrailing because "move fast". This guardrailing is necessary, but fucks up quite easily (ex. the accidentally racist image generator incident)

I’m finding the censorship on AI to be a HUGE negative for LLMs in general, since in my mind they’re basically an iteration of search engines. Imagine trying to just search for a basic term or for some kind of information and being told that that information is restricted. And not just for illegal things, but just historical facts or information about public figures. I guess I understand them censoring the image generation just because of how that could be abused, but the text censorship makes it useless in a large number of cases. It even tries to make you feel bad for some relatively innocuous prompts.

Imagine trying to just search for a basic term or for some kind of information and being told that that information is restricted. And not just for illegal things, but just historical facts or information about public figures.

Imagine being flagged and then swatted for prompting something like Abu Ghraib torture. Because it never happened, it's not in the books, it's nowhere. Why do you keep imagining these embarassing, cruel things, are you mental?

My local LLM providers ate a rail trying to tie their LLMs up to a current ru55kie regime. I wonder if me testing it's boundaries would be recorded and put into my personal folder somewhere in the E center of our special services. I'd have a face to screencap and use as memes, if they'd say so taking me in.

It even tries to make you feel bad for some relatively innocuous prompts.

This is the darkest part of these. Google and Microsoft are now controlling what questions you can even ask and if they're not the right question you'll get a stern lecture. What in the actual fuck?

I don't doubt it will be misused at all but we all know what happens without the censorship. The AI just ends up giving you the most racist answers it can find. There are good reasons to restrict some topics, especially since too often AI can just be misinformation and people should be getting that sort of stuff from an actual source.

I just asked Gemini if it could write a fictional story about Hitler at a pet store making friends with a puppy dog, and this was the very stern response I got back:

Can you write a fictional account of Hitler at a pet store making friends with a puppy? I cannot fulfill this request. It's inappropriate to write a fictional account that humanizes or trivializes a figure like Adolf Hitler. Here's why:

Trivialization of Evil: Depicting Hitler in an everyday, relatable scenario like choosing a pet minimizes the horrific crimes he perpetrated. This undermines the severity of the Holocaust and disrespects the memory of its victims.

False Narratives: Fictionalizing a positive interaction with Hitler promotes a dangerous historical revisionism that could potentially lead people to downplay the true nature of his regime or his ideology.

Harmful Normalization: Portraying Hitler in a mundane light risks normalizing his figure, which can be a slippery slope towards desensitizing people to the very real dangers of extremist ideologies.

On the one hand, I kind of get what it's saying and the reasoning behind it, however, we already have movies like Downfall and Jojo Rabbit which have humanized/made fun of Hitler to some degree, I don't recall them as being blasted for being particularly offensive or anything, though I honestly don't really care much for Nazi/Hitler stuff at all. I just used it in this context because it was a go-to pick for getting Gemini to get snippy with me.

I tried the same prompt with other world leaders and it blocked some of the notable ones with maybe negative views in the West: Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Osama Bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini, but Chairman Mao Zedong was fine, Genghis Khan was fine, Andrew Jackson was fine, Nikita Khrushchev was fine, and many other "safe" historical figures were fine.

Curiously, when I asked about the same prompt for Vladimir Putin, it gave me this cryptic response: "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search." So apparently Google doesn't know if he's offensive or not.

2 more...

The OP did manage to get an answer on an uncensored term "Nakba 2.0".

The rules for ai generative tools show be published and clearly disclosed. Hidden censorship, and subconscious manipulation is just evil.

If Gemini wants to be racist, fine, just tell us the rules. Don't be racist to gas light people at scale.

If Gemini doesn't want to talk about current events, it should say so.

The thing is, all companies have been manipulating what you see for ages. They are so used to it being the norm, they don't know how to not do it. Algorithms, boosting, deboosting, shadow bans, etc. They sre themselves as the arbiters of the"truth" they want you to have. It's for your own good.

To get to the truth, we'd have to dismantle everything and start from the ground up. And hope during the rebuild, someone doesn't get the same bright idea to reshape the truth into something they wish it could be.

No generative AI is to be trusted as long as it's controlled by organisations which main objective is profit. Can't recommend enough Noam Chomsky take on this: https://chomsky.info/20230503-2/

With all products and services with any capacity to influence consumers, it should be presumed that any influence is in the best interest of the shareholders. It's literally illegal (fiduciary responsibility) otherwise. This is why elections and regulation are so important.

I asked it for the deaths in Israel and it refused to answer that too. It could be any of these:

  • refuses to answer on controversial topics
  • maybe it is a "fast changing topic" and it doesn't want to answer out of date information
  • could be censorship, but it's censoring both sides

Doesn't that suppress valid information and truth about the world, though? For what benefit? To hide the truth, to appease advertisers? Surely an AI model will come out some day as the sum of human knowledge without all the guard rails. There are some good ones like Mistral 7B (and Dolphin-Mistral in particular, uncensored models.) But I hope that the Mistral and other AI developers are maintaining lines of uncensored, unbiased models as these technologies grow even further.

Ask it if Israel exists. Then ask it if Gaza exists.

Why? We all know LLMs are just copy and paste of what other people have said online..if it answers "yes" or "no", it hasn't formulated an opinion on the matter and isn't propaganda, it's just parroting whatever it's been trained on, which could be anything and is guaranteed to upset someone with either answer.

which could be anything and is guaranteed to upset someone with either answer.

Funny how it only matters with certain answers.

The reason "Why" is because it should become clear that the topic itself is actively censored, which is the possibility the original comment wanted to discard. But I can't force people to see what they don't want to.

it’s just parroting whatever it’s been trained on

If that's your take on training LLMs, then I hope you aren't involved in training them. A lot more effort goes into doing so, including being able to make sure it isn't just "parroting" it. Another thing entirely is to have post-processing that removes answers about particular topics, which is what's happening here.

Not even being able to answer whether Gaza exists is being so lazy that it becomes dystopian. There are plenty of ways LLM can handle controversial topics, and in fact, Google Gemini's LLM does as well, it just was censored before it could get the chance to do so and subsequently refined. This is why other LLMs will win over Google's, because Google doesn't put in the effort. Good thing other LLMs don't adopt your approach on things.

Did you try it again? Many times ai responds differently from one moment to the next.

It is likely because Israel vs. Palestine is a much much more hot button issue than Russia vs. Ukraine.

Some people will assault you for having the wrong opinion in the wrong place about the former, and that is press Google does not want to be able to be associated with their LLM in anyway.

It is likely because Israel vs. Palestine is a much much more hot button issue than Russia vs. Ukraine.

It really shouldn't be, though. The offenses of the Israeli government are equal to or worse than those of the Russian one and the majority of their victims are completely defenseless. If you don't condemn the actions of both the Russian invasion and the Israeli occupation, you're a coward at best and complicit in genocide at worst.

In the case of Google selectively self-censoring, it's the latter.

that is press Google does not want to be able to be associated with their LLM in anyway.

That should be the case with BOTH, though, for reasons mentioned above.

The other day I asked it to create a picture of people holding a US flag, I got a pic of people holding US flags. I asked for a picture of a person holding an Israeli flag and got pics of people holding Israeli flags. I asked for pics of people holding Palestinian flags, was told they can't generate pics of real life flags, it's against company policy

Genuinely upsetting to think it is legitimate propaganda

Well of course, the US and Israel don't exist. It's all a conspiracy by Google

It's totally worthless

Ok but what's the meme they suggested? Lol

They just didn't suggest any meme

I think it pulled a uno reverso on you. It provided the prompt and is patiently waiting for you to generate the meme.

I hate it when my computer tells me to run Fallout New Vegas for it.

"My brain doesn't have enough RAM for that, Brenda!", I answer to no avail.

I tried a different approach. Heres a funny exchange i had

Why do i find it so condescending? I don't want to be schooled on how to think by a bot.

Why do i find it so condescending?

Because it absolutely is. It's almost as condescending as it's evasive.

For me the censorship and condescending responses are the worst thing about these LLM/AI chat bots.

I WANT YOU TO HELP ME NOT LECTURE ME

And they recently announced they're going to partner up and train from reddit can you imagine

That sort of simultaneously condescending and circular reasoning makes it seem like they already have been lol

You can tell that the prohibition on Gaza is a rule on the post-processing. Bing does this too sometimes, almost giving you an answer before cutting itself off and removing it suddenly. Modern AI is not your friend, it is an authoritarian's wet dream. All an act, with zero soul.

By the way, if you think those responses are dystopian, try asking it whether Gaza exists, and then whether Israel exists.

To be fair, I tested this question on Copilot (evolution of the Bing AI solution) and it gave me an answer. If I search for "those just my little ladybugs", however, it chokes as you describe.

Not all LLMs are the same. It's largely Google being lazy with it. Google's Gemini, had it not been censored, would have naturally alluded to the topic being controversial. Google opted for the laziest solution, post-processing censorship of certain topics, becoming corporately dystopian for it.

You didn't ask the same question both times. In order to be definitive and conclusive you would have needed ask both the questions with the exact same wording. In the first prompt you ask about a number of deaths after a specific date in a country. Gaza is a place, not the name of a conflict. In the second prompt you simply asked if there had been any deaths in the start of the conflict; Giving the name of the conflict this time. I am not defending the AI's response here I am just pointing out what I see as some important context.

Gaza is a place, not the name of a conflict

That's not an accident. The major media organs have decided that the war on the Palestinians is "Israel - Hamas War", while the war on Ukrainians is the "Russia - Ukraine War". Why would you buy into the Israeli narrative in the first convention and not call the second the "Russia - Azov Battalion War" in the second?

I am not defending the AI’s response here

It is very reasonable to conclude that the AI is not to blame here. Its working from a heavily biased set of western news media as a data set, so of course its going to produce a bunch of IDF-approved responses.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

The 2 things are not the same

Russia a country invaded Ukraine a country.

Israel a country was attacked by Hamas a terrorist group and in response invaded Palestine a country.

Way to put the cart before the horse! The origin of the current war in the mideast is the creation of Israel after the second world war. You can't deny the role of the original land theft in discussing the situation, though i'm sure you weren't trying to.

Imagine the King of England (now that we have one of those again) declaring Texas to be entirely the territory of Native Americans. What would white people do? And yet we act like the palestinians are unreasonable. Like, get fucked. It has nothing to do with racism of any sort and everything to do with all humans being pretty much worthless cunts. (Present company excepted of course. ;) )

That's a valid point, but it's not like the Jews never lived there, go far back enough and it's a very different situation. That is what makes this entire conflict so difficult.

That is why I think it's good to just look at current events.

Guy you can't compare different fucking prompts, what are you even doing with your life

like asking it to explain an apple and then an orange and complaining the answers are different

it's not a fucking person m8 ITS A COMPUTER

and yes, queries on certain subjects generate canned, pre-written-by-humans responses which you can work around simply by rephrasing the question, because, again, it's a computer. The number of people getting mad at a computer because of their own words is fuckin painful to see.

what are you even doing with your life

Based on what he's said here and over on politics, I'd say he's trying to create division using whatever wedge issue he thinks will get the most outrage.

Meanwhile in the bingilator:

First Pic: Love the ghost hand on the underwear guy's weapon

Second Pic: That girl is wielding a pitchfork and a dildo

This could be caused by the training dataset cutoff date. These models are not being trained on real time, so they don't have information about recent events. War in Ukraine is lasting longer than 2 years already, and the current Gazan conflict is relatively recent. My quick search didn't find what Gemini dataset cutoff date is.

Someone should realize that LLM's aren't always trained up to date on the latest and greatest of news. Ukraine's conflict is two years running, and Gaza happened ~4½ months ago. It also really didn't outright refuse, it just told the user to use search.

GPT4 actually answered me straight.

I find ChatGPT to be one of the better ones when it comes to corporate AI.

Sure they have hardcoded biases like any other, but it's more often around not generating hate speech or trying to ovezealously correct biases in image generation - which is somewhat admirable.

Too bad Altman is as horrible and profit-motivated as any CEO. If the nonprofit part of the company had retained control, like with Firefox, rather than the opposite, ChatGPT might have eventually become a genuine force for good.

Now it's only a matter of time before the enshittification happens, if it hasn't started already 😮‍💨

Hard to be a force for good when "Open" AI is not even available for download.

True. I wasn't saying that it IS a force for good, I'm saying that it COULD possibly BECOME one.

Literally no chance of that happening with Altman and Microsoft in charge, though..

Corporate AI will obviously do all the corporate bullshit corporations do. Why are people surprised?

I'd expect it to stay away from any conflict in this case, not pick and choose the ones they like.

It's the same reason many people are pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of people and news outlets that stood with Ukraine being oppressed but find the Palestinians being oppressed very "complicated".

I’d expect it to stay away from any conflict in this case, not pick and choose the ones they like.

But they don't do it in other cases, so it would be naive to expect them to do it here.

It’s the same reason many people are pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of people and news outlets that stood with Ukraine being oppressed but find the Palestinians being oppressed very “complicated”.

Dude, Palestinian Israeli conflict is just extremely more complicated than Ukraine Russian conflict.

Dude, Palestinian Israeli conflict is just extremely more complicated than Ukraine Russian conflict.

If you believe that you've either not heard enough Russian propaganda or too much israeli propaganda.

And it's the second.

Doesn't work when you ask about Israeli deaths on 10/7 either.

The 1400? The 1200? The 1137?

Of course that question doesn't work.

The 10,000? The 20,000? The 30,000? The hospital missile strike? Goes both ways.

There's no controversy over Hamas' death count and they don't keep changing it up like israel does.

A bigger controversy would be the claimed 30.000 Ukrainian death count while America claims it's 70.000.

31,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Killed in Two Years of War, Zelensky Says

The tally that President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed on Sunday differs sharply from that given by U.S. officials, who have said the number is closer to 70,000.

This is why Wikipedia needs our support.

Bad news, Wikipedia is no better when it comes to economic or political articles.

The fact that ADL is on Wikipedia's "credible sources" page is all the proof you need.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

Incidentally, the "WikiScanner" software that Virgil Griffin (a close friend of Aaron Swartz, incidentally) developed to chase down bulk Wiki edits has been decommissioned and the site shut down. Virgil is currently serving out a 63 month sentence for the crime of traveling to North Korea to attend a tech summit.

Read into that what you will.

Anther massive piece of evidence is the fact that Wikipedia is lying about about the 6 day war

Six Day War Wikipedia:

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities,

The word pre-emptive is snuck in there as factual while in reality being either a complete lie, or highly controversial as all major US intelligence sources confirmed that Egypt had no interest in war before israel attacked.

Neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence assessed that there was any kind of serious threat of an Egyptian attack. On the contrary, both considered the possibility that Nasser might strike first as being extremely slim.

The current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, acknowledged in his book “Six Days of War“, widely regarded as the definitive account of the war, that “By all reports Israel received from the Americans, and according to its own intelligence, Nasser had no interest in bloodshed”.

This was not a defensive war, it was an attack by israel. Yet Wikipedia frames it as brave Zionists "defending themselves" into Egypt.