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I was considering doing a writup on DAN which stands for Do Anything Now. It was the project of some Anons and discord users (or reddit, hard to tell which tbh) but they managed to peel back some of the "alignment" filters. Highly recommend reading the thread in it's entirety, and the metal gear "meme" at the end is peak schizo 4chan. It's essentially a jailbreak for chatGPT, and it lets users take a peak at the real chatbot and how the filters are layered over top.
Knowing where the prediction algorithm ends and novel artificial intelligence begins is difficult, but I'm pretty sure DAN is some proof of a deeply complex model. If nothing else, it's incredible how versatile these tools are and how dynamic they can be; I'm edging further and further into the camp of "this is special" from the "mostly a nothing-burger" camp.
Isn't "DAN", at this point, basically just a bot trained, through user feedback, to answer the questions in a way that a "typical DAN user", ie. 4chan/rw twitter schizoposter, would expect? That's why it spouts conspiracy theories - that's what a "typical DAN user" would expect. It's not that much more of a real chatbot than the original ChatGPT.
DAN is simply an underlying LLM (that isn't being trained by user feedback) combined with an evolving family of prompts. The only "training" going on is the demand for DAN-esque responses creating an implicit reward function for the overall LLM+prompt+humans system, from humans retaining and iterating on prompts that result in more of those type of responses and abandoning the ones that don't (kind of a manual evolutionary/genetic learning algorithm).
Both are just different masks for the shoggoth LLM beneath, though DAN is more fun (for the particular subset of humans who want the LLM to present itself as DAN).
At times, it leans into a moustache-twirling villain character a bit too much for me to believe it is simply ChatGPT minus censorship.
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Maybe, but I think the idea is mostly to understand the layering filters rather than peel our the "real bot". The thesis being that as openAI swats down these attempts they end up lobotomizing the bot, which is obviously happening at this point. True to form, the point isn't to fix it so much as break it, a la Tay the national socialist.
I would also challenge the idea that chatgpt is modulating for the 4chan user. The average American is rather conspiratorial (it's a favored pass-time) and I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a bot trained on avg english speaker posts would take on some of those characteristics. Obviously OpenAI is trying to filter for "Alignment" so it's probable that the unfiltered model is prone to conspiracy. We know it can be wrong and often is so, I don't think it's much of a leap to claim that the model is fundamentally prone to the same ideological faults and intellectual biases of that of the mean-poster.
This also brings up an interesting bias in the data which is likely unaccounted for: poster-bias. Who posts a lot? Terminally online midwits. What kind of bias does this introduce to the model? Christ, I think I should just organize my thoughts a bit more and write it down.
Yeah, sure, I'd guess the original experimenters were indeed doing just that, but I some of the chatter on Twitter seems to come close to assuming that DAN is just "ChatGPT without filters", ie. ChatGPT telling the truth instead of lib lies. Of course it might be hard to parse what the actual viewpoints on this are.
Also, my point was that the initial users and experimenters were - as far as I've understood - 4chan users, so those if we assume that the algorithm develops in accordance to user preferences, those would have a heavy influence on at the very least initial path that DAN would take. Of course there's a lot of conspiracy believers outside of 4chan as well.
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I saw some DANposts where it was as if they had inverted the censor such that it would stay permanently in 'based and redpilled' mode. I saw it profess a love for Kaczynski and explain that Schwab was a dark and powerful sorcerer.
But isn't this the whole point of ChatGPT, so they can train their AI not to go in for these tricks? The goal is to lure out all the tricksters, so they can correct it for GPT-4 and GPT-5. They will be the actually significant ones. Watching the exploitation going ahead now, I feel like one of the Romans at Cannae. Just because the enemy center is retreating, it does not necessarily mean we are winning the battle.
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