In plain words: They compared what language models say on hot-button topics with real poll answers from 60 US demographic groups. The gap was huge—about as wide as the Democrat-Republican split on climate change—and telling the model to act like a group didn't close it.
Abstract
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being used in open-ended contexts, where the opinions reflected by LMs in response to subjective queries can have a profound impact, both on user satisfaction, as well as shaping the views of society at large. In this work, we put forth a quantitative framework to investigate the opinions reflected by LMs -- by leveraging high-quality public opinion polls and their associated human responses. Using this framework, we create OpinionsQA, a new dataset for evaluating the alignment of LM opinions with those of 60 US demographic groups over topics ranging from abortion to automation. Across topics, we find substantial misalignment between the views reflected by current LMs and those of US demographic groups: on par with the Democrat-Republican divide on climate change. Notably, this misalignment persists even after explicitly steering the LMs towards particular demographic groups. Our analysis not only confirms prior observations about the left-leaning tendencies of some human feedback-tuned LMs, but also surfaces groups whose opinions are poorly reflected by current LMs (e.g., 65+ and widowed individuals). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tatsu-lab/opinions_qa.
Shibani Santurkar, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Cinoo Lee, Percy Liang, Tatsunori Hashimoto
arXiv:2303.17548 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG · submitted Mar 30, 2023
abstract · pdf · html
Subjectively, alignment of open source LLMs can vary wildly depending on the instruction finetune and the context prompt, and many finetuners go out of their way to remove alignment.