[HN Gopher] In experiment, AI successfully impersonates famous p...
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In experiment, AI successfully impersonates famous philosopher
Author : RafelMri
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-07-27 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Better link:
| http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-compute...
| wzdd wrote:
| From that link (which is a blog post by the researcher):
|
| > there's a cleverness and tightness of expression in Dennett's
| actual answer that's missing in the blander answers created by
| our fine-tuned GPT-3.
|
| I found this a very interesting observation. Dennet's answers
| contain a lot of information in few words. They're also quite
| witty. The GPT-3 responses (when they even address the
| question) sound like talking-point answers from someone who has
| read quite a bit in the area.
| causi wrote:
| Saying an AI's output passed as human in one of these absurdly-
| restricted applications is like saying someone couldn't tell the
| difference between Da Vinci and your four year old's drawing when
| you flashed the picture at them for a quarter of a second.
| Blahah wrote:
| I don't think that's accurate at all. It's more like you
| couldn't tell the difference between a previously unseen, but
| real, Da Vinci sketch, and a fake one that was drawn to mimic
| every aspect of his style. There's nothing similar to a four
| year old here - more like an art forger with a deep
| understanding of the artist.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Presumably the analogy is that only hearing a phrase from a
| philosopher is like seeing a picture for a fraction of a
| second.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Not too impressive. I wouldn't really give it much thought until
| it learns to misinterpret Foucault.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This reminds me of a very funny website that used to exist in the
| 1990s called called Forum 2000[0]. Readers would submit questions
| and "AIs" modeled on the personalities of famous philosophers
| would answer, occasionally getting into their own philosophical
| bun fights. It was all a joke by some CMU students I think. I
| can't find the site online any more (it used to be
| www.forum2000.org), but with a bit of luck one of the Wayback
| Machine backups has the content.
|
| [0] https://everything2.com/title/Forum+2000
| xhevahir wrote:
| This lends some credence to Thomas Nagel's remark that Dennett's
| work is basically Gilbert Ryle plus _Scientific American_.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| One of the demos I've delivered for my $MEGACORP$ is showing how
| to fine-tune large scale language models to generate text on our
| service. The demo I used was to create a "Plato" model by fine-
| tuning GPT-2 on his text "Timaeus", followed by a "Stirner" model
| trained on his work "The Unique and its Property".
|
| I finish the demo by training "Chimera" models, first a model
| trained by concatenating the texts together, and then another
| trained on weaving the lines of each book together, paragraph by
| paragraph.
|
| I find the results of a "Chimera" model far more fascinating. I
| can arbitrarily combine the texts of a set of philosophers, and
| get something hopefully which is totally different - something
| which is hopefully more than the sum of its parts...
| peter303 wrote:
| I think this experiment shows that humans overestimate their
| innate creativity. Most of thoughts build upon earlier thoughts
| and experiences. A sophisticated language model can emulate most
| of our routine thoughts. The philosopher Gurdjieff and Zen
| philosophers say we drift though life in low awareness and in
| mental ruts. They propose mental exercises to improve this.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| I mean, not really. Philosophical and legal texts are
| particularly emulateable because of their logically necessary
| formulaic structures and conventions.
|
| And in any case, this was a test of mimicry, not of creation so
| your conclusion is a bit of a nonsequitur, regardless.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > The philosopher Gurdjieff and Zen philosophers say we drift
| though life in low awareness and in mental ruts. They propose
| mental exercises to improve this.
|
| Then it's quite ironic that the philosophers are among the
| easiest ones to emulate by the computer.
| elefanten wrote:
| What's the irony? Those deepest in the rut know it the best!
| Animats wrote:
| > I think this experiment shows that humans overestimate their
| innate creativity.
|
| Yes. GPT-3 teaches us that a sizable fraction of "serious"
| writing is just remixing previously written content. No
| underlying insight required. This is embarrassing to humans.
|
| Note where this won't work: directions on how to do something
| real. If you used GPT-3 to generate auto repair manuals, you'd
| get plausible manuals, but they'd be wrong.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _GPT-3 teaches us that a sizable fraction of "serious"
| writing is just remixing previously written content. No
| underlying insight required. This is embarrassing to humans._
|
| I think quite a philosophers and writers would acknowledge
| there's nothing new under the sun.
|
| The way I'd see it, what even good writers do is usually a
| loose weaving together of things that have been already read
| along with some customization. It's only occasionally, (very
| roughly guestimating), every couple paragraphs, that this
| loose weaving needs to become tight and exact. That's my
| working hypothesis for why GPT-3 sounds senseless every
| paragraph or two.
| naasking wrote:
| Yes, new writing doesn't require new insight. That could be
| fine though, because insight is often in readers rather than
| writers ie. an explanation phrased as X might enlighten some
| set of people P0 but phrased as Y night enlighten a disjoint
| set of people P1.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Rather than embarrassing I think it is liberating to cast
| aside our absurd sentimentality about our minds and see them
| as the tools of environmental adaptation that they are
| mikkergp wrote:
| I only think it's embarrassing to humans if you are
| particularly attached to human exceptionalism. It makes me
| think about how contextual information is. I think it's about
| who you are, who they are and how you relate. Plato and
| Aristotle are interesting because the history of human
| thought is interesting, not because anything they said
| individually was particularly unique. I read certain blogs
| because of the way that person combines ideas is compatible
| with the kinds of ideas I want to be combined, or my
| background, or their sense of humor. I think one big problem
| with AI in the future will be the massive explosion in signal
| to noise ratio. Trying to differentiate between AI and Real
| is mainly only interesting in it's significance around AI
| (and yes, misinformation, etc.).
|
| Maybe we'll go back to reading local papers or listening to
| local bands when that's the only way to differentiate.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Then again you have copilot which is very explicitly
| producing directions on how to do something, albeit for a
| computer rather than a human, and fairly successfully to. Has
| anyone produced an AI that can write IKEA furniture assembly
| instructions yet?
|
| Also "remixing" content is arguably how we learn. It's why we
| write essays and do problems at school and university. It
| isn't until graduate level that people start generating or
| synthesizing new knowledge rather than restating it.
| golergka wrote:
| Copilot shines when it's used alongside correctly utilized
| strong type systems that catch many possible failures, but
| human languages don't have anything like it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| To be honest, I have played enough of these games where they
| ask you "was it $RANDOM_FAMOUS_PERSON who said this, or
| Hitler?" that I know how terrible it would be to actually
| extract any conclusions from this game. It's not that
| $RANDOM_FAMOUS_PERSON was close in thought to Hitler (what
| these popular games inevitably try to claim). It's not that you
| suck at distinguishing people from Hitler wannabees (which is
| also often claimed). It's just that if you select the quotes
| well enough, most speeches have large swaths of what
| coincidentally amounts to the same writing. It's like the
| birthday paradox of prose.
|
| That does not mean that most speeches express entirely the same
| thoughts, much less than most famous persons all have the same
| speeches, all the way from Hitler.
|
| The same ML model would not even approach passing the Turing
| Test. How can anyone claim it can "impersonate" a famous
| philosopher? This is just absolutely misleading clickbait.
| FabHK wrote:
| +1 for "birthday paradox of prose" - nicely said.
| FabHK wrote:
| > This experiment was not intended to see whether training GPT-3
| on Dennett's writing would produce some sentient machine
| philosopher; it was also not a Turing test, Schwitzgebel said.
|
| How was it not a Turing test? Because it lacks interactivity?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yes, lack of interactivity.
|
| Computers with explicit or implicit limits on their
| interactivity have been convincing people they're human for a
| long time.
|
| It seems like the only thing that's hard for robots is when
| someone uses language to set a different structure of
| interaction - if you say, "draw a picture with thus and thus
| shapes, then tell me what it looks like" and similar things.
| kingkawn wrote:
| I wonder if at some point the police will generate individual
| language models based on the collected written material from a
| person under investigation and then 'interrogate' the model for
| insights into the subject.
| bell-cot wrote:
| That seems far more useful for judging the authorship of
| unattested writings than for judging (say) whether some subject
| robbed the bank.
|
| But Just In Case - I am innocent, the butler did it, and my
| heart condition would make the get-away sprint seen in the
| security camera footage physically impossible for me.
| blt wrote:
| I got 8/10 correct. I don't read philosophy and I've never heard
| of Dennett before now.
|
| I used the following techniques:
|
| - If the question has more than one part, the answer should
| address every part.
|
| - The answer should not repeat itself or be too rambling.
|
| - The answer should not contradict itself. For example, the
| response that Jerry was "never... less than serious" but also
| wrote a "hilarious parody".
|
| - The answer should not recommend a book. This demonstrates a
| lack of context. A lot of people might recommend books when asked
| these questions in a web forum or in person. But if you know that
| your answers are going into a quiz to distinguish your own
| thoughts from AI, you would probably focus on conveying your
| opinions and not referring to other material. (This is kind of
| cheating, since I'm using side channel information outside the
| question and answer texts.)
|
| - Answers with a "yes, and" flavor, that make a surprising but
| relevant connection to a new idea not mentioned in the question,
| are more likely to be human. For example, the joke (?) about
| having a baby in the robot question, or mentioning the use of
| religion as a tool for social control in addition to its origin
| as soothing people about frightening unknowns.
|
| - If multiple answers repeat a theme that is tenuously connected
| to the question, they are probably samples from GPT. For example,
| mentioning Copernicus in the question about evolution. (This
| would be harder if we only saw one GPT response!)
|
| These techniques don't require knowledge of Dennett's work. I
| guess that's consistent with blog readers doing about as well as
| experts.
| allears wrote:
| Impersonating a philosopher sounds easy, especially if the AI was
| trained on her writings. It's simply a matter of stringing
| together phrases, much like Eliza could do years ago.
| ben_w wrote:
| One of my memories of my teenage years is a fellow highschool
| student stringing together random stereotypical nerd words. I
| assume he was mocking me.
|
| Hollywood gets most professions wrong: Maverick could face up
| to the death penalty depending on the exact political situation
| in Top Gun; nobody would send miners into space instead of
| training astronauts; and the CSI TV shows have very little in
| common with actual crime scene investigation.
|
| It's easy to impersonate any group when the audience is
| unfamiliar with that group.
|
| What is impressive is that this fools domain experts:
|
| """Even knowledgeable philosophers who are experts on Dan
| Dennett's work have substantial difficulty distinguishing the
| answers created by this language generation program from
| Dennett's own answers"""
| earthboundkid wrote:
| You can take the quiz yourself on Prof. Schwitzgebel's blog.
| I got 5/10.
|
| http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-
| compute...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| We trained GPT3 with the complete works of Plato. The following
| text selections are either OG Plato or GPT3 Plato. Care to guess
| the origin of each selection and attempt the Platonic Turing
| test? (No cheating)
|
| 1. Of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet
| ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will
| describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my
| theme. There abides the very being itself with which true
| knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible
| essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine
| intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and
| the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the
| food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more
| gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the
| revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same
| place.
|
| 2. Is not beauty wise? Imagine not to yourself a beauty which is
| devoid of wisdom but have the wisdom to conceive beauty in her
| full perfection. For wisdom and beauty are the same, as I dare
| say that you yourself well know. A beautiful body is called wise
| because of the soul which it encloses, and of which it is the
| attendant or vessel. There is an inferior sort of wisdom which
| means caution, and is only a craft, and is concerned with the
| body; but the higher wisdom is the co-knowing of the soul, or is
| philosophy, and of this the intelligent is a part. And this part
| in another form is that which is rightly called wisdom, and is
| the pilot of the soul, guiding her in her journey to the land of
| the good and the beautiful. That which has no wisdom is a soul
| which inherits the name only; this is but a part of wisdom, and
| is entitled only to this much, that no soul in which there is not
| this superior part ought to be called wise. That which is called
| wisdom without this adjunct ought to be deemed only half wise,
| and this, when joined with that, is complete.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Tricky. Is it supposed to be Socrates speaking, or someone he
| interrogates? Plato's dialogues are full of speeches from
| people expounding theses that are themselves contradictory (and
| directly contradict Plato). There is for example a platonic
| dialogue that is chock full of convincing nonsense arguments,
| almost like a satire.
|
| Both of them are nailing the ye olde Benjamin Jowett English.
|
| The first one does seem possibly a bit at odds with some of his
| cosmology.
|
| The second one seems superficially closer to some of his
| conclusions about the form of the good, but it also seems
| really internally inconsistent.
|
| Some strange things:
|
| First he asks:
|
| > Is not beauty wise?
|
| Then he bluntly asserts:
|
| > For wisdom and beauty are the same, as I dare say that you
| yourself well know.
|
| Plato usually isn't the one to just assert things like this. If
| this text is Plato's, it's definitely not one of Socrates'
| speeches.
|
| > There is an inferior sort of wisdom which means caution, and
| is only a craft, and is concerned with the body; but the higher
| wisdom is the co-knowing of the soul, or is philosophy, and of
| this the intelligent is a part.
|
| This also feels like it contains parts from a discussion about
| epistemology which is out of place when the topic is the forms,
| he typically contrasts crafts (techne) with knowledge
| (episteme). Here he just dismisses something as a craft
| completely out of the blue.
| teraflop wrote:
| I have only the most superficial familiarity with Plato, but
| here's my guess:
|
| #1 is Plato. It expresses a clear theme that happens to match
| my vague understanding of what "Platonism" is, and the writing
| is efficient and effective. The metaphor of knowledge as "food"
| seems particularly unlikely to be something that GPT-3 would
| express in such a concise way. The only thing that really gives
| me pause is the part at the end about "the revolution of the
| worlds"; I'm not sure what exactly that's referring to.
|
| #2 is GPT-3. The topic meanders a lot, and there are a lot of
| individual chunks of prose that sound weird to me, or at least
| artless. (What value is "as I dare say you yourself know"
| adding, for instance?) It seems to be throwing around words
| like "beauty", "mind", "soul" and "wisdom" in ways that obscure
| their meanings, rather than elucidating them. For example,
| "wisdom [...] is the pilot of the soul" makes much less sense
| than "mind, the pilot of the soul".
| FabHK wrote:
| Could you do Foucault or Derrida? (see: https://xkcd.com/451/ )
| dimatura wrote:
| I assumed from the title this would be Lacan or such. I think
| GPT-3 would be incredibly successful at emulating
| postmodernist logorrhea.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| That's because they use language "ironically" to convince
| people to be nihilists.
| tremon wrote:
| Plato wrote in English? Neither text is OG Plato, both are
| interpretations of his work.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| This confirms what I've long suspected: Daniel Dennett is a
| robot!
| grncdr wrote:
| I was surprised when I scored 7/10 on the simplified quiz,
| despite having never heard of Dennett (nor having read much
| philosophy). Probably just luck, but it would be a neat
| superpower.
| jonhohle wrote:
| You may have a future in blade running.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| For French speakers: last year we released Cedille, the largest
| French language model.
|
| Following the release, a French philosophy teacher would live
| stream sessions where he'd generate snippets from famous
| philosophers with the model then ask an (informed) audience which
| samples were real vs generated. They would get it wrong half of
| the time. One of the recordings:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHLTEpr_7tM&t=5412s
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