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ChatGPT, rot13, and Daniel Kahneman

I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve
some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the
bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it
to decode the rot-13 encoding of "Why did the chicken cross the
road":

[chatgpt-ro]

So the first thing to note here is that ChatGPT is not able to solve
the task, even for very small cases.

But nonetheless, I found this exchange interesting. ChatGPT's
approach to solving this brought to mind Daniel Kahneman's book
Thinking, Fast and Slow. To me, it feels like ChatGPT is attempting
to apply System 1 thinking (fast, instinctual) to a problem that
requires a System 2 approach, and ends up getting exactly the results
you'd expect from that: answers that looks vaguely sensible, but are
actually way off base.

As a human, when performing rot13 decoding, you apply System 2
thinking: working through each letter, doing calculations in your
head to find the right letter - perhaps remembering common letter
mappings as you go. But in this case, it feels like ChatGPT is
approaching the problem like a language learner put on spot: going
wordwise, hazily recognising words, and filling in the gaps from
there.

I wonder whether the distinction between the tasks ChatGPT is good
at, and those that it isn't, is whether the task is more amenable to
System 1 or System 2 thinking? When I think of things that ChatGPT
has been observed to be poor at, for example:

  * evaluating complex mathematical equations
  * writing mathematical proofs
  * solving cryptic crossword clues

all of them (generally) require some degree of System 2 thinking as a
human. On the other hand, many of the tasks it is good at are things
that humans use System 1 thinking to do:

  * translating languages (once fluent)
  * writing jokes
  * summarising text

When it makes mistakes, ChatGPT also displays the kind of
overconfidence that System 1 thinking results in.

Interestingly, ChatGPT can kind of follow along with our System 2
reasoning (e.g: where I explained that it answering plaintext with a
different number of letters from the ciphertext could not make sense,
because rot13 is a one-to-one mapping). But it seems incapable of
taking that reasoning and applying it again, even when the next
application is very similar.

                        James Williams * 2020