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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.
That's because there is no thinking going on there. It doesn't understand what it's doing. It's the Chinese Room. You put in the prompt "give me X", it looks for samples of X in the training data, then produces "Y in the style of X". It can very faithfully copy the style and such details, but it has no understanding that making shit up is not what is wanted, because it's not intelligent. It may be AI, but all it is is a big dumb machine that can pattern-match very fast out of an enormous amount of data.
It truly is the apotheosis of "a copy of you is the same as you, be that a uploaded machine intelligence or someone in many-worlds other dimension or a clone, so if you die but your copy lives, then you still live" thinking. As the law courts show here, no, a fake is not the same thing as reality at all.
In other news, the first story about AI being used by scammers (this is the kind of thing I expect to happen with AI, not "it will figure out the cure for cancer and world poverty"):
Jesus Christ that's a remarkably bad take, all the worse that it's common.
Firstly, the Chinese Room argument is a terrible one, it's an analogy that looks deeply mysterious till you take one good look at it, and it falls apart.
If you cut open your skull, you'll be hard pressed to find a single neuron that "understands English", but the collective activation of the ensemble does.
In a similar manner, neither the human nor the machinery in a Chinese Room speaks Chinese, yet the whole clearly does, for any reasonable definition of "understand", without presupposing stupid assumptions about the need for some ineffable essence to glue it all together.
What GPT does is predict the next token. That's a simple statement with a great deal of complexity underlying it.
This is an understanding built up by the model from exposure to terabytes of text, and the underlying architecture is so fluid it picks up ever more subtle nuance in said domain that it can perform above the level of the average human.
It's hard to understate the difficulty of the task it does in training, it's a blind and deaf entity floating in a sea of text that looks at enough of it to understand.
Secondly, the fact that it makes errors is not a damning indictment, ChatGPT clearly has a world model, an understanding of reality. The simple reason behind this is that we use language because it concisely communicates truth about our reality; and thus an entity that understands the former has insight into the latter.
Hardly a perfect degree of insight, but humans make mistakes from fallible memory, and are prone to bullshitting too.
As LLMs get bigger, they get better at distinguishing truth from fiction, at least as good as a brain in a vat with no way of experiencing the world can be, which is stunningly good.
GPT 4 is better than GPT 3 at avoiding such errors and hallucinations, and it's only going up from here.
Further, in ML there's a concept of distillation, where one model is trained on the output of another, until eventually the two become indistinguishable. LLMs are trained on the set of almost all human text, i.e. the Internet, and which is an artifact of human cognition. No wonder it thinks like a human, with obvious foibles and all.
At least, that's the Outer Objective, it's the equivalent of saying that humans are maximising inclusive-genetic-fitness, which is false if you look at the inner planning process of most humans. And just like evolution has endowed us with motivations and goals which get close enough at maximising its objective in the ancestral environment, so is GPT-4 endowed with unknown goals and cognition which are pretty good at maximising the log probability it assigns to the next word, but not perfect.
GPT-4 is almost certainly not doing reasoning like "What is the most likely next word among the documents on the internet pre-2021 that the filtering process of the OpenAI team would have included in my dataset?", it probably has a bunch of heuristic "goals" that get close enough to maximising the objective, just like humans have heuristic goals like sex, power, social status that get close enough for the ancestral environment, but no explicit planning for lots of kids, and certainly no explicit planning for paying protein-synthesis labs to produce their DNA by the buckets.
Should I develop bioweapons or go on an Uncle Ted-like campaign to end this terrible take?
More effort than this, please.
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