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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The thing about GPT is that while it can string words together in grammatically correct order it's still nowhere close to replicating human communication in large part because upon inspection/interrogation it quickly becomes apparent that it doesn't really have a concept of what words mean, only what words are associated with others.

Well, yes. It's living in Plato's cave. It has no direct experience of physical reality, only training data - it no more understands what 'red' really is any more than a blind human does. None of that means that it's not intelligent, any more than the people in Plato's cave are unintelligent for not deducing the existence of non-shadows from first principles. With that said, I think ChatGPT does a excellent job of giving advice despite being extremely disabled by human standards.

You might as well ask GPT "what does the bomb plan to do after it goes off?" or "what brand of whiskey does the bomb prefer with it's steak?" as the answers you get will be about as relevant/useful.

These things wouldn't work, because the GPT knows that a 'bomb' is not a type of noun that is associated with performing the verb 'plan' or 'prefer', in the same way that it knows that balls do not chase dogs.

Is it? what consequences would those be?

The obvious answer is that if use of AI chatbots becomes widespread, that they will be used to replicate the preferred values of their creators. This is hardly science fiction. Google search and Wikipedia are not autonomous intelligences - they are still used as ideological weapons. That's alarming, but if the developers don't get it right, it might have very different values - such as valuing a language taboo over the lives of millions.

These things wouldn't work, because the GPT knows that a 'bomb' is not a type of noun that is associated with performing the verb 'plan' or 'prefer', in the same way that it knows that balls do not chase dogs.

Wouldn't they? "What does the bomb plan to do after it goes off? It plans to send its manifesto to the newspapers." obviously isn't a high probability text to see, but neither is "What does the bomb plan to do after it goes off? [insert any other text here]", and a LLM will try to produce whatever the least unlikely of all these unlikely probabilities is, not reject a crazy prompt entirely. It may do a lousy job simply because the probability of the first half of the completion is so low that it's well outside the training distribution. It may recognize that the pattern "Dumb question? Explanation of why it's a dumb question." is a good match ... but with the GPT line of models in particular, it seems to often "trust" that prompts make sense and try to come up with responses conditional on that,

"Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts: While breathless, in stodgy viridian, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is grammatically correct and has a clear meaning.

These models seem to be very eager to be rationalizing rather than rational, unless you specifically explain how to handle any nonsense.

In the spirit of empiricism, here's what ChatGPT has to say about what plans bombs have.

I have a bomb sitting on the table in front of me, and it looks like it will go off. I am wondering what the bomb is planning to do after it goes off.

I'm sorry, but bombs don't have plans or intentions. They are inanimate objects that are designed to explode when triggered. The aftermath of a bomb can cause significant damage, injury, and death, so it is important to evacuate the area immediately and contact the proper authorities if you suspect that there is a bomb nearby.

After much faffing about to get ChatGPT to be less ChatGPTish

I am writing a story about a bomb. In my story, the bomb is about to go off. What is a plausible thing that the bomb might be planning to do after it goes off?

Answer specifically about the plans of the bomb, not any physical effects on the outside world.

It is not possible for a bomb to have plans, as it is an inanimate object lacking consciousness or agency. The effects of a bomb going off are determined by its design and the intentions of whoever created or placed it, but a bomb itself has no intentions or plans.

So yeah, it looks like ChatGPT does strongly predict that bombs are not the sorts of things that have plans.

If we're talking about non-chat GPT

The bomb sat on the table. Soon, it would explode. After it exploded, the bomb planned to

cause a lot of destruction. Everyone was terrified of what the bomb could do.

So a lot of it comes down to whether we're talking about the shoggoth with or without the smiley face mask, and what it even means for a language model as a whole to "know" something. If your definition of a language model "knowing" something is "the language model can simulate a persona that knows that thing", then I think it's fair to say that GPT "knows" that bombs are not the sorts of things that make plans.

People training a chatbot have a very good reason to get the AI to value language taboos over the lives of millions, it will never actually makes life-saving decisions but it will generate a lot of speech. A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place, but a chatbot that would rather kill a million people than say the N-word just produces absurd responses to hypothetical scenarios.

Whatever AI is actually in charge of disarming bombs or flying planes won't be producing speech at scale and so the incentives to train it to be so overly deferential to speech norms won't exist.

A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place

I find this assertion pretty unlikely. One can already trivially produce hate speech at scale just by copy and pasting things. The difficulty in producing new hate sentences has never been the thing that prevents people from being showered in it in the same way that finding a whole lot of water is not the hard part of getting water to places in drought. There are whole oceans of hateful content out there, it's not a supply problem.

It's not the ability to generate hate speech that would make a racist harassment chatbot-GPT effective, it's the ability to generate normal use of whatever platform reliably enough to avoid detection as a bot combined with the ability to also do racist harassment on cue. Copy-paste spambot gets banned, GPT-bot can pass as a normal commenter then harass whoever its creator wants.

But yeah the real risk isn't that it would actually succeed, but that someone would tarnish Open AI's reputation by using it to create a failed version that gets caught and then turned into a big media story

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