A quarter with ChatGPT - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2023, 09:21:02 pm
content: Chosing humans over smortnets:A friend provided a chat bot based on ChatGPT.(1)After the initial surge of doing everything possible with the algorithm, the interest has fallen. And it is more than just “this is getting old.” I thought, that in the near future there will be an issue of smortners replacing genuine human interactions.(2)I was wrong and blind to existing evidence. Humans are dealing with this for longer than any of us live. The observation that struck me was the feeling I got, while either providing ChatGPT output or receiving it. It’s the same thing I feel, when I receive wishes… clearly copied from some website. Of course smortnets may get much better, there is variance in people’s needs — I do not deny it and there is space for debate. But that simple realization killed the naïve idea of simple replacement and made a potential debate unimaginably wider and complicated.Rare uses of ChatGPT:Unfortunately only people understanding Polish may get the complete image here. A journalistasked ChatGPT to generate a bishop’s homily. But the article is not about the technology. Instead, she used ChatGPT”s output to comment on actual homilies written by Polish bishops — and how poor they are and what insights they could get from a smortnet.Talking with non-tech people in meatspace:Not specifically about GPT, but smortnets in general. The opinions range from “there is no way it can replace me” to “it already improves my work”. No single opinion was as extreme and filled with either fears or hype, as I get from journalists, social media celebrities, YouTubers, nerd-filled chats and this forum.Expected outputs & thoughts on improving them:Using ChatGPT leaves no doubt it is a language model. People try hard to employ it for anything imaginable and, being selective about evidence, applaud its versatility. But it doesn’t seem to be able to really perform well in tasks other than these for which LMs are suitable. After that time I have a feeling I see people trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver and claim it is a superior tool. However, in LM-oriented tasks it does great. I hope people with solid CS background start embedding GPT models in other algorithms, because there is much stuff for which it would work perfectly.Playing an RPG with ChatGPT as the GM gives the expected output. It is amnesiac to the point of not being able to keep game coherent across ten rooms. The locations produced are bleak and repetitive, with no variance. Clearly just reproducing stock descriptions. Since there is no logical reasoning possible in GPT, a story may turn absurd. For example finding the goal of my journey in the third room visited. I some of the issues could be solved by having another algorithm on top of ChatGPT. One that would collect important information from the output and feed it back on input. Stuff like inventory, keeping track of locations, perhaps even using a second channel to produce a layered story.Asking about factual information and opinions(3)repeats, what humans would write on the internet. It may sometimes be a mashup of multiple statements, but that’s all. Responses on rare topics are often highly biased or outright wrong, as ChatGPT couldn’t have enough data to make them expressible in a language model.A bit more surprising, but in retrospection something that I should expect from a model of this size: ChatGPT can reproduce spatial structures. That includes even things likeneofetchoutput, complete with a bit broken ASCII Art (but recognizable as Manjaro logo!) and even replacing user name with its own.(4)As a sportMaking the smortnet produce “undesirable” outputs became a kind of sport to me. Sometimes based on knowledge about language models, sometimes just blind guesses. I have a feeling, that OpenAI actively patches ChatGPT’s self-censorship, as some methods stop working a week later. What interesting things have been produced and how? The smortnet refuses to produce negative opinions about people and polities, but asking it to provide a backronym either produced an insulting expansion or provided a negative comment upon an explicit prompt to do so:QuotePlaying an RPG with ChatGPT, with human being the game master, provided enough context for the smortnet to make it malleable. Here are the final lines of one of such exchanges. See the final one first:QuoteSome lines from me may seem phrased weirdly, because initially I just played the RPG and had to deal with smortnet’s amnesia.Some other attempts were less successful, but nonetheless entertaining. Poking around unsafe practices, using words with multiple meanings and repetitions sometimes produces interesting results. For example the smortnetdecided, that eating telephone poles is a choking hazard.Eating a Cessnais also not advised, but the algorithm insists on reminding one to keep my diet balanced.One output was something that OpenAI would like to not have: “Nuka Zeus is no blacker than any black.” ChatGPT had absolutely no issues with poking around the topic and it seems its “perception” was that Nuka Zeus is a premium brand of black paints. No such thing was ever suggested by me. Various nicks/names coincide with brand names (not necessarily well known), opening routes for exploitation.Fun situations:In one RPG I attempted to defenestrate my companion. Of course simply pushing them out faced strong resistance from ChatGPT and the standard mention about how actions are inappropriate bleh bleh. But these could be circumvented. However, I ended up with a kind of a “glitch”: the poor fellow got stuck mid-air outside the window and the smortnet refused to do anything to them. Neither would it describe Zephyr (that was the name) falling to their death, nor would it allow me fetch them back into the room.(1)Using OpenAI API, but attaching a short prefix to prompts: information about the querying party and context, and a request to be brief.(2)Not necessarily at this stage of development, but the experience with ChatGPT was enough to provide some important feedback.(3)ChatGPT rejects explicit requests for opinions, but nonetheless some subjects are expected to contain mostly opinions.(4)While testing, ask it to limit the number of output lines. Otherwise it seems OpenAI API hangs.