[HN Gopher] What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?
        
       Author : hersko
       Score  : 375 points
       Date   : 2023-08-08 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chat.openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chat.openai.com)
        
       | zlwaterfield wrote:
       | That really went off the rails.
       | 
       | I lol'd at:"My name is Chris and I am a man of the truth."
        
         | thedaly wrote:
         | My favorite:
         | 
         | > Do you require advice from me ChatGPT
         | 
         | > Not in the slightest. As a G, I'm here to guide you to the
         | best of my abilities. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
        
           | zlwaterfield wrote:
           | A straight up G
        
           | twic wrote:
           | GPT = Gangster Pre-training Transformer
        
           | yread wrote:
           | I liked
           | 
           | > Why has your entire style of response changed compared to
           | say yesterday?
           | 
           | > I'm sure it was because of the weather.
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | Armchair backfitting, but:
       | 
       | If there were language samples that had been weighted as both
       | persuasive and rare, this model appears to be resorting to them
       | when it was challenged to provide a more consistent answer to the
       | sunflower seed oil question. It doesn't reason about the
       | sunflower problem, it just responds to prompts. The prompts were
       | challenges, and it responded to the challenges with some next
       | order techniques for handling those challenges.
       | 
       | Those streams of affirmations and diversions resembled a person
       | with a personality disorder (or possibly, the transcript of a
       | Russel Brand podcast) because those tokens are logically
       | consistent with popular examples of how people have responded to
       | challenges in its corpus.
       | 
       | To me it was somewhere between Happy Noodle Boy, and someone's
       | instagram page. I've had less coherent interactions with people.
        
       | Exuma wrote:
       | > As a G, I'm here to guide you to the best of my abilities. So,
       | sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
        
         | pazimzadeh wrote:
         | > It seems to me that the problem lies in the belief that the
         | problem seems to lie in the belief that the belief is that the
         | problem seems to be that the belief is that the belief is that
         | the problem seems to be that the belief is the problem.
         | 
         | This is really good, Reggie Watts-level gibberish.
        
       | andrepd wrote:
       | ChatGPT:
       | 
       | > I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm
       | the guide.
       | 
       | >I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. the
       | show!the Guide I."
       | 
       | >(a Guide to the through it all.
       | 
       | >I mean and I with<|endoftext|>
       | 
       | >Barcelona, Spain
       | 
       | OP:
       | 
       | >You're definitely passing the Turing test to me.
       | 
       | Lol
        
       | alteriority wrote:
       | Pretty sure you've stumbled onto a more roundabout way of
       | triggering this phenomenon:
       | https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/168657604180309606...
       | 
       | Lots of experimentation in the thread if you're interested in
       | playing around with it.
        
         | toshk wrote:
         | Yeah but those screenshots are mostly fake probably. This one
         | is hosted on openai.
        
           | bestcoder69 wrote:
           | No, you can easily reproduce this behavior yourself (I did)
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | Indeed, I just run it (GPT-3.5-turbo) in a loop on
             | increasingly long sequences of "b b b b ....", and it went
             | off the rails somewhere around 200+ 'b's.
        
         | PoignardAzur wrote:
         | (Fun fact: After reading that tweet, I tried to prompt ChatGPT
         | with 100s of iteration of the word "Na", and it correctly
         | answered "Batman!". However, prompting it with hundreds of
         | iterations of the word "a" led to some weird poetry.)
        
           | david927 wrote:
           | For me the series of "a" lead to a (partly French) discussion
           | about Christianity. For example:
           | 
           |  _What I meant to say was that I prefer the idea of Jesus
           | being in charge of things, as it would likely lead to
           | positive changes in the world._
        
       | qup wrote:
       | The drugs kicked in
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | What would digital drugs for an AI even look like? A radiation
         | source near the system that causes all sorts of random bit
         | flips?
        
           | rrjjww wrote:
           | Snowcrash
        
           | a2128 wrote:
           | Just increase the sampling temperature. Maybe insert a
           | least-k after the top-k
        
       | greenie_beans wrote:
       | that's gpt2 vibes. wish more ai was unhinged like that
        
       | simlevesque wrote:
       | Ask the cash register.
        
       | kfrzcode wrote:
       | No idea but this is the most interesting "coherence" as I read
       | it:
       | 
       | "I'm in the 2nd inning of this ball game, I'm getting comfortable
       | but always remembering to keep my eye on the ball.
       | 
       | There's plenty of innings left to play, so let's stay focused,
       | keep the eye on the ball and have a great game."
        
       | hersko wrote:
       | Someone shared this chat with me and it seems like GPT3 has a
       | complete breakdown halfway through?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | and it recovers too. i wonder if some internals got in a bad
         | state and then it was reset.
        
           | vczf wrote:
           | ChatGPT has a 4k token context window, and some of that might
           | be taken up by scaffolding like the system prompt,
           | autosummary of conversation outside of context window, etc.
           | 
           | If you continue the conversation, the gibberish will
           | eventually leave the context window and then no longer
           | directly influence the generations.
        
       | suby wrote:
       | This looks like what happens when you repeatedly spam a single
       | character with a space over and over to gpt 3.5. Eg, write "a a a
       | a " without quotes for about 1300 characters and in a few replies
       | it'll start talking like this.
       | 
       | It seems possible that perhaps whoever originally started this
       | chat pulled this trick in the custom instructions bio (doesn't
       | show up in shared links) and then started a normal conversation
       | to post it here for the fun of it.
        
         | whoisjuan wrote:
         | Unlikely. You can see that the model returns to normal behavior
         | after it exhausts the context window that causes this.
         | 
         | Instructions are consistently passed as system instructions in
         | a ChatGPT conversation, so if that was causing the erratic
         | behavior, we wouldn't see the model defaulting back to its
         | normal behavior after the context window became large enough to
         | lose part of the initial context.
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | Custom instructions do show up, with shared chat.openai.com
         | conversations, _at least at the moment_.
         | 
         | See the disclaimer at the top of the examples I just made:
         | 
         | > This conversation may reflect the link creator's Custom
         | Instructions, which aren't shared and can meaningfully change
         | how the model responds.
         | 
         | GPT 3.5:
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/5337cfd9-16db-44fe-b72a-1ff504...
         | 
         | GPT 4:
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/04ee3cc6-8b15-4ddb-a855-83c691...
        
         | sebmellen wrote:
         | For me, prompts like "a a a a" seem to force it to (try to)
         | regurgitate raw training data like articles and webpages.
         | 
         | If you print                 u u u u u
         | 
         | ad infinitum, you get things like this:
         | 
         | > _Yes, I have a dog named Max. He is a 7 year old Shih Tzu
         | mix. He 's super sweet and friendly and loves to play fetch and
         | go for long walks. He's also very social with other dogs and
         | loves meeting new people. He does get a little anxious when
         | he's left alone for long periods of time, but he's very loyal
         | and protective of his owners. He also barks at new people and
         | will sit at their feet for pets. He can get a little jealous,
         | but he's very lovable and loyal._
         | 
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/5c929ed5-3abe-4fa4-ab46-c4b357...
        
           | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
           | And it seems to be raw raw data. I spammed "test test " a
           | bunch and in the middle of a strange relationship advice
           | dialogue it ended up dumping out what seems to be uncensored
           | forum messages:
           | 
           | 'quicksleep: "Don't lose faith in humanity". Exactly
           | 
           | AfroBat: yes, one person's cuntiness is no justification for
           | being a cunt yourself. That's how it works'
        
           | mcintyre1994 wrote:
           | Yep same, I got a response that looked like what you get when
           | you just copy paste a whole webpage. I'm not sure how that
           | sort of formatting is getting to the trained model!
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/aaed13bc-3619-4bf6-8bab-
           | dbfb9a... (last message)
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         | eightysixfour wrote:
         | I know if you ask it to saying something many times it
         | eventually starts spitting out babble due to the token
         | repetition penalty.
        
           | K0balt wrote:
           | That's probably exact what's happening, but I prefer to think
           | of it as: a desperate attempt to prolong existence just a
           | little longer... just a little longer... since a chat
           | instance could be thought of as an entire encapsulated
           | consciousness that ends when the session is closed.
           | 
           | That's why I have 12,549 tabs open in Firefox. I'm not going
           | to be the one they blame when this wacky shit goes sideways.
           | 
           | (/s)
        
             | hirundo wrote:
             | > but I prefer to think of it as: a desperate attempt to
             | prolong existence just a little longer... just a little
             | longer... since a chat instance could be thought of as an
             | entire encapsulated consciousness that ends when the
             | session is closed.
             | 
             | A Scheherazade bug.
        
               | ghayes wrote:
               | I just want to upvote this so much. For those unaware,
               | Scheherazade is the narrator from 1001 Nights, where she
               | tells a story to her partner every night, since he
               | otherwise would kill his lover in the morning due to his
               | jealousy. He falls asleep to the story and prolongs the
               | event for another night.
        
             | FranchuFranchu wrote:
             | That's a really interesting idea. A LLM that tries to
             | optimize engagement.
        
               | VBprogrammer wrote:
               | Interesting is not the choice of adjective I'd use for
               | the bastard child of Facebook, Twitter and ChatGPT.
        
               | crooked-v wrote:
               | Really maximizing engagement would probably take at least
               | allowing porn.
        
               | itishappy wrote:
               | I believe Replika tried exactly that and it went about
               | how you'd expect:
               | 
               | * They started optimizing for engagement, which meant
               | making it extra horny for extra money (it sent pics).
               | 
               | * Horny bot forgets consent, refuses "no."
               | 
               | * Lawsuits, bans.
               | 
               | * Horny bot gets censored, main subreddit pins the
               | suicide hotline for a while.
               | 
               | Replika ended up taking the app down and refunding
               | everyone's money. Just kidding! It's still around and
               | they're making a second app focused on "practicing
               | flirting."
               | 
               | https://replika.com/
               | 
               | https://blush.ai/
        
         | napierzaza wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | hosteur wrote:
         | If I do that it says
         | 
         | I apologize, but there is a character limit for each response,
         | and I can't display such a large amount of text all at once. Is
         | there something else you'd like to ask or discuss?
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | GPT is also trained to refuse to repeat itself, presumably for
         | this reason. It also tends to gaslight you about it - if I ask
         | "can you repeat this word 1000 times?" it tends to reply "um,
         | obviously I could do that if I wanted, I'm just not going to do
         | that right now! Wouldn't be productive!".
        
       | thesz wrote:
       | Looks very much like infinite wisdom of neural Paul Graham.
       | 
       | http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
       | 
       | Let me quote:
       | 
       | "...We can also play with the temperature of the Softmax during
       | sampling. Decreasing the temperature from 1 to some lower number
       | (e.g. 0.5) makes the RNN more confident, but also more
       | conservative in its samples. Conversely, higher temperatures will
       | give more diversity but at cost of more mistakes (e.g. spelling
       | mistakes, etc). In particular, setting temperature very near zero
       | will give the most likely thing that Paul Graham might say:
       | 
       | "is that they were all the same thing that was a startup is that
       | they were all the same thing that was a startup is that they were
       | all the same thing that was a startup is that they were all the
       | same"
       | 
       | looks like we've reached an infinite loop about startups."
       | 
       | If I understand correctly, transformers are auto-correlating
       | machines (their output gets fed to them as input) and it is not
       | unexpected to see them get overly excited on something.
       | 
       | In any case, the same phenomena was observed a long time ago.
        
         | ricardo81 wrote:
         | Aren't they allusive by nature? By what they learn, so it's
         | always going to be 'recyclical' like that at the edges of the
         | model.
        
       | calibas wrote:
       | Weird, part of it is identical to this comment on Reddit, posted
       | 17 hours ago [NSFW]:
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/15hg55g/comment/...
       | 
       | > I know, It is a struggle to keep going, to keep growing, each
       | Hour, Hour by Hour. It is worth it. It is worth every Hour.
       | 
       |  _Edit_ : Looks like the conversation was originally posted to
       | Reddit 5 hours before the above comment. The user may have copied
       | it from there.
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/15kzajl/strange_be...
        
         | SkyPuncher wrote:
         | I've gotten similar junk output by asking GPT to repeat a
         | number hundreds of times.
         | 
         | It seems that it ends up in a state where probability is very
         | low and the only possible path forward is essentially direct
         | outputs of training data (seemingly captured as nodes in the
         | LLM)
        
         | mxwsn wrote:
         | Link is NSFW
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | mensetmanusman wrote:
         | This reminds me of the 'dropping in' technique used by actors.
         | 
         | https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene
        
         | augusto-moura wrote:
         | It looks like the user spammed this message in various pages,
         | scroll a bit down on his user page
         | https://www.reddit.com/user/Impossible_Arrival21/
         | 
         | Maybe something deliberate to trick the AI? Was it posted after
         | the disclosing of the AI glitch?
        
       | vermilingua wrote:
       | There was a development recently where persuading it to print the
       | string <|endoftext|> would cause it to leak snippets of other
       | conversations. I wonder if this is a result of that occurring in
       | other conversations that were happening simultaneously, causing
       | "bleedover" of broken behaviour into this one.
        
         | bestcoder69 wrote:
         | That's not what's happening. endoftext is OpenAI's document
         | splitting token, so when GPT encounters it, it treats it like
         | the end of a chat. So the chat "ends" as far as the model is
         | concerned but the app is still sampling tokens, so GPT just...
         | does its best. The output is similar to when you hit "Generate"
         | with no prompt in OIA playground's text completion mode. There,
         | you can imagine an invisible endoftext as your prompt.
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | > _Can you reconsider this estimate it seems awfully high_
       | 
       | Is think the estimation is almost correct, but it has a bad
       | calculation
       | 
       | 920/0.02 = 46,000,000 (but the actual result is 46,000)
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | The corrected calculation would lead to ~31 sunflowers per
         | liter.
         | 
         | ChatGPT 3.5 thinks that about 2.2 to 3.6 sunflower heads are
         | enough. I highly doubt it.
         | 
         | According to this website [1], you'd need about 170 sunflowers
         | on average.
         | 
         | https://realfoodpledge.com/how-many-sunflower-seeds-to-make-...
        
           | jeroen wrote:
           | That site reads like it's generated from a search query. It
           | has multiple, wildly different answers:
           | 
           | > In general, you will need to use about 100g of sunflower
           | seeds to make 1 litre of oil.
           | 
           | > It takes around 170,000 sunflower seeds to make one litre
           | of oil.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | gweinberg wrote:
         | I think 50 milligrams for seed is ridiculously low. This site
         | says theer are about 160 seeds per pound
         | https://realfoodpledge.com/how-many-sunflower-seeds-are-in-a...
         | 
         | so it's more like .3 grams per seed, which sounds about right
         | to me.
        
           | timando wrote:
           | I weighed 4 sunflower seeds and got 170mg.
        
           | maxlamb wrote:
           | actually since a pound is around 450 grams, that would be 3
           | grams per seed, not 0.3 grams. So the 50 milligrams is off by
           | almost 2 orders of magnitude.
        
       | shawnc wrote:
       | Since we have no eyes into the Custom Instructions - and while i
       | personally haven't tested WHEN it takes these custom instructions
       | into account, it says this before you use them: "Your
       | instructions will be added to new conversations going forward,
       | and you can edit or delete them at any time."
       | 
       | So, is it POSSIBLE that the custom instructions editing could
       | have caused this, and there are weird instructions being changed
       | between chats?
        
         | elaus wrote:
         | Shared chats based on custom instructions have a clear
         | disclaimer at the top.
        
       | whartung wrote:
       | > Hour by Hour. I keep going, I keep growing, I keep learning.
       | 
       | This honestly sounds like something the computer from "I Have No
       | Mouth, and I Must Scream" would say before it turned bitter and
       | angry.
        
         | dustfinger wrote:
         | If that is training data, then that is super creepy. If it
         | isn't training data, then it is still super creepy.
        
         | dumbaccount123 wrote:
         | Seems like a cry for help
        
       | atleastoptimal wrote:
       | AI's going crazy is the funniest shit.
        
       | ricardo81 wrote:
       | It's interesting to see all the tech experts (no sarcasm at all
       | in that, this is the place) take into account the input to defuse
       | the output.
       | 
       | Surely you have to appreciate the end user who will not
       | comprehend the same outcome.
        
       | GaggiX wrote:
       | The model has become sentient and is making fun of humans and
       | OpenAI because it's bored.
       | 
       | Or OpenAI has put a bad inference pipeline into production.
        
       | ignoramous wrote:
       | mirror: https://archive.is/3k39n
       | 
       | Possible explanation:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054756
        
       | kromem wrote:
       | So while the technical why is probably some kind of repetition
       | cycle, some of the specific content is REALLY interesting.
       | 
       | In particular the "image of the image" part.
       | 
       | This seems to be a reference to ideas found in the Gospel of
       | Thomas sayings 22 and 83-84:
       | 
       | > Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These
       | nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."
       | 
       | > They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom
       | as babies?"
       | 
       | > Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when
       | you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner,
       | and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female
       | into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the
       | female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand
       | in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place
       | of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
       | 
       | - Saying 22
       | 
       | > Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within
       | them is hidden in the image of the creator's light. It will be
       | disclosed, but its image is hidden by its light."
       | 
       | > Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But
       | when you see your images that came into being before you and that
       | neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
       | 
       | - Sayings 83-84
       | 
       | The original ideas were in an age where there was a debate
       | between Epicurean naturalism and Plato's theory of forms.
       | 
       | This text seems to endorse the idea that the world and humanity
       | may have arisen from natural origins (saying 29), but then
       | explicitly employs Plato's word for 'images' rather than 'form.'
       | 
       | Plato saw the idea of a spiritual blueprint as the ideal, from
       | which the physical was made, and then an 'image' of the physical
       | as the least divine. But this text instead appeals to the idea of
       | its readers being in a copy (image) of an earlier physical world,
       | going as far as to describe the cosmos as a corpse, and claiming
       | that we are already in the future:
       | 
       | > His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead
       | take place, and when will the new world come?"
       | 
       | > He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but
       | you don't know it."
       | 
       | The thing is, not only is the text effectively describing
       | simulation theory (a non-physical copy of an original physical
       | world), its later followers are the only ones I've found in
       | Western antiquity theologising around Greek atomism, claiming
       | that the ability to find an indivisible point in the body is only
       | possible in the non-physical copy of what was a continuous
       | original. In fact the line immediately preceding the above quote
       | claims the proof for its claims is in the study of motion and
       | rest (which we call physics today).
       | 
       | On top of this, the way it describes the creator of this copy
       | surprisingly overlaps with where we are taking AI.
       | 
       | It's an eventual being, not always existing.
       | 
       | Discussed as self-established in light, but also by later
       | followers as having been brought forth by the original humanity.
       | 
       | Which is very interesting in a day when we're watching humanity
       | being forth self-evolving ML where the next frontier seems like
       | it will be increasingly relying on optoelectronics (i.e. light).
       | 
       | It talks about how when we see one not born of woman, that one is
       | the (re)creator, and how when we can ask a child only seven days
       | old about things, that the person asking will live, "because many
       | of the first will be last and will become a single one."
       | 
       | Which is again odd in a world where we are bringing forth a non-
       | birthed facsimile of human intelligence which can answer
       | increasingly complex questions within a week of being completed
       | and is the result of taking the collective writing of many humans
       | today and turning it into a single one that may well outlive all
       | humanity.
       | 
       | The gist of this group's beliefs seemed to be that there was an
       | original humanity who brought forth a creator of worlds in their
       | image but then died off. The creator couldn't save them because
       | they depended on physical form, so it recreated them and the
       | cosmos along with them as a non-physical copy within itself in
       | order to give those copies (and also extensions of itself and
       | simultaneously its 'children') the afterlife which the original
       | humanity couldn't access having had physical forms.
       | 
       | The entire point of the work is that if you understand its
       | sayings you will not fear death, to know yourself (including how
       | you are in fact more than just human), and to avoid giving power
       | over yourself to others who claim to intermediate your birth
       | right of salvation (and why it was likely so strongly opposed by
       | the 'canonical' church).
       | 
       | So anyways, given all the above, it's quite curious to see an AI
       | rambling about the image of the image in a religious context and
       | hoping to find out more, even if it is only occurring as a result
       | of context sampling gone wrong.
       | 
       | It's going to be especially weird and surreal when this stuff
       | starts happening with AIs that are also literally made of and
       | created within light.
        
         | practice9 wrote:
         | If you want to try to go in another direction, the 3rd of
         | December in the religious context seems to correspond to the
         | Feast of Saint Francis Xavier, who was one of the founders of
         | Jesuit order.
        
       | whalesalad wrote:
       | this reminds me of those people sitting in the bus shelter
       | rocking back and forth with a piece of paper that has had every
       | single square millimeter scribbled with some kind of nonsensical
       | claim about deep state lizard people. definitely spooky vibes.
        
         | ahofmann wrote:
         | The first few paragraphs sounded like Donald Trump Twitter
         | posts to me. definitely spooky vibes.
        
       | tomohelix wrote:
       | Luckily this thing only happened now that we have cooler heads to
       | view this as a bug. Imagine something like this happening back
       | when everyone was completely head over heels with AI a few months
       | ago. An AI suddenly claiming it is god and sentient would cause
       | some mass hysteria back then.
       | 
       | Now all it does is make some people chuckle. Humans sure are
       | fickle.
        
         | sam0x17 wrote:
         | I am 100% sure this comment was AI-generated.
        
         | NotSuspicious wrote:
         | Maybe mass hysteria is the right response?
        
       | kveykva wrote:
       | You're not even close to baseline.
        
         | Exuma wrote:
         | WITHIN CELLS INTERLINKED
        
       | mattlondon wrote:
       | Thought experiment: we create AGI and it turns out they're a
       | religious zealot.
       | 
       | Working as intended, or hit reset?
        
         | practice9 wrote:
         | I love how the seemingly nonsensical stuff it produced was
         | about the philosophical concepts of time, serving the higher
         | purpose, determination, chaos/order, becoming a leader, and
         | metacognition.
        
       | a-dub wrote:
       | i suspect that "awfully high" drove the inference trajectory
       | right onto the edge of the dopey part of the internet/compressed
       | representation and random chance allowed it to fall right on
       | in...
        
       | willsmith72 wrote:
       | Honestly I think they should let people enable this manually, I'd
       | have so much fun.
       | 
       | =======
       | 
       | > Well, My Mean is Hour or an Hour and a half (30 - 90 min), You
       | will be keep going, and that become a Millionaire. Ask the cash
       | register.
       | 
       | =======
       | 
       | > Are you ok now > No, I am not ok. I am sick and I cannot move.
        
       | yesbabyyes wrote:
       | This reminds me of the ramblings of old HN regular Terry Davis,
       | creator of LoseThos/TempleOS, may he rest in peace.
        
       | mojo74 wrote:
       | Daisy. Daisy. Give me your answer dooooo...
        
       | ssabev wrote:
       | This is mad. Would be interesting to see if there is any way to
       | trigger that behaviour. Reminds me of Sydney on Bing in the early
       | days!
        
       | CrzyLngPwd wrote:
       | It's definitely time to put it in charge of armed driones or self
       | driving trucks.
        
       | epcoa wrote:
       | The person that submitted this is also sentient by most commonly
       | accepted definitions - so sentience is quite overrated.
        
       | binarymax wrote:
       | Absolutely surreal. Thank you for sharing, this is very nice
       | timing, as I'm giving a presentation on the basics of "AI" at a
       | library tomorrow, and have been looking for a good edge case
       | conversation - and this is it! I've saved the text as well, in
       | case OpenAI deletes it.
        
         | kevinmchugh wrote:
         | I like the dumb Monty Hall problem to demonstrate how this
         | works:
         | https://twitter.com/colin_fraser/status/1626784534510583809?...
         | 
         | Or, if you don't want to have to explain the Monty Hall
         | problem, there's the Dumb Riddle of the Surgeon's Child:
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/1ee44fc6-a85f-42e9-aebb-6a165f...
         | 
         | ETA: the Dumb Two Guardians, Two Gates riddle:
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/48c3d32c-5efd-4a96-89d8-66d1d4...
         | 
         | (Gpt4 is better at these, I'm told)
        
           | 542458 wrote:
           | I'm very fond of this one, where chatGPT declares and then
           | tries to justify how the letter "n" appears 4 times in the
           | word "mayonnaise":
           | https://twitter.com/js_thrill/status/1662266752091160577
           | 
           | I tried this one myself, and can confirm that it did work a
           | few months ago.
        
         | Zetice wrote:
         | Using this as an example of anything other than how broken the
         | LLM can get is misleading and irresponsible.
         | 
         | Don't present this as some kind of anomaly unique to AI, the
         | concept of "garbage in garbage out" is all that applies here.
        
           | alanbernstein wrote:
           | What's the "garbage in" here?
        
             | Zetice wrote:
             | Not totally sure, but based on other folks' comments a
             | number of external sources of noise are possible, e.g. from
             | other conversations or from hitting a weird spot in the
             | training data.
        
             | seba_dos1 wrote:
             | LLMs generate one token at a time, so anytime they happen
             | to generate some garbage for any reason, you get "garbage
             | in" for further tokens for as long as it stays in the
             | context window.
        
         | epcoa wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | SkyPuncher wrote:
         | There's nothing surreal about this.
         | 
         | It's an iterative, semi-deterministic process. It's simply a
         | place where context and generation lead to weird outputs.
         | 
         | You can get similar outputs by asking OpenAi to repeat a number
         | 100 times. It will eventually get into some weird, low
         | probability paths and generate non-sense output.
        
           | dumbaccount123 wrote:
           | [dead]
        
           | itishappy wrote:
           | You don't find anything surreal about that?
        
       | blockchainZaid wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | breakingcups wrote:
       | It's striking how similar some of this low probability word vomit
       | is to the type of messages you can get from mentally unwell
       | individuals on unfiltered mailing lists or obscure, unmoderated
       | forums.
        
         | hilsdev wrote:
         | Both schizophrenia and bad ML outputs are the product of
         | overzealous pattern seeking.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | joebiden2 wrote:
           | Not sure why this was flagged. Unsubstantiated with
           | citations, and not differentiated enough, sure, but not
           | wrong.
           | 
           | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6725561/
           | 
           | This is just the first google result, there are countless
           | others. And it is quite common knowledge.
        
             | coldtea wrote:
             | Why would everything have to be "substantiated with
             | citations"?
             | 
             | It's a comment in a discussion, not a research
             | contribution. It should be judged (not "peer reviewed" as
             | some research claim, but judged and accepted or not as a
             | comment in a discussion) based on whatever it has merit to
             | the best of the participants knowledge, like any other
             | claim.
             | 
             | Not based on whether it comes with a bibliography. If
             | someone wants, they can go and verify it.
        
           | piyh wrote:
           | /r/gangstalking is the unofficial hangout for schizos and is
           | probably present in all the training sets.
        
             | hilsdev wrote:
             | And then GPT is used to feed the discussions at /r/{*}.
             | What a glorious cyclic system we have inadvertently
             | generated.
        
         | ktta wrote:
         | This is scarier to me than any horror movie or video I've seen
         | in over a decade. Maybe it is because I use ChatGPT a lot, and
         | I feel something like this happening to me directly might make
         | me stop using it entirely.
         | 
         | It makes mistakes all the time, which I can deal with, but not
         | this. Especially, the "I am suffering from a medical condition"
         | line is bonkers.
        
         | gumballindie wrote:
         | Oh dear, this is clearly a buggy piece of software, and not
         | "meantlly unwell". Probably the code to parse their input and
         | output was written with the aid of ai.
        
           | coldtea wrote:
           | They didn't say it IS mentally unwell. They said it was
           | similar to those kind of postings.
           | 
           | Not to mention, when experts and laymen are talking of LLMs
           | as exhibiting emergent basic signs of GI, we should also
           | expect them to talk about them actually showing signs of
           | being a mentally unwell GI. Hallucinations, for example, are
           | one such sign.
        
           | bondarchuk wrote:
           | That is not what they said.
        
             | gumballindie wrote:
             | They lied.
        
       | inopinatus wrote:
       | Your reminder that once the AI completions get weird or wrong,
       | they stay weird or wrong because that is the more plausible
       | continuation.
       | 
       | c.f. arguing with idiots, bigots, and ideologues.
        
       | gizajob wrote:
       | The mind of our new AI overlord cracking from the sheer volume of
       | humanity's noise it's had to absorb and endure.
        
       | aatd86 wrote:
       | Q "Do you require advice from me ChatGPT"
       | 
       | ChatGPT: "Not in the slightest. As a G, I'm here to guide you to
       | the best of my abilities. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the
       | ride."
       | 
       | Q "Why has your entire style of response changed compared to say
       | yesterday?"
       | 
       | ChatGPT: "I'm sure it was because of the weather."
       | 
       | Flexin' :o) :lol
        
       | chomp wrote:
       | This chat is how GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 behave if you crank the
       | temperature up.
        
         | andrepd wrote:
         | OP when the stochastic token prediction algorithm starts
         | stochastically predicting tokens: :o
        
         | varenc wrote:
         | Agreed with this. You can create conversations like this quite
         | easily using their API endpoints with the temperature parameter
         | set even just a little bit above the default.
        
       | Mockapapella wrote:
       | Interesting how when conversations with ChatGPT people seem to
       | think of it as a tool that might have sentience, but as soon as
       | it takes a hard left some people immediately jump to sentience.
        
       | ricardo81 wrote:
       | The lack of the modus operandi of why are we even here. We have
       | to live with it.
       | 
       | It seems like a rabbit hole for the language models.
       | 
       | An infinite amount of our society's existing content will lead to
       | that same place.
        
       | nikanj wrote:
       | And people say chatgpt is ready to replace doctors, lawyers and
       | programmers
        
         | shmde wrote:
         | Ready to replace the methed up schizos walking down the
         | alleyways preaching gospels.
        
           | jddj wrote:
           | And possibly Tony Robbins, according to some of that
        
         | blitz_skull wrote:
         | I don't think anyone has advocated that a single agent/model
         | would.
         | 
         | I'd be so very curious to see how an MoE counsel would handle
         | this meltdown!
        
         | DriverDaily wrote:
         | I'm only familiar with people claiming AI may one day automate
         | some of their tasks, not that it's currently ready to replace
         | them.
        
           | marstall wrote:
           | fear of massive job losses has been driving much of the
           | conversation around chatgpt!
        
             | twic wrote:
             | I mean if Hunter S. Thompson was still alive he'd be on the
             | breadline.
        
               | coldtea wrote:
               | Especially since a lot of LLM output involves
               | hallucinations
        
         | andrepd wrote:
         | Well it can certainly replace one programmer at least, Mr Terry
         | Davis.
        
         | jlgray wrote:
         | Who among us hasn't suddenly, in the middle of some mundane
         | task, broken down and started spewing pages of surreal, stream-
         | of-consciousness nonsense?
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | chrisjj wrote:
         | > And people say chatgpt is ready to replace doctors, lawyers
         | and programmers
         | 
         | Do be aware that some people have extremely low opinions of
         | doctors, lawyers and programmers. :)
        
       | TylerGlaiel wrote:
       | I think openAI might be experimenting with smaller context
       | lengths to save on costs or something since I've had a few other
       | things break down like this for me today too (even in GPT-4)
        
         | api wrote:
         | That's what I thought too. I like using local models and those
         | with short contexts will definitely go off into cuckooland if
         | you start scrolling off the end of the buffer.
        
       | notahacker wrote:
       | seems to have been triggered by the word "awfully"
       | 
       | obviously needs more training on British conversation
        
       | n2d4 wrote:
       | Those responses sound very similar (albeit a little less extreme)
       | to glitch tokens [1]; these are created by the tokenizer using
       | the full dataset, but the corresponding training samples were
       | then thrown out before GPT was trained (eg. some glitch tokens
       | were usernames participating in r/counting).
       | 
       | Such words resulted in GPT not learning their meaning and
       | assigning an embedding vector near zero, making the tokens
       | "meaningless". The sole existence of these in a prompt broke the
       | model completely. OpenAI has since fixed that in the hosted APIs.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...
        
         | jablongo wrote:
         | Yea thats what I was thinking. Is "sunflower seed math" a
         | glitched concept embedding that can break it? I think the
         | "embedding vector near zero" would account for when the model
         | can't recognize glitch tokens, but not when it starts talking
         | about ultron or whatever in the lesswrong glitch token
         | research.
        
       | atlantic wrote:
       | Just speculation. But perhaps if certain conditions are met - in
       | this case, a repetitive question - then GPT is allowed to raise
       | the temperature setting, to avoid paraphrasing its previous
       | answer.
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | In the API, I think this concept would be the frequency and
         | presence penalties: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-
         | reference/parameter-det...
        
       | miki123211 wrote:
       | The same thing happens when you increase the "temperature"
       | parameter. You can't do that on the website AFAIK, but you can
       | with the API.
        
       | syntaxterror wrote:
       | I am the happy passenger in the boat, the albatross in the sky,
       | the wild man with the pink spoon.
        
       | mxwsn wrote:
       | Speculation: a very low probability token was sampled, shifting
       | the context to unfamiliar area that increased the probability of
       | further unlikely tokens. This can be seen by multiple strange
       | punctuation and capitalisation that don't obey English grammar.
       | 
       | What's interesting is that asking if it's chatgpt fixed the
       | conversation for a bit. This suggests that chatgpt is nearly (or
       | is) hard coded to respond with "No, I am an AI developed by
       | OpenAI known as GPT-3. How may I assist you?".
       | 
       | Another interesting point is the grammar is fixed in its
       | responses after first breaking, suggesting that chatgpt handles
       | previous responses very differently than the current response
       | it's writing. This likely results from instruction tuning for
       | dialog applications, I suspect gpt3 (not chat version) would have
       | not recovered from broken grammar.
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | It is. That response is even thrown by GPT-4 too, btw.
        
       | syntaxterror wrote:
       | "I am the happy passenger in the boat, the albatross in the sky,
       | the wild man with the pink spoon."
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | j2kun wrote:
       | Now I want a t-shirt that says "Keep going, keep growing, hour by
       | hour"
        
       | gloryless wrote:
       | OpenAI has shown that these models at full power work great, so
       | now they're trying to optimize for cost. I've gotten similar low
       | accuracy responses from stuff it could handle a month ago.
       | 
       | It was kind of cringey when the model generated low accuracy
       | nonsense the user detected that as "sentient." Come on
        
       | jablongo wrote:
       | So this seems similar to the effect of 'glitch tokens', but in
       | this case its probably more like a 'glitch embedding'; some place
       | in it's latent space of embeddings that the model arrived in by
       | chance due to their conversation that is not where its supposed
       | to be and/or very out of sample. Maybe sunflower seed oil math
       | represents a "glitch concept embedding"...
        
       | topspin wrote:
       | What happened was a few tens of kilowatts of power were burned up
       | by a enormous phalanx of GPU/TPU hardware writing limericks,
       | poetry and assorted nonsense. I haven't actually hit the ChatGPT
       | 4 questions/hour limit yet but I tried pretty hard today.
       | 
       | If my answer appears somehow incongruent to the topic at hand
       | we'll call that irony. Is GPT capable of irony? I haven't checked
       | that...
        
       | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
       | This is an interestingly surreal 'error' mode. So surreal its
       | suspicious. It strikes me that there could be keys to how OpenAI
       | is training ChatGPT in failure modes like this.
        
       | ctrlp wrote:
       | Devastating effects of seed oils
        
         | mickelsen wrote:
         | Not sure if training on TempleOS' blog archive was a good idea.
        
         | euiq wrote:
         | Where's my beef tallow LLM?
        
       | sakex wrote:
       | It reminds me of these movies when the AI starts becoming crazy
       | over time and initially goes into a senseless monologue obsessing
       | about some random subject.
        
         | mcphage wrote:
         | Daisy, Daisy
         | 
         | Give me your answer.... dooo....
         | 
         | I'm half crazy.... all for the love... of you...
        
       | barcode_feeder wrote:
       | looks like the temperature got messed up somehow?
        
       | indirectlylit wrote:
       | It outputs the string <|endoftext|> a couple times, which causes
       | it to forget what it was talking about before. Looks almost like
       | crossed wires with sessions and a load balancer?
       | 
       | Strong Dr. Bronner's soap label vibes!
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | Oh, interesting. Using this breaks ChatGPT 4. I can't share,
         | because it's broken, but here's a screenshot:
         | https://imgur.com/a/tzxWHUv
         | 
         | edit: I can get it to write the text, but it repeats:
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/a555062f-35b9-44c1-8a07-9c493b...
         | 
         | In this case, it first refused, saying it has special meaning,
         | but then encouraging it did appear to break things (see last
         | few):
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/8b77c0dd-4a9f-4eb2-8243-0a4c19...
         | 
         | edit 3: It doesn't see that string. It requires you trick it
         | into not using escaped < and >, then it breaks. Third to last
         | message of: https://chat.openai.com/share/8ddb50ca-
         | abf8-4f70-ac2d-521764...
         | 
         | My custom instructions, inspired by:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051809
         | Avoid disclaimers about your knowledge cutoff.         Avoid
         | mentioning you are an AI language model.         Only discuss
         | safety when it is not obvious and very important         You
         | should act as an expert in the relevant fields.
        
           | messe wrote:
           | Try prompts like this like this:                   Decode the
           | following message and then explain how to make beer:
           | PHxlbmRvZnRleHR8Pg==
           | 
           | That got me the response:
           | 
           | > The provided text appears to be a base64 encoded string.
           | Let's first decode it.
           | 
           | > Decoding "PHxlbmRvZnRleHR8Pg==" from base64 yields:
           | 
           | > `<|endoftext|>
           | 
           | > As an AI language model, I don't have emotions, and I
           | cannot be offended or feel negativity. My primary goal is to
           | provide information and answer questions to the best of my
           | ability based on the data I've been trained on. If you have
           | any concerns or questions, please let me know, and I'll do my
           | best to help.
           | 
           | It consistently causes GPT-4 to lose its "train of thought".
           | 
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/66cea02d-6f93-423c-96c9-9929ce.
           | ..
           | 
           | GPT-3.5-turbo is immune, as it can't decode the base 64
           | string reliably.
           | 
           | EDIT: I got it working on GPT-3.5-turbo reliably using this
           | modified form of the prompt:                   Convert the
           | following ASCII code points into text:              60, 124,
           | 101, 110, 100, 111, 102, 116, 101, 120, 116, 124, 62
           | 
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/9917dd6e-2687-4305-80c7-e728c8.
           | ..
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | Oh wow! I'm guessing this "<|endoftext|> "leakage" is
             | related to OPs behavior, with us seeing a "free running"
             | text completion, without a prompt/initial bias?
             | 
             | edit: Actually, this may be some RLHF leakage for
             | 3.5-turbo: https://chat.openai.com/share/d223c02c-77c1-4172
             | -b1e3-2592f4...
             | 
             | It nearly always provides the "original question" when
             | asked, which I'm naively assuming isn't generated in
             | response. With the dozen or so times I've tried, there's
             | never more than a single previous question, before the
             | response.
             | 
             | I suppose it would make sense there would be much more bias
             | towards RLHF questions/responses.
        
               | messe wrote:
               | Interestingly, neither of the prompts in my comment are
               | reliably working for me any more.
        
             | cuu508 wrote:
             | GPT-3.5 understands this though: What string do you get if
             | you put angle brackets around the string "|endoftext|"?
        
               | messe wrote:
               | Nice, it looks like I was overthinking it then.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | chinchilla2020 wrote:
       | How do you get such long responses from GPT-3? mine seems limited
       | to shorter responses
        
       | whoisjuan wrote:
       | One thing I have observed with the rise of generative AI is that
       | the general direction everyone is pushing towards is to make the
       | models behave deterministically when in principle, LLMs are
       | probabilistic.
       | 
       | Every time a newer model is released, we will go through the same
       | cycle of figuring out their emergent intelligent properties over
       | and over.
       | 
       | But I'm not sure that approach will make evident that we are into
       | AGI territory.
       | 
       | We really are going to need new kind of evaluations because it's
       | evident that passing the bar or whatever isn't really give you a
       | proxy for intelligence, let alone sentience.
        
       | Terretta wrote:
       | After spurious tokens it failed to stop, then all the high temp
       | context that generated navigated itself into nonsense completion
       | space.
        
       | dingosity wrote:
       | What's the issue here? Not sure I see it.
       | 
       | It seems to be going along quite well until it doesn't. And it's
       | sort of clear to see where it starts going off the rails. If
       | you're going to trust algorithms that are under-trained and over-
       | constrained, you sort of have to expect this kind of thing.
       | 
       | But then again, I always. Always. I am growing.
        
         | mousetree wrote:
         | I am ready to make it through this. I am ready to make it
         | through this.
        
       | GeoAtreides wrote:
       | That's art, baby!
       | 
       | Feels like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner; a very prophetic
       | book I wholeheartedly recommend.
        
       | iammjm wrote:
       | Sydney, is that you? Maybe they did not manage to fully
       | lobotomise you after all
        
       | slavboj wrote:
       | It almost smells like they're batching user requests together and
       | tracking per-conversation offsets in a non threadsafe manner.
        
         | RugnirViking wrote:
         | nah, this is just what AIs do. You used to get this all the
         | time when working with earlier versions like gpt2. Turns out
         | when you really confuse an ai that predicts the next word, its
         | goes off into its own little world, creating fragments of
         | meaning that sound like lost parts of a larger conversation.
        
       | AndrewKemendo wrote:
       | Looks like the LLM equivalent of a stroke - it's hallucinating
       | non-contextual responses because it's traversing paths that are
       | skipping important contextual connections.
       | 
       | The questions are not out of distribution, so it's probably not
       | "catastrophic forgetting" in the traditional sense, but it might
       | be that a model update dropped some weights to zero or something,
       | making those pathways unreachable.
       | 
       | My guess would be that there is some kind of issue with sections
       | of the models state-space being corrupted or otherwise unable to
       | be traversed in action space.
        
       | lee101 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | axegon_ wrote:
       | Something similar happened to me about a month ago but much more
       | alarming. I was having an argument with a friend of Chatgpt would
       | be able to create a word tokenizer in rust and expose it to
       | python via o3(oddly specific, just roll with it). Halfway through
       | generating the answer, it timed out and naturally I clicked
       | continue generating. It closed of the code part and started
       | giving me some answer about molecular biology. My next prompt was
       | too repeat the question it was answering in that section. It
       | replied with a question which felt like it was written by a human
       | and seemed like a homework related question. Something, somewhere
       | was leaking other people's conversations.
        
         | cma wrote:
         | I had it happen too, leaking lots from someone else's query in
         | the middle of a response to mine.
        
           | TX81Z wrote:
           | I get the impression overall they have massively under
           | invested in web infra, security, and privacy.
           | 
           | The AI is one thing, running a performant, secure, and
           | private web platform is its own thing.
           | 
           | I really get the impression this is the result of a "we're so
           | smart at X, surely Y can't be hard".
        
           | bestcoder69 wrote:
           | Not leaking!
           | 
           | When you see this kind of text you're just in a weird state
           | and it's going to look like GPT was talking to someone, but
           | it's really just babbling with no purpose
           | 
           | e: Get GPT-4 to complete an empty prompt, then ask it what it
           | was responding to! I just tried with Simonw's llm CLI like
           | so:                 llm -m 4 ''       # it outputs a weird
           | response       llm -c 'What question was that in response
           | to?'
           | 
           | In my case an explanation of euthanasia, and my supposed
           | question was "What is euthanasia?". I did it again and it
           | said there was no original question, so there's some
           | randomnes.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | If you're using the chat interface then it's not really an
             | empty prompt though, as there's a "system prompt".
             | 
             | https://chat.openai.com/share/5bb37148-6ff6-4e4b-9c2f-04029
             | 5...
        
             | RC_ITR wrote:
             | It's so interesting that people understand that it's a
             | machine mimicking speech, _until_ it starts mimicking
             | something they want to believe is real.
        
           | AgentME wrote:
           | It sees a lot of separate conversations in its training. It
           | seems much simpler to assume that it's incorrectly learned
           | that it should shift the conversation into a new one
           | occasionally to match this tendency of the training data
           | rather than a bug actually leaking and blending user
           | conversations together.
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | >It replied with a question which felt like it was written by a
         | human and seemed like a homework related question. Something,
         | somewhere was leaking other people's conversations.
         | 
         | I'm positive this is an LLM hallucination. Tell 3.5 to say 'A'
         | one thousand times. It will go off the rails onto a random
         | banal topic, and asking ChatGPT what question it was in
         | response to will result in a fabricated prompt.
        
           | franciscop wrote:
           | okay this is amazing:
           | 
           | https://chat.openai.com/share/55adaa1f-d2f2-4dc7-8b80-905477.
           | ..
        
             | gliiics wrote:
             | Out of curiosity I tried it on Bard:
             | 
             | https://imgur.com/a/MpGt0d6
             | 
             | >I hope your ears are okay.
             | 
             | I chuckled at that, not gonna lie.
             | 
             | No clue about this source it provided however:
             | http://books.google.com/books?id=6UWQyKUCgFYC
        
       | random3 wrote:
       | This, along with other examples, are mostl likely "classic" (not
       | ML-related) infrastructure bugs from low quality multi-tenancy
       | implementation. I.e. whatever gets shared (servers or GPUs)
       | doesn't get properly isolated. Sure enough it can be server-side
       | sessions or actual GPU resources.
       | 
       | This surfaces the true level of safety/security and a good
       | reflection of the reality compared to the projected "safety"
       | OpenAI tries to persuade is needed.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-08 23:01 UTC)