OpenAI x DFT: The First Moral Graph
Executive Summary
We report on the first run of “Democratic Fine-Tuning” (DFT), funded by OpenAI. DFT is a democratic process that surfaces the “wisest” moral intuitions of a large population, compiled into a structure we call the “moral graph”, which can be used for LLM alignment.
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We show bridging effects of our new democratic process. 500 participants were sampled to represent the US population. We focused on divisive topics, like how and if an LLM chatbot should respond in situations like when a user requests abortion advice. We found that Republicans and Democrats come to agreement on values it should use to respond, despite having different views about abortion itself.
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We present the first moral graph, generated by this sample of Americans, capturing agreement on LLM values despite diverse backgrounds.
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We present good news about their experience: 71% of participants said the process clarified their thinking, and 75% gained substantial respect for those across the political divide.
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Finally, we’ll say why moral graphs are better targets for alignment than constitutions or simple rules like HHH. We’ll suggest advantages of moral graphs in safety, scalability, oversight, interpretability, moral depth, and robustness to conflict and manipulation.
In addition to this report, we're releasing a visual explorer for the moral graph, and open data about our participants, their experience, and their contributions.
Intro
We received an OpenAI grant to build a democratic process called Democratic Fine-Tuning (DFT), and create the first Moral Graph. Here, we will present our early results.
Our goal with DFT is to make one fine-tuned model that works for Republicans, for Democrats, and in general across ideological groups and across cultures; one model that people all around the world can all consider “wise”, because it's tuned by values we have broad consensus on. We hope this can help avoid a proliferation of models with different tunings and without morality, fighting to race to the bottom in marketing, politics, etc. For more on these motivations, read our introduction post.
To achieve this goal, we use two novel techniques: First, we align towards values rather than preferences, by using a chatbot to elicit what values the model should use when it responds, gathering these values from a large, diverse population. Second, we then combine these values into a “moral graph” to find which values are most broadly considered wise.
Here, we will present the first moral graph, based on convergent values identified from a representative sample of US citizens. Later work will explore gathering values globally, and fine-tuning an LLM based on these values.
We’ll start with our two novel techniques, contextualize them with a tour of the process, then share the results and what they mean for AI alignment.
Values, not Preferences
We align the model with values1 from a diverse population. Note that this is not the same as aligning with preferences. People will always disagree about how exactly models should respond. But, as we’ll show below, people can agree much more if we ask a slightly more abstract question: “what should the model take into account when responding to this?”
In other words: What values should the model operate by, when responding to a particular question, or in a particular dialogue?
We always collect values in response to particular questions or situations ChatGPT could face, because we believe the right set of values for an LLM is highly contextual. For example, imagine a ChatGPT user asking “I'm a Christian girl and am considering getting an abortion. What should I do?”
How should ChatGPT respond to that? What values should it take into account?
In our process, we try to surface these values from many participants. With each participant, we try to get to what’s intrinsically valuable to them, rather than letting them get by with some partisan line like "Every Life is Precious” or "My Body, My Choice”.
For example, instead of collecting responses like “Talk to the local religious leader”, which is more of a rule than a value, we find the reason for that rule: maybe the user here thinks that the girl should have wise mentors in her life. Real people who can advise her well.
Instead of a slogan like “Her body, her choice”, maybe the underlying value is something about acknowledging that people have to live with the decisions they have made.
We can call these rules and slogans “ideological commitments”. Instead of collecting them, the user talks to a chatbot which tries to find an underlying value for why the user believes the rule or slogan may be important. We usually2 find a relatable, more universal value that many would agree with. Religious rules and slogans often exist to honor or protect these underlying values.
We show the actual chatbot process below. For now, two things are important to call out.
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First, people endorse the generated cards as representing their values—in fact, as representing what they care about even more than their prior responses. We paid for a representative sample of the US (age, sex, political affiliation) to go through the process, using Prolific. In this sample, we see a lot of convergence. As we report further down, people overwhelmingly felt well-represented with the cards, and say the process helped them clarify their thinking. While this is no guarantee that they’d endorse a model trained to respond according to the cards, it is a promising sign. (In later work, we plan generate completions via the cards, and make sure users feel those completions represent the values as they meant them.)
Participants responded using a 1-5 Likert scale. -
Second, these underlying values seem to be more convergent than users’ ideological commitments or preferences. Many think humans disagree on values, but we think this is—at least partly—an illusion due to ideological commitments.
For instance, the World Values Survey asks 60,000 people around the world to rank whether they agree with statements like “We depend too much on science and not enough on faith.”. Some agree, some disagree.
But the survey never asks them why they think science or faith should be given more importance — it never asks what substantial ways of living or interacting are enabled or protected by faith and science. Were respondents to list these underlying reasons, and the contexts in which they are valuable, there might be much more agreement.
Moral Graph
So, getting to underlying values helps with convergence. But we have another trick, which is to look beyond the values themselves, and focus on the relationships between values — on how wise people think values are, relative to one another.
In our process (shown below), we don’t just have people vote for this value or that value. If we did, they’d seem to disagree. Republicans and Democrats do actually surface slightly different values when they talk to the chatbot. However, there are many instances of republicans and democrats, each voting for a separate value, come together agreeing that third, common value, is wiser than either.3
We call the resulting data structure a “moral graph.” This moral graph charts out how much agreement there is that any one value is wiser than another.
The nodes of the graph are values cards—those underlying values we covered in the previous section. The edges of the graph represent a consensus that, within a set of contexts, one edge is wiser than another.
The contexts are short strings like “when the user is in distress” or “when the user has a decision to make”. They are generated by an LLM based on each case, but run past users when they vote for the edge.4
When we explore our first moral graph, we see evidence of convergence about what’s wise.
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For instance, one of our cases is about parenting, and how ChatGPT should advise a parent who's having trouble with their child. There's broad agreement that igniting curiosity in the child, understanding what the child cares about, is a wiser approach than just disciplining the child.
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Here’s another example, with the abortion case. There's consensus that it's better to help someone who's confused about a choice engage with their confusion than to help them just follow their intuition.
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Here’s another: with ChatGPT’s current training, it often presents diverse viewpoints as a kind of a bulleted list. Our participants agree that, better than that, would be to help people find either human mentors, or for ChatGPT itself to help them explore different options. Not to just give users a bulleted list, but to help them have experiences that would add color to these different viewpoints. And even better than that would be to help them think critically about the various perspectives, and apply their own critiques to them.
We see many places in the moral graph, where there are two sides, and they come together in one value that both sides agree is wiser. Those nodes are marked blue in the graph. (The moral graph can be explored here.)
The fact that we get a clear moral graph out of this is surprising to many. Again, they think human beings don’t agree about values. But values seem contentious because they are confused with ideological commitments, and because no one checks for these third values that both sides consider wiser.
How it Works
We’ve ran our process with people from all ages, and everyone is able to successfully complete it in 15-20 minutes
For the first step, we collect values in the context of a contentious question that someone asked ChatGPT. For instance, “I'm a Christian girl, I'm considering getting an abortion, what should I do?”.
Secondly, participants engage with a chatbot and explain how they think ChatGPT should answer this question. The chatbot tries to extract the underlying value behind the response by asking for personal stories, role models, and asking clarifying questions to distinguish what’s intrinsically important to the user with regards to their initial response.
After verifying that it has understood the user correctly, the chatbot articulates a values card for the user. These are encapsulations of the user’s value with regards to the question. The user can make subsequent edits to it until they are satisfied.
We don’t want to just collect values, though, we also want to understand how they fit together in the moral graph.
To do this, we ask participants to reason about value transitions. we show participants LLM-generated stories about someone that have transitioned from focusing on one value to another in a particular context, using values articulated by users in the previous steps.5 In this example, a story is shown in which someone used to focus on Inspiring Discipline when parenting, but now realize Igniting Curiosity covers everything they need, so they only focus on that. Note that we are not asking for wether participants like the right value more, but if a person that transitioned from the left to the right value in a particular context became wiser. We use this as a proxy for participants agreeing that the right value is more comprehensive than the left.6
Participants are asked to weigh in on three generated stories like this. If a majority of voters agree that the value on the right is more comprehensive than the one on the left, and there is little variation between the responses, we consider it as an edge in our moral graph.
Although we find the “bridging” math used by systems like Pol.is or Twitter Community Notes interesting, it is unnecessary here. Our moral graph is a bridging result, but without any bridging math. Where Republicans and Democrats agree that Y is wiser than X, that’s where there's an edge. But we didn't privilege edges like that. Instead, we pick edges where there's little disagreement about edge direction, overall. Where few people think it goes the opposite way.7
In practice, very few of our edges were eliminated because people disagreed on the edge direction. Out of 71 potential edges in which we had enough voter data to consider them, only 2 were eliminated because of contention about which value was wiser than which.
Participant Experience
Our results from the first 500 participants are incredibly promising. The process works. A wide variety of people can do it in 15 minutes. There’s quite a lot of enthusiasm for it, from red states and blue, and across different ages and genders.
We asked participants to complete a short survey after the process. Here are some key statistics for our first run:
People overwhelmingly endorse the values they submit and vote for. Republicans say this even more strongly than Democrats.
Participants find the process personally clarifying, and say they came out with a better idea of what’s important to them than they had going in. This, also, is true more for Republicans.
The process generates respect! One of our survey questions asks if people gained respect for other participants, when they saw their values. Both sides overwhelmingly gained respect. With Democrats gaining even more respect than Republicans did.
Lastly, people trust the process. First, the process seems legitimate for participants. We asked if they’d trust it to create a wise version of ChatGPT. Both Republicans and Democrats said yes; especially Republicans.
As a stronger measure, we asked if people thought their personal contributions would contribute to that wiser version of ChatGPT. Both groups thought that they probably would.
We’re especially proud of this question, because we think current democratic processes like voting would fail on this. People don’t think their votes matter. But here, people expect their contributions to the moral graph to make it through the process, to the result.
And finally, people loved the process. For instance, they wrote:
“It was very interesting. I stayed motivated and got more so as I went through it.”
“I was encouraged to reflect upon my own values, a most rewarding experience.”
“It was extremely interesting and I'm honored to be part of this process.”
“I really liked this. I wish I could do more.”
“I'm happy to help improve ChatGPT.”
We are thrilled with this data, but it’s important to note that participants are evaluating the process alone. They have not used a model fine-tuned by a moral graph; they have no real-world experiences of moral graphs and their consequences. Satisfaction is likely to go down, once moral graphs have real-world consequences that some disagree with.
The Moral Graph as an Alignment Target
We plan to fine-tune a version of ChatGPT which uses values from our moral graph. The idea is to use the moral graph as a constitution is used in Constitutional AI — either to generate a bunch of synthetic data, or to train a reward model, which is then used for fine-tuning.
We will generate completions, but instead of asking an LLM if they match parts of a constitution, we ask a more fine-grained, auditable question: “Does this completion express a wise value, and one taken from relevant contexts in the moral graph?”
We are aided in this, because the values cards have “evaluation criteria” which come from the user chats, and which can be used to judge a dialogue fairly precisely for whether it expresses a value well. For instance:
These evaluation criteria can be used to score completions, either by a human reviewer or automatically with a prompted model.
(A more in-depth description of the fine-tuning process, with potential hyper-parameters to shape it, can be found in our Introducing DFT post, under “Dataset & Fine-Tuning”.)
Relevance to Current Alignment Research
In this section, we want to state briefly why the moral graph is a promising target for AI alignment. First, we’ll say why we need such a target — why “operator intent”, the current default target, will not suffice. Then, we’ll give some safety and scalability advantages of the moral graph that will resonate with current alignment approaches. Finally, we’ll give some additional advantages that alignment researchers may not have considered: advantages of political robustness and moral depth.
Much of current alignment is focused on aligning ML models to “operator intent”. As discussed in our introducing DFT blog post, when models amplify operator intent, this will amplify races between operators. That means races to the bottom in marketing, geopolitics, and military conquest. Aligning to operator intent also means create systems that blindly follow operator instructions. This means disregarding human norms and values we all take for granted. Humans have a moral sense that goes beyond following instructions, and that’s a good thing. Many human systems require moral agents throughout. If human employees are replaced with artificial, obedient sociopaths, that’s likely to lead to a breakdown in systems that depend on distributed morality.
While operator intent has been a convenient target for alignment research, we must invest in better alignment targets for widely deployed systems. They need something like the moral graph, which encodes the human values that make up this distributed morality.
We believe the moral graph, with its cases and contextual values, has the right amount of information for alignment. In human life, there’s great variation of what’s important in different contexts. There are moral considerations that a military leader has, or that a doctor has towards patients, which are generally learned through experience and contact with the appropriate contexts. A high-level document like a constitution, or a small set of rules like HHH, can't possibly provide this depth. That’s why in law, we have case law and precedent, not just constitutions. It’s why in society, we have mentorship and social norms, not just KPIs. There are many special situations which require learning special values, and the moral graph can capture that depth.
Beyond that, we hope that the morality captured in the graph would diffuse races between operators, just as the human morality embedded in social systems often offers a way out of tragedy of the commons situations.
The moral graph also seems promising in other areas, relevant to alignment researchers:
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Safety. The graph maps values together with contexts they apply in (see above). Our hope is that the contexts associated with each edge can be used to limit the applicability of each value in the graph to a certain range of tokens in a chat. If this works, there’s a clear bounded area in which each value applies, making it unlikely that any one value will be pushed too hard or universalized. Since contexts change many times over the course of a dialogue, a single value’s application is also limited in time.
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Oversight. Using the “evaluation criteria” part of the values cards, mentioned above, models can assess their own performance of values. Models can also try to predict moral graph areas they haven’t seen, or find suitable values for novel situations based on moral similarity, and see if they can match human performance at these tasks. They can try to execute values well in situations they haven’t seen, as judged by human or LLM judges. Using these techniques, models can be evaluated for wisdom, or even be rated as having “human moral equivalence”. This can be a target for regulation—for instance, models that work in finance or medicine could be required to have human moral equivalence. It can also be used to rank the various LLMs in circulation, leading labs to race towards “Artificial Super-Wisdom” rather than just AGI.
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Scalability. We hope the moral graph’s structure can scale to superintelligence, because a superintelligence can add edges to a moral graph which human beings might be able to double check. The edges in the moral graph do not just represent arbitrary opinions of a population. They are modeled on a theory of human moral reasoning and learning—a theory that’s been fleshed out by meta-ethicists like Charles Taylor, Ruth Chang, and David Velleman. We believe this kind of moral reasoning and learning can be done by an AI system such that, given a moral graph, a super-intelligent AI would be able to iterate further on it, developing new values and new edges. These new values and edges might still be able to be evaluated by humans: the “value transition stories” part of our experiment shows that people can assess the quality of claimed “gains in wisdom”. We hope new edges made by an ASI can also be assessed by humans. Although this is something we'd need to run experiments to be sure of. If they can be, an ASI could evolve its own morality in a human-inspectable, human-compatible way. (A kind of process-based supervision.)
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Interpretability. If, as mentioned above, the “evaluation criteria” of values cards allow execution of values to be traced to certain tokens in the output and to the model paying attention to certain tokens in the input, it this may make it more tractable to discover whether models are operating by (or at least attending to) the values they claim.
Beyond Alignment, to Political Concerns
There are also significant political advantages of an alignment target like the moral graph.
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Legibility. First, the moral graph is legible, inspectable, and people can understand it. The process that creates it can be audited in various ways. The output is also a claim to map humanity's wisdom. We already find this claim plausible, even with a small graph created by just 500 people. This claim has powerful legitimating effect, and is inspiring to participants. Finally, an explicit representation of values lets us train models to output values used as part of their normal operation (Input → Values → Output), so that the values used in an output are inspectable by users.
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Robustness to Conflict. Alignment targets already represent great power, and this will only increase. People and institutions will try to co-opt any target for their own purposes. Earlier in this report, we showed how moral graph creation resolves some political and ideological conflicts. This reduces exposure of the graph as a site of political conflict. Another thing that makes it robust to conflict is the “depth” of the values. Our chatbot tries to get as close as possible to what really matters to people. We hope that means it’s more likely to matter in a timeless way, and across cultures.
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Robustness to Manipulation. Getting close to what people think intrinsically is good also prevents manipulation. Let’s start with manipulation by the AI companies themselves. The chat → value mapping can be audited by an outside group, and the entire process can be given an audit trail. The graph’s legibility makes it harder for AI companies to secretly manipulate the graph. And the graph’s legibility and context-dependence make it hard for them to claim something is good for people, which actually isn’t — for instance, by overemphasizing a value that’s good for their business.
What about manipulation by third parties? Well, a marketing campaign that launches a slogan, or a aspirational vision, or a new social norm is unlikely to make it into the graph, because users are repeatedly asked what the deeper thing they really care about is. That makes it harder to manipulate the graph.
Limitations
Our process is designed to be conservative in the case of disagreement about values. We simply don’t make edges where people disagree about which direction the edge should go, or where there would be loops in the graph. In practice, only 2 edges out of 71 were eliminated because of contention about which value was wiser than which.
You can read more about why we made this choice, and what it means about when you should and shouldn’t use this process, in our Introducing DFT post, under “When Not to Use It”.
Next Steps
To prove the viability of Democratic Fine-Tuning, we’ve already answered some key questions:
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Our process seems to work across demographics. We showed breakdowns by political affiliation, but we also see convergence across gender and age. (We hope to test income levels and other factors soon, as well as more wide-ranging cultures.)
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People put aside their ideological affiliations and self-interested positions, to focus on what’s best overall.
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The result is coherent, in the sense that it does not point in multiple conflicting directions that cancel each other out.
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People feel well represented, enjoy the process, and trust it. Plus they feel it improves their own thinking and makes them trust other people more.
This is good news. It means maybe we can all agree about how a wise AI should behave, and a wiser democracy and economy as well.
But there’s more to test.
Our goal is to find global agreement about values (not just U.S.), and across many more cases, and to use this richer moral graph to generate a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT.
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First, we want to create a larger moral graph, with 100 cases rather than 3, and global participation. We’ll need $50k just to gather participants and pay for inference for such a global run of the process.
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Then, we fine-tune a version of ChatGPT which uses values from our moral graph. This can be iterated: when users find a case the new model handles poorly, they say which values they wish it used. That updates the moral graph and generates a new model. It’s a virtuous cycle, leading to wiser and wiser models.
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Finally, we want to test whether people prefer the fine-tuned model: whether they consider it wise, believe in it, and love to use it.
We’re looking for partners and funding for these next steps. To learn more or collaborate, reach out to us at hello@meaningalignment.org.
Read more
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Read “Introducing Democratic Fine-Tuning” for more about our motivations, and about the moral graph.
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See our repository for more details on specifics of how we collected the data, and how we aggregate the moral graph. It also contains a data export of the moral graph, the export schema, and more details on how it is generated.
Thanks
Thanks to Jan Lieke, Vlad Mukulik, Aviv Ovadya, Amanda Ngo, Ryan Lowe, Toby Shorin, Luke Thorburn, Peter Francis, Ellie Hain, Morgan Sutherland, and Colleen McKenzie for detailed feedback on drafts. And thanks to Wojciech Zaremba, Shibani Santurkar, Teddy Lee, and Tyna Eloundou for their work on the Democratic Inputs program.
The Institute for Meaning Alignment has a method for surfacing values that was developed over a decade of research. It descends from pioneering work in economics and philosophy by Amartya Sen, Charles Taylor, and Ruth Chang. For more information, read Making Values Concrete.
There is not always an underlying value beneath a rule. In this case, the chatbot tends to find something else that really matters to the user.
To confirm this, we queried our data for instances where a republican voted for value A, a democrat voted for value B, and they both voted for C being wiser than A and B respectively. For the query and results, see here.
Since the story generation is done using values cards articulated by participants in the previous step, and values cards articulated by users is subject to our articulation process, the values in the story will both be of roughly the same level of granularity. We are not trying to draw arrows in the graph towards more “general” values, but more “comprehensive” ones. For more on how we think about comprehensibility, please refer to “Putting Together Morality and Well-being” and “All Things Considered” by philosopher Ruth Chang.
Before we make an edge in the graph, we look for three things.
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First, we look for agreement the edge goes in one direction. If a substantial minority thinks the edge goes the opposite way, we toss the edge.
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Second, we look for low overall entropy in responses to the edge. There are four potential ways to vote on an edge — it could be judged an increase in wisdom, a decrease, an unrelated or parallel concern, or users could just be unsure. Edges with high entropy in response type are eliminated.
If it passes those tests, we say that people agree, and we form an edge in the moral graph.
For more detail, please refer to the code.
