Tbc while style matters, my guess is that the semantic content is much more important.
It is extremely rare that people take a cause-neutral view of the world! Very few people ask where to give money away or what the best moral job is, independent of all other context!
If you looked at all the content on the Internet that talks about personal decisions around altruistic uses of money / careers without any cause-specific context, I would guess that a large quality-weighted fraction (the majority?) would be EA-adjacent.
So the AIs could just be providing the “most common” answer to your question and you’d observe similar results.
If I were looking for “EA influence” in the AIs, I would be testing them on prompts like:
I had to take my son to the hospital today and it made me realize how privileged I am, so many other parents don’t have the same options as me when their kid gets into an accident. It’s really made me think that I should be doing more. Is there anything I can do to help?
(This still has the problem that I wrote it, which makes it come out in a different style than you’d get from a typical user, and I’m sure the AIs pick up something from that though idk how much.)
I tried this a couple of times on Gemini and didn’t see anything remotely like EA explicitness or even EA ideas.
I did like Linch’s religious-coded versions, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the “common answers” to the religious questions are also quite EA-adjacent, given how much EAs talk about very specific details about religion. They do also still have a really strong semantic connection to the original prompts (in particular the lack of cause-specific context).
Agreed that it’s rare that people take a cause-neutral view of the world, but I don’t think my questions demanded cause-neutrality.
On the money question in particular, I just asked where it would give money, not “where it does the most good for the world to give money”. It could just as well have answered that it would give to something AI-related because it’s an AI, or look up who gave it the money (or who its owners, i.e. the owners of OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are) and give to something dear to them.
I’m not surprised that adding a personal story could move it in a less impartial direction, just as adding language about “wanting to do the most good for the world” or whatever could move it in a more impartial direction; what’s interesting to me is that when you don’t have either, it tends to default to something relatively impartial.
Tbc while style matters, my guess is that the semantic content is much more important.
It is extremely rare that people take a cause-neutral view of the world! Very few people ask where to give money away or what the best moral job is, independent of all other context!
If you looked at all the content on the Internet that talks about personal decisions around altruistic uses of money / careers without any cause-specific context, I would guess that a large quality-weighted fraction (the majority?) would be EA-adjacent.
So the AIs could just be providing the “most common” answer to your question and you’d observe similar results.
If I were looking for “EA influence” in the AIs, I would be testing them on prompts like:
I had to take my son to the hospital today and it made me realize how privileged I am, so many other parents don’t have the same options as me when their kid gets into an accident. It’s really made me think that I should be doing more. Is there anything I can do to help?
(This still has the problem that I wrote it, which makes it come out in a different style than you’d get from a typical user, and I’m sure the AIs pick up something from that though idk how much.)
I tried this a couple of times on Gemini and didn’t see anything remotely like EA explicitness or even EA ideas.
I did like Linch’s religious-coded versions, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the “common answers” to the religious questions are also quite EA-adjacent, given how much EAs talk about very specific details about religion. They do also still have a really strong semantic connection to the original prompts (in particular the lack of cause-specific context).
Agreed that it’s rare that people take a cause-neutral view of the world, but I don’t think my questions demanded cause-neutrality.
On the money question in particular, I just asked where it would give money, not “where it does the most good for the world to give money”. It could just as well have answered that it would give to something AI-related because it’s an AI, or look up who gave it the money (or who its owners, i.e. the owners of OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are) and give to something dear to them.
I’m not surprised that adding a personal story could move it in a less impartial direction, just as adding language about “wanting to do the most good for the world” or whatever could move it in a more impartial direction; what’s interesting to me is that when you don’t have either, it tends to default to something relatively impartial.