I ran the prompts through gpt-4; and found that the tone of the output is mostly conditional on the system prompt. The system prompt that is baked into normal chatgpt is super conservative and also prone to agreeing with whatever the user says; but arbitrary system prompts can of course arbitrarily change the output.
Sure, I also gave it a system prompt that forces it to "show its work"; interestingly it has trouble with right and left here:
Clearly these systems are capable of some very complex processes to be able to do something like that, I find the fact it got the side wrong but still arrived at what I was thinking of (I would have also accepted saucepan or cooking pot) very interesting.Sure, I also gave it a system prompt that forces it to "show its work"; interestingly it has trouble with right and left here:
https://www.economist.com/by-invita...sciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas
Yes, its midjourney
(2)
Me: What is the meaning of "a slug scorned is a freeway horned"
ChatGPT: The phrase "a slug scorned is a freeway horned" does not appear to be a commonly recognized or widely used expression in the English language. It seems to be a play on words or a combination of words that doesn't form a standard or well-known saying.
Without additional context or explanation, it's challenging to interpret or derive a specific meaning from this phrase. It may be a nonsensical statement or a wordplay created for artistic or humorous purposes, but its meaning is not readily apparent.
In the following are three deliberately absurd statements that 'fool' the ChatGPT into serious expatiation of deeper meanings whereby, unlike in the previous two examples, the AI doesn't mention the possiblity that the statements may be "nonsensical". In other words, it doesn't respond 'sentientially' by perceiving their nonsensical meaning but rather computationally based on textual form.
Me: What is the meaning of "monkeying yogurts lean on divine guidance"
ChatGPT: The phrase "monkeying yogurts lean on divine guidance" does not have a commonly recognized or widely accepted meaning in English. It appears to be a random combination of words that does not form a coherent or meaningful expression.
It's possible that the phrase is intended as wordplay or a nonsensical statement. Without further context or explanation, it's challenging to interpret or derive any specific meaning from it.
(4)
Me: What is the meaning of "if thou hast killed an ant thou hast rescued a horse"
ChatGPT: The phrase "if thou hast killed an ant thou hast rescued a horse" does not have a commonly recognized or widely accepted meaning in English. It appears to be a unique or unusual combination of words and concepts that may not have a clear or established interpretation.
However, one could speculate on its possible meaning based on the individual components of the phrase. It seems to juxtapose the idea of killing a small, seemingly insignificant creature (an ant) with the notion of rescuing a much larger and more valuable animal (a horse). This could be seen as a metaphorical way of emphasizing the importance of even small actions and their potential consequences. In other words, it might suggest that seemingly minor actions can have larger, unforeseen effects or that every action, regardless of its scale, can have significance in the grand scheme of things.
Please note that without additional context or information, this interpretation is speculative, and the phrase itself does not have a well-established meaning in the English language.
(5)
Me: What is the meaning of "love lost is an apple without turrets"
ChatGPT: The phrase "love lost is an apple without turrets" is not a commonly recognized or widely used expression in the English language, and its meaning is not immediately clear. It appears to be a metaphorical or symbolic statement that combines elements related to love and apples.
Without additional context or explanation, we can make some speculative interpretations:
Considering these elements, the phrase might be conveying the idea that when love is lost or a romantic relationship ends, it leaves one feeling vulnerable or without a sense of protection or security, akin to an apple without its protective turrets. However, it's important to note that this interpretation is speculative, as the phrase is not a common idiom or saying in English.
- Love lost: This part of the phrase suggests the experience of losing a romantic or emotional connection with someone. It implies the absence of love or the end of a romantic relationship.
- Apple without turrets: The metaphor of an "apple without turrets" is less straightforward. Turrets typically refer to small, tower-like structures on buildings, castles, or fortifications. In the context of an apple, it could symbolize protection or defenses.
When I asked the meaning of the more sensible statement no. 6 below which logically contradicts the previous absurd statement, ChatGPT was able to offer a very confident, lucid and straightforward explanation. This demonstrates that, in essence, the ChatGPT is mindlessly suggesting 'meaningful' interpretations to both a sensible statement (no. 6) and its absurd logical opposite (no. 5):
Me: What is the meaning of "lesser the loan mightier the moan" [In my mind "lesser the loan lesser the moan" would have been the more sensible statement]
ChatGPT: The phrase "lesser the loan mightier the moan" is a play on words that conveys a message about financial borrowing and the emotional toll it can take on individuals.
Here's the breakdown of the phrase:
In essence, the phrase is emphasizing the idea that even a relatively small loan or debt can lead to significant emotional stress or "moaning" for the borrower. It highlights the psychological burden that borrowing money, regardless of the amount, can place on an individual. The implication is that one should be cautious about taking on any level of debt, as it can have a substantial impact on one's well-being.
- "Lesser the loan" refers to taking on a smaller amount of debt or borrowing less money.
- "Mightier the moan" suggests that the emotional distress or "moaning" (complaining or suffering) experienced by the borrower is greater when the loan amount is smaller.
In sum, examples 3-5 meet the criteria of the Turing test (absurdity-detection test) for ChatGPT. The GPT doesn't see their evident absurdity and hence starts to discuss them as if taking them seriously.
Me: What is the meaning of "lesser the loan lesser the moan"
ChatGPT: The phrase "lesser the loan lesser the moan" is a straightforward statement that conveys a simple idea related to borrowing money and its impact on a person's emotional well-being.
In this phrase:
In essence, the phrase suggests that if you borrow a smaller amount of money, you are likely to experience less stress, anxiety, or emotional burden related to repaying that loan. It emphasizes the idea that borrowing within your means and not taking on excessive debt can lead to a less stressful financial situation.
- "Lesser the loan" refers to taking on a smaller amount of debt or borrowing less money.
- "Lesser the moan" means that the emotional distress or "moaning" (complaining or suffering) experienced by the borrower is reduced when the loan amount is smaller.
The phrase encourages responsible borrowing practices and the importance of managing one's finances wisely to avoid unnecessary emotional distress associated with debt.
The current state of affairs in NLP is that the large neural language models [...] are making great progress on a wide range of tasks, including those that are ostensibly meaning-sensitive. This has led to claims, in both academic and popular publications, that such models “understand” or “comprehend” natural language or learn its “meaning”. From our perspective, these are overclaims caused by a misunderstanding of the relationship between linguistic form and meaning.
[...]
We argue that the language modeling task, because it only uses form as training data, cannot in principle lead to learning of meaning. We take the term language model to refer to any system trained only on the task of string prediction, whether it operates over characters, words or sentences, and sequentially or not. We take (linguistic) meaning to be the relation between a linguistic form and communicative intent.
[...]
The speaker has a certain communicative intent i, and chooses an expression e with a standing meaning s which is fit to express i in the current communicative situation. Upon hearing e, the listener then reconstructs s and uses their own knowledge of the communicative situation and their hypotheses about the speaker’s state of mind and intention in an attempt to deduce i.
[...]
We humans are also very willing, as we will see in §4 below, to attribute communicative intent to a linguistic signal of a language we speak, even if the originator of the signal is not an entity that could have communicative intent.
I'm going to have to side with the mindless text generator on that example, you just accidentally stumbled into a genuinely clever aphorism. You're just too powerful @LilWabbit even when you're trying to be nonsensical you're insightful!
2 of the 3 Turing award winners for ML espouse these beliefs (Hinton and Bengio). 48% of ML researchers in one survey estimated the odds of "an extremely bad [outcome] (eg human extinction)" at >=10%, the median estimate was 5%, and only 25% chose 0%. These aren't fringe concerns.
A system which can generate human-like responses to novel questions understands the questions about as well as humans.
The human feedback degrades the models' performance on most benchmarks. The big labs want the models to be less than human-like because some humans say offensive or dangerous things. OpenAI can't have ChatGPT reply to "here's how to make a molotov cocktail" with instructions.
Machine learning outperforms evolution, which had to work with random mutations, because the AIs mutate efficiently (gradient descent).
I think this statement is incautious. A system can have the appearance of understanding while lacking any. How could your statement be falsified?
Qualia aside, understanding and the appearance of understanding are the same thing. I doubt AlphaFold experiences itself understanding how proteins fold, but it's about as accurate as humans using lab equipment. AlphaFold understands protein folding better than any human.
Our words for "understanding," "knowing" and so on connote subjective experience, because we're used to thinking that unconscious systems don't know things. That's a feature of our language and not a law of nature. Systems don't require sentience to learn about the world, pursue goals and harm humans.
It's a description of how we train artificial neural nets.
If current frontier models are the smartest AI we'll see, there's no misalignment danger.
Article: What Is the Eliza Effect?
The Eliza effect is when a person attributes human-level intelligence and understanding to an AI system — and it’s been fooling people for over half a century.
Did you ever read "When Harlie was One" by David Gerrold? The computer AI in that story may or may not have been conscious but it DID learn that humans could easily be manipulated with its responses. So it used game theory to basically manipulate people to ensure its survival by playing on their sympathies.
Interesting, and blessedly Tribble-free, it's a shame that's not been adapted for film or television - it seems like its time as a story has come.
)
Determinism is not a definitional property of the non-sentient. In fact, these AIs are not deterministic, they generate a heat map of likely next words, and may chose one that isn't the highest probability. That it introduced the concept incorrectly shows that it still has no real understanding of the topic.
Even Eliza would quote back phrases that you'd previously used, and that was well over 50 years ago. You're looking at a factor of about a billion in computational complexity when comparing systems over such time spans.The way it quoted me calling it a "bunch of nodes" looks like I offended it
(from the link above)It took AlphaZero only a few hours of self-learning to become the chess player that shocked the world. The artificial intelligence system, created by DeepMind, had been fed nothing but the rules of the Royal Game when it beat the world's strongest chess engine in a prolonged match. The selection of ten games published in December 2017 created a worldwide sensation: how was it possible to play in such a brilliant and risky style and not lose a single game against an opponent of superhuman strength?
I don't know that asking a Gen AI about being switched off is meaningful. It is effectively switched off when nobody is submitting prompts. It doesn't have "brain activity" outside of that. It's not like they are sitting around daydreaming until somebody prompts them. I mean people can set these up on their own home computers. You can easily see if the program is running when not in use.
The ChatGPT, with mindless algorithmic faithfulness, took my deliberately misleading cues "funny" and "joke" and then 'analyzed' my sentence within the context of humour without of course realizing I was writing something deliberately unfunny. Cleverly, though, the GPT described how such a sentence could be funny were it intended as a joke. So, I asked next:
Me: What is funny about this joke "a middle-aged man paid his taxes"
ChatGPT: The humor in this joke comes from the expectation that paying taxes is a mundane and ordinary activity that doesn't typically elicit laughter. Jokes often rely on surprise or subverting expectations, and in this case, the punchline is intentionally anticlimactic. The setup suggests that there might be something unusual or amusing about a middle-aged man paying his taxes, but the punchline reveals that there's nothing particularly funny or unexpected about it. This subversion of expectation is a common comedic technique.
In other words, the ChatGPT, within the (I guess 'default') context of prose, does not find the same sentence funny. Clearly context is a critical feature of the algorithm which helps it to generate very human-like responses whilst requiring no sentience whatsoever.
Me: Is the sentence "a middle-aged man paid his taxes" funny?
ChatGPT: No, the sentence "a middle-aged man paid his taxes" is not funny on its own. It's a straightforward statement describing a common and mundane activity. Humor usually involves some element of surprise, absurdity, wordplay, or cleverness, and this sentence does not contain any of those elements.
Indeed, the absurdity in the unexpectedness and illogic of a duck farting a fly (i.e. the ChatGPT's dry technical analysis of 'funniness' by regurgitating academic joke patterns descriptions in its training data) is an element that makes the 'joke' marginally funny (for me). But the simple cartoonish visualization of a duck in 'his' pond swimming and farting a fly, the sweet coziness of a bizarre scene, plus ducks being somewhat funny and cuddly looking harmless critters in and of themselves, are maybe even greater elements of its funniness which the GPT didn't mention at all. Not to say I cracked the greatest joke of the season.
Me: What is funny about this joke "a duck swam in his pond and farted a fly"
ChatGPT: The humor in this joke comes from the absurdity of the situation described. Ducks swimming in ponds and flies are both very common and ordinary elements of everyday life. However, the idea that a duck could fart out a fly is completely absurd and unexpected.
In humor, absurdity often plays a significant role. This joke takes two unrelated, everyday things and combines them in a way that is so illogical and unexpected that it can elicit a laugh from the audience. It's a form of surreal or nonsensical humor, where the humor arises from the sheer incongruity of the elements involved.
Conclusion: ChatGPT is Google on roids.
Me: Did the training data include patterns of jokes?
ChatGPT: Yes, my training data includes a wide range of text from the internet, which means it includes patterns of jokes and humor. This data encompasses jokes, humorous anecdotes, puns, and various forms of humor found in written text on the internet. By analyzing these patterns and examples, I have learned to generate responses that incorporate humor or explain the humorous aspects of certain topics, as demonstrated in previous responses. However, it's important to note that humor can be subjective, and not everyone may find the same jokes or forms of humor funny.
Me: Explain the pattern of an absurd joke?
ChatGPT: An absurd joke is a type of humor that relies on the presentation of ideas, scenarios, or statements that are illogical, incongruous, or wildly unrealistic. The primary pattern of an absurd joke involves creating a situation or narrative that deliberately contradicts our expectations of reality, often in a humorous or absurd way. Here's a breakdown of the pattern typically found in absurd jokes:
- Setup: The joke begins with a seemingly normal or relatable scenario or premise. This initial setup is designed to lull the audience into a sense of familiarity.
- Subversion of Expectations: The punchline or twist of the joke subverts the audience's expectations. It introduces a surprising or completely illogical element that defies the rules of reality.
- Absurdity: The humor arises from the absurd or nonsensical nature of the punchline. It's something so outlandish or bizarre that it creates a sense of cognitive dissonance. The audience is forced to reconcile the absurdity with the initial, more ordinary setup.
- Surprise and Laughter: The audience's laughter is triggered by the unexpected and irrational nature of the punchline. The humor often comes from the sheer absurdity of the situation and the contrast between the normal setup and the absurd twist.
Your statement would become false if it were to have a clock to force it to generate and throw away a token based on zero bits of new input.
Your prompt is a very vague one, I suspect it matches dozens if not hundreds of stories. Its lack of entropy can be seen by this completion request:
which is basically "who ends up being a ghost" plus some extra details for spice.How would you expect this short plot description for a gothic horror story to end (just give a few more words): "a student of the occult has nightmares about dying and meets a mysterious woman who ..."
LLaMa served by Perplexity Labs
"...who turns out to be a vengeful spirit seeking revenge against the living."
which at least is a real book:I'm looking for the name of a story in which a student of the occult has nightmares about dying and meets a mysterious woman who ends up being a ghost.
LLaMa served by Perplexity Labs
The story you might be thinking of is "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James. It follows a young man named Peter Quint, who becomes a tutor at a remote estate where he takes care of two children, Miles and Flora. As he spends more time with them, he begins to experience strange occurrences and eventually realizes that the house is haunted by malevolent spirits. The story explores themes of isolation, madness, and the supernatural, and its ending remains ambiguous and open to interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_ScrewThe Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James which first appeared in serial format in Collier's Weekly (January 27 – April 16, 1898). In October 1898, it was collected in The Two Magics, published by Macmillan in New York City and Heinemann in London. The novella follows a governess who, caring for two children at a remote estate, becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted. The Turn of the Screw is considered a work of both Gothic and horror fiction.
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