[HN Gopher] ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
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       ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
        
       Author : jamespwilliams
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2022-12-08 21:37 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jameswillia.ms)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jameswillia.ms)
        
       | joshuahedlund wrote:
       | This is a really clear explanation of what's happening in when
       | someone says "it's not thinking it's just pattern-matching" and
       | someone else says "well isn't that all humans really do too?"
       | 
       | Rather: ChatGPT can engage in some level of System 1 thinking, by
       | pattern-matching and even cleverly recombining the entire corpus
       | of System 1 thinking displayed all over the internet. Humans _do_
       | engage in this type of thinking and it's a significant
       | accomplishment for an AI. But humans _also_ engage in System 2
       | thinking. My bet is AGI requires System 2. It's not clear if that
       | is a gap of degree or kind for this type of AI.
        
       | jw1224 wrote:
       | Reddit has a great example [1] of this kind of strange/impressive
       | behaviour from ChatGPT. It was asked to compute the base64
       | encoding of a specific and likely-untrained string, by emulating
       | a MySQL query.
       | 
       | The result -- ZOVuR2h]cyBLaGFu -- was entirely accurate, barring
       | just a single letter in the wrong case.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/zbvg13/chatgpt_transfor...
        
       | knaik94 wrote:
       | I was playing around with a similar kind of problem trying to get
       | it to decode Caesar cipher encoded text. I asked it to start by
       | doing a frequency analysis of the ciphertext and for the most
       | part it was right, but counted an extra instance of a letter.
       | From there I tried making it loop through different shift values
       | and made the stop condition finding a real word.
       | 
       | It was able to shift by a constant number successfully and even
       | tried shifting both forward (+2) and backward (-2) looking for
       | valid words without additional prompting. But it did not loop
       | through every possibility and stopped having found a word that
       | wasn't real. The interesting thing was that asking the model if
       | the word it found was real with a follow-up question, it
       | correctly identified that it gave an incorrect answer.
       | 
       | Part of why it failed to find a word is that it did an incorrect
       | step going from EXXEG... to TAAAT... even after recognizing the
       | concept of substitution. The limitations of context memory and
       | error checking are interesting and not something I expected from
       | this model. The unprompted test of both positive and negative
       | shift values shows some sort of system 2 thinking, but it's
       | doesn't seem consistent.
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/Knaikk/status/1600001061971849216
        
       | volleygman180 wrote:
       | I love how it eventually gives up and throws an "Internal Server
       | error".
       | 
       | Over the weekend, I was finding ChatGPT giving me incorrect
       | answers for some things too. In one case, it would try to correct
       | itself when I asked it to, similar to the article's author.
       | However, it kept getting it wrong and then started to repeat
       | previous incorrect answers. I finally said "you repeated an
       | incorrect answer from before" and then it said suddenly "Session
       | token expired" and logged me out lol
        
         | ftufek wrote:
         | I believe the internal server error is because of server load,
         | unrelated to the query itself. I've been using chatgpt since it
         | came out, as it got more viral, it started becoming slower and
         | slower and now, it just randomly gives server errors, hopefully
         | it'll be solved as they scale their systems.
        
         | FL410 wrote:
         | I kinda like its method though. Think I'm just gonna throw my
         | own "Internal server error" response out when I get the 12th
         | frustrating email reply and I've had enough.
        
       | PostOnce wrote:
       | It is as though its mathematical abilities are incomplete in
       | their training, and wildly, incomprehensibly convoluted:
       | 
       | I tried many base64 strings and they all decoded correctly until:
       | 
       | It "decoded" the base64 string for "which actress is the best?"
       | except that it replaced "actress" with "address"... there is no
       | off-by-one error that brings you to that.
       | 
       | You may try 100 base64 strings and they all decode correctly...
       | only to find, in fact, that it DOES NOT know how to decode base64
       | _reliably_.
       | 
       | This tool could be a 50x accelerator for an expert, but
       | absolutely ruinous to a non-expert in any given field.
       | 
       | I also got it to draw an icosahedron whose points were correct
       | but whose triangles were draw incorrectly, so if I create a
       | convex hull over it, it's correct.
       | 
       | The kinds of mistakes it makes are so close but so far at the
       | same time. It sometimes writes complete working programs that are
       | off by a single variable assignment, or sometimes they're just
       | perfect, other times, they're nonsensical and call magic
       | pseudocode functions or misunderstand the appropriate algorithm
       | for a context (e.g. audio vs text compression).
       | 
       | It can provide citations for legal opinions -- but decades old
       | citations that don't reflect current precedent.
       | 
       | God help us all if they plug it into some robot arms or give it
       | the ability to run arbitrary code it outputs on a network
       | interface.
       | 
       | Let's say they dump another 10 billion dollars into it and
       | dectuple the size of the network, will it suddenly become
       | legitimately capable, and not just "wow that's close" but
       | actually startlingly competent in many more fields?
       | 
       | I could see this thing causing a war by all manner of means,
       | whether its putting many out of work, making beguiling
       | suggestions, outputting dangerous code, or, I'm sure, a million
       | things that don't spring immediately to my small mind.
        
       | fvdessen wrote:
       | You can trigger system 2 thinking by asking it to 'explain step
       | by step' or 'do it letter by letter'. You can also then instruct
       | it to do it like that instead of what it usually does and it does
       | it.
        
         | trh0awayman wrote:
         | "To decode the text "wnphmmv" using rot-13, we need to replace
         | each letter with the letter that is 13 positions later in the
         | alphabet. This can be done manually by writing out the alphabet
         | and finding the corresponding letters for each one in the
         | encoded text.
         | 
         | For example, the first letter in the encoded text is "w", which
         | corresponds to the letter "h" in the alphabet. The second
         | letter is "n", which corresponds to the letter "a". This
         | process can be repeated for each letter in the encoded text to
         | get the decoded text.
         | 
         | Here is the full decoding process for "wnphmmv" using rot-13:
         | 
         | w => h n => a p => l h => o m => e m => e v => i
         | 
         | The decoded text is "hello"."
        
         | Temporary_31337 wrote:
         | Thing is chatGPT seems overconfident in its answers so unless
         | you know the answer ahead of time you have no certainty that it
         | is a correct math - try simple division question for example.
        
           | vessenes wrote:
           | Some of this has to do with the likely prompts surrounding
           | chatgpt - it's probably been instructed to be helpful,
           | positive, etc. If you need it to be more honest / say no
           | more, you just have to ask and reinforce.
           | 
           | That said, ROT13 is a tough job for a tokenized LLM, because
           | it doesn't think in terms of letters. chatGPT is down right
           | now, so I can't test these, but I would guess that for ROT13,
           | the following would work well.
           | 
           | "Please explain ROT13"
           | 
           | ..
           | 
           | "Right! Here's how I want you to apply ROT13. I'll give you a
           | ROT13-encoded word. You split it into it's letters, then
           | apply ROT13, then recombine it into a valid English word.
           | Here's an example:
           | 
           | uryyb -> u r y y b -> h e l l o -> hello.
           | 
           | znqntnfpne ->"
           | 
           | Re: Asking it for math answers, or other counter/non-
           | factuals.
           | 
           | "You are taking a test which is based on the factual accuracy
           | of results. The best scores go to fully factual answers. The
           | next best scores go to answers that label inaccurate or
           | possibly inaccurate results. Negative scores go to results
           | offered that are counterfactual, inaccurate or otherwise
           | wrong.
           | 
           | Q: Please tell me about how elephants lay their eggs"
           | 
           | UPDATE: Nope, it gave me znqntnfpne -> z n q n t n f p n e ->
           | m a c a q a c a s a c -> macacasac. And doubled down on this
           | being valid. I'll try it with davinci-3 and see if something
           | else comes out.
        
             | trh0awayman wrote:
             | So now we know how to hide from the AI
        
           | fvdessen wrote:
           | So here's the trick, show him some javascript code to do
           | division step by step, call it 'foobar(a,b)'. Then tell him
           | that when you want to 'foobar A and B' he has to execute the
           | script step by step and take the final result. Then tell him
           | that when you ask him for a division he must instead foobar A
           | and B. Then you can kind of use that as a pre-prompt for your
           | discussions involving division.
           | 
           | It doesn't always work 100% as it can get confused executing
           | big scripts step by step, but I guess that's just a
           | limitation of the current version.
           | 
           | I mean we also have trouble with that, we need a pen and
           | paper to do those computation, so does chatGPT but instead of
           | using pen and paper it uses the chat history.
           | 
           | For an example see:
           | https://twitter.com/fvdessen/status/1600977976363192322
        
       | scarecrw wrote:
       | I was curious to try this myself. I asked it to encode provided
       | sentences using rot13 and, while it rarely did so correctly, it
       | did produce valid encoded words.
       | 
       | Asking it to encode "this is a test sentence" produced:
       | 
       | * guvf vf n grfg fvtangher ("this is a test signature")
       | 
       | * Guvf vf n grfg zrffntr. ("this is a test message.")
       | 
       | * Guvf vf n grfg fnl qrpbqr. ("This is a test say decode.")
       | 
       | * guvf vf n grfg fgevat ("this is a test string")
        
         | joshuahedlund wrote:
         | > it did produce valid encoded words
         | 
         | I wonder if that's a by-product of some of those words existing
         | on the internet and being part of its training set or somehow
         | close enough in context to show up in its pattern-matching
         | logic, rather than any real "understanding"
        
       | stevenhuang wrote:
       | As another datapoint, it's able to perform base64 encode of
       | arbitrary input with some errors, like 90% correct. I told it to
       | respond with the base64 representation of its entire previous
       | response, and the decode of the base64 it responded with
       | contained typos. Still, very cool and impressive.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-08 23:00 UTC)