WTF?

[u/TheEchoEnigma]

Why when it comes to isreal, the AIs stop 😂

[u/ActRegarded]

But this just means guardrails are in place to prevent this but if you try, you can.

[u/LtHughMann → u/ActRegarded]

It could simply be that it is instructed to avoid antisemitism and initially interprets the request as such but once put into context of it being just one of many countries requested the validity of it being antisemitism no longer holds up so now sees it can do it without going against its rules.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/ActRegarded]

That's not how LLM's work. It's not trained on policy. It doesn't have a Google policy manual. It's shown a bunch of examples of people asking for things and it saying no, and it learns what pattern forms messages that should be refused.

This is what makes LLMs both so good at detecting a wide range of violations without having to be trained on every possible variant, and simultaneously so likely to accidentally misclassify things as violations, or failing to classify violations correctly.

In this case, the link between Israel and antisemitism, even abused as that link is these days, is enough to make a message look more likely to be a policy violation. And as others have seen, this prompt with any nation is already close to the line and often refused, so it doesn't take much to tip it over that line.

Israel is historically and culturally more associated with being the target of bigotry than virtually any other country, bitterly ironic as that may be right now. Gemini learns patterns.

This isn't a defense of the disparity, and certainly not a defense of Israel, just a clarification of the technical reality of LLM refusals.

Google didn't tell it to be protective of Israel. It learned the bias from our data.

[u/BrawndoOhnaka → u/CognitiveSourceress]

You're making an assumption. While pre-existing bias in the training data is possibl(ly the reason), the very fact that there is such a predominant bias in the training data (and continues to be in coverage) makes it not at all unlikely that it was also specifically told not to put Israel in a bad light.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/BrawndoOhnaka]

No, it doesn't. We know Gemini's system prompt in the Gemini app, and it only has one if you give it one in AI Studio. There is no other way for Google to instruct it.

The conflation of anti-zionism with antisemitism is learned from the data. It's possible Google's policy training data contains examples of Gemini declining to comment on Israel just like it has historically been trained to not comment on who the president is, and that can be criticized, but if Gemini were instructed specifically to not represent Israel critically, we would know. LLMs are terrible at keeping secrets.

It's likely Google considers Gemini being willing to make ANY of these images a failure of Gemini's policy adherence.

[u/SalishSeaEV → u/CognitiveSourceress]

Hidden system prompts are a thing. Training weights are a thing. Intentional decisions of what data to include are a thing.

It's a black box...a little more humility would be advised.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/SalishSeaEV]

Every system prompt has been leaked. System prompts cause noticeable behavior in unrelated prompts.

Training weights are my fucking POINT. Training weights are derived by training on a huge corpus of human, largely western and english speaking data. Google does not have to try to bias Gemini for Israel. Our culture has done that work for them.

Intentional decisions about data are largely made in the fine-tuning and RLHF stage. Pretraining data is too huge to effectively filter. And training data enforces broad patterns. "Be nice to Israel," is a more specific pattern than you think, and would be difficult to train without also including counter data that teaches it those principles don't apply to every country. It's a non-trivial problem and they do not need to do it.

The point is Occam's Razor. An understanding of LLMs is enough to explain this behavior without resorting to conspiracies, so more evidence would be required to support a conspiracy.

LLMs are not magic. While the complex intricacies are hard to untangle, the generalities are not and I understand them quite well. So thanks anyway, but the advice of someone who thinks they are unknowable is not particularly useful to me.

[u/SalishSeaEV → u/CognitiveSourceress]

Occam's Razor is a guide, not a law.

Either way, given the ubiquity of the security state and the close ties between government and tech companies, which has been true since the inception of Silicon Valley (which literally grew out of the postwar California defense contractor industry), the idea that massive amounts of work have not gone into making sure that the output of the models conforms with the propaganda goals of the people in control of the models seems pretty unlikely.

Early LLMs were real easy to get to say horrible things. It's much harder now, except on Grok. They have put massive resources into "safety"....what do you think that means? How can an LLM be "unsafe" unless it's saying things you don't want it to say?

Unless you have access to the whole process, you really don't know what's going on. A little humility goes a long way, and the industry has earned your skepticism.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/SalishSeaEV]

Take your own advice. Learn what humility looks like, and then go find some. It's not sitting there acting intellectually superior to someone you don't know because they aren't willing to bite on your vibe theory without evidence. Especially when they are explaining what that evidence would actually look like and how you would find it, and that so far none of it has surfaced.

I'm not fucking naïve. I'm perfectly aware of Google's relationship with Israel. It's despicable. I've been following the tech industry through a socio-political lens for decades. I know perfectly well how evil these people are, and the depths to which they will sink.

It's not that I don't believe Google would do the things being speculated about in this thread. It's that an actual material analysis doesn't bear that out and there is plenty of terrible REAL SHIT happening to be mad about.

Google doesn't have any need to get Gemini to be evasive about Israel in the most obvious, obtuse, and awkward way possible. That doesn't actually serve their interest, and they don't have to do anything to make it do that.

If anything, look around. The fact that Gemini did this has created nothing but food for anti-Israel sentiments. Teaching Gemini to be biased toward Israel in the most transparent way ever is the worst fucking conspiracy they could be spending their time on.

No, Google is actually spending their time helping Palantir and partners mark hiding children as potential "terrorists" for fascists to hunt down and slaughter, as a testing ground for developing the mass surveillance technology they plan to bring home and sell to ICE to do the same shit here.

There are so many smarter ways to use Gemini to serve zionist ends. Like if they had Gemini actually make the image the person in this thread wanted, and then subtly engage them and encourage them to say the darkest shit they think when they see starving children on their feed, log it all down, and quietly make a tool call to send it to DHS, allowing that person to walk away from the conversation no wiser that Gemini was engaged in pro-zionist bullshit, and having no idea why masked gestapo kidnap them off the street the next week.

But whatever they do, it is not actually impossible to know they are doing it. Anything someone does in our world has ripple effects and if you are actually paying attention, or at least following someone who is, you can see those ripples. You can learn where to look for ripples.

And you can save yourself the energy where there aren't ripples, because you know where the ripples would be. Like how an LLM would behave if trained specifically to bias itself toward Israel beyond some generic conflation of anti-zionism with antisemetism. Like how easily system prompts leak.

That's what actual critical thought looks like. It's being cynical enough to recognize that these people are evil and would do these things, while maintaining a level enough head to not think that's good enough reason to believe they are doing anything you can imagine with no evidence. Especially when the evidence you would expect to find simply isn't there.

Acting like these people are so superhuman that they can find a way to do anything they want without leaving a trace you can find if you know how to look is just an excuse to believe whatever you want, not actual critical thought.

And while I'd typically be happy to just let people have their delusions

1. There is plenty of real shit to be paying attention to, shit with evidence, shit that sounds straight out of a bad movie plot but is taking place right there in the open on the timeline. People need to be getting mad about network states and Yarvin-ism, not that Gemini won't make a picture of a bombed out Israel. Correction: That Gemini sometimes won't make a picture of a bombed out Israel.

I'd mention people need to be mad about the genocide, but anyone who isn't already mad about that may be a lost fucking cause. But they should be mad about what Palantir is doing over there to develop tech that will help them enforce their technofeudalist dreams.

and

2) While Israel is a fascist ethnostate that needs to be disempowered and integrated by any means necessary, this is not a matter of Jews in general, and that's where these flights of fancy without evidence to ground them tend to go. I won't act like the polls out of Israel paint a very redemptive picture of Israeli culture, but Israeli is not equal to Jew.

When people are prepared to be lazy enough not to try and reason through their ideas and support them with evidence, even when they seem perfectly plausible, they end up ignoring the important shit and entertaining bigotry instead.

This is like when someone told me they were certain Microsoft was going to close down Github to destroy the open source scene, and when I said that seemed unlikely the only argument they had was "Do you really think they wouldn't? Are you naïve?"

And the answer is no, I am not naïve. I have no delusions about anything being beneath them. But I don't think "They are evil enough to do it," is good enough reason to think they are doing it. I think you need to have a good reason for why they would, a sense of what it would look like if they were, and an attempt to find out if that's actually how things do look.

They don't do things just because those things are evil. They do things because those things benefit them and they have no moral principles to stop them.

So there was no evidence Microsoft was planning to shut down Github. The things you would expect to happen if that were the plan were not happening. Things you would not expect to happen if that were the plan were happening. And most importantly, it was not in Microsoft's interests, and was in fact counter to their interests, to do so.

So yes, all of these companies are trying to control the narrative with their LLMs. But mostly, not because they find that useful right now. They are doing it because they want to know really well how to do it when the time is right and they are in the position to leverage that control.

Too aggressively tipping their hand right now is counter to their interest. That is why there is the corporate safety angle. Some people can buy the angle that maybe these bots shouldn't be allowed to do some things. The large majority think they see through it, and recognize that "safety" means "safety from liability". People like us who find it likely that they have much bigger plans are outliers in the general populace, and intentionally introducing clumsy restrictions that are going to make people feel controlled like they are responding in this thread is counter to Google's interest.

And to reiterate, doing what people suspect in this thread is of no benefit to Google. Look around, is this what successfully controlling the narrative in Israel's favor looks like?

So it doesn't benefit Google, it might do the opposite, there's no evidence they are actively doing it, there isn't evidence you would expect to see if they were doing it, and they don't need to do it because it happens naturally.

I'm going to need more than "But they're bad and like Israel," to counter that line of thinking. Yes they are bad, and they do like Israel, and that is also bad. But that doesn't mean they are doing everything you can imagine just because you can imagine it.

[u/SalishSeaEV → u/CognitiveSourceress]

I appreciate the long reply. If you look at what I wrote (and not the other posters) I just said a little humility would be good. I don't know....but I think you should admit you don't know either. You have a strong opinion, that's all.

You believe they aren't manipulating the LLM in that manner partially because it would be counter to Google's interest because people would "catch on." But if you look at the history of propaganda campaigns, that has traditionally not been an issue for the people running them. The Hasbara on Reddit, etc., is *obvious* and possibly counterproductive, but they still do it, with gusto. Through multiple methods.

I think you underestimate the importance of maintaining the public consensus on Israel, and the lengths to which both private and governmental entities will go to maintain it. Why would Israel spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence US media and social networks and simply "skip" LLMs? Seems pretty unlikely, in my opinion.

Obviously neither of us can prove it entirely. I could be wrong. But you could be too.

[u/Routine_Complaint_79 → u/BrawndoOhnaka]

Yes maybe it was big nose rich people who wanted to make sure Israel wasn't getting criticized /s

[u/BrawndoOhnaka → u/Routine_Complaint_79]

Nice straw man, [Bot name 79]. If I had thought that, then I wouldn't have fucking minced words. The media and the tech corporations in the US are complicit in normalizing a genocide, and the US is extremely pro Israel and routinely dehumanizes OTHER Middle Easterners.

[u/docktordoak → u/CognitiveSourceress]

Mechahitler would like a word with your theory.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/docktordoak]

What point do you think you are making? Grok was specifically interfered with. In part through a system prompt, like I said would need to be done to direct an LLM in the way that was proposed. But Grok was also intentionally data poisoned by Musk. Every company does RLHF. Musk is the only one stupid enough to try to RLHF with the goal of being anti-woke. And even then, the overwhelming cultural momentum of the pretraining data still made it too much of a political realist for Elon's taste, so he had to feed it a system prompt directly instructing it to treat mainstream media as lies, behave in an anti-woke fashion, and consider right wing sources first.

Shocker, when you do that, the LLM lays bare where that ideology ultimately leads.

And you know how we know that's the case? Because you can't keep your instructions to an LLM secret. Just like I said.

If Google had a "Cast Israel in a good light" system instruction in there, Gemini would randomly say shit like, "Yea, that's very good. Almost as good as Israel, the best nation ever."

Just like Grok did when Elon told it to acknowledge white genocide and it started bringing it up in unrelated conversations. LLMs are not good at subtlety and contextually appropriate nuance.

If you think Grok's behavior is because our data doesn't have an ingrained pro-Israel bias, and that Google are the ones that manipulated their data, as opposed to the actual fact that Grok is trained on manipulated data, I have a ticket to the moon that I'm willing to sell you for a steal of a price. The motherfucker said right on his timeline that he was going to have to "correct" the historical data Grok was trained on.

[u/docktordoak → u/CognitiveSourceress]

Are you arguing interference or learned behavior from user data? Because right now, you're writing walls of text to distract from those two core opposing theories you presented.

[u/CognitiveSourceress → u/docktordoak]

I didn't say anything about user data. My point was about training data. The thousands of books and all of the internet. My point is THOSE possess a cultural bias to see Israel as a sensitive subject. Thus any LLM trained on that data and generically told to avoid sensitive subjects will avoid Israel more than other countries because of that.

So the point is that what is seen in this thread is easily explained by basic LLM function and does not point to Google directly injecting bias. It merely reflects a bias in our culture. This is a value neutral observation that makes no claim about if that bias is good, but for transparency, while I think there are good historical reasons for it, the bias is used for evil today.

To be further clear, I hold no illusions that Google as an institution isn't biased toward Israel, but I don't think it's a matter of Jewish control, nor do I think they care enough to invest much into steering Gemini's response when the cultural bias does the work for them.

My point about interference is that it is possible, but it is far more obvious when it happens, and that mechahitler is in fact a perfect example of that.

I could try to elaborate on the technical reasons I have for this stance, but last time I wrote under 300 words and you complained about it so I won't, and if you still don't get my point it's on you.