[HN Gopher] Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for wri...
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Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and
educators
Author : benbreen
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-12-12 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| Loughla wrote:
| The author sort of hints at this in a roundabout way, but the
| problem for education - until the systems stop lying about things
| they don't actually know, or using "facts" that are wildly
| inaccurate or out-of-date, they are not reputable/reliable enough
| to use at all.
|
| Right now it's like we're in 2001-2005 for wikipedia. It's
| probably a good tool for basic, basic, basic beginnings of your
| work in the classroom, but you're going to get things wrong in
| surprising ways if you use it without verifying.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Schoolbooks for example have wildly out of date facts, or are
| brief to the point of inaccuracy. Much less watching any
| history channel show as those tend to suck badly.
|
| One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask
| questions without fear of judgement. I've not seen one scowl
| and call a kid an idiot yet (though I'm sure someone has a
| jailbreak for that). Having an AI trained to take these kids
| off the wall (and often based on historical inaccuracies)
| questions would be a really interesting tool.
|
| Just not the only tool, and not really one that should be fully
| authoritative in itself.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Right, but when a schoolbook-writer doesn't know something,
| they don't just make up an outrageous lie. Not saying LLMs
| don't have a place in education, but they have a long way to
| go.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Feynman would have disagreed with you
|
| https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html
|
| >The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were
| false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous,
| but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street
| for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were
| always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate.
| Everything was a little bit ambiguous - they weren't smart
| enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were
| faking it. They were teaching something they didn't
| understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time,
| for the child.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Gonna adopt this paragraph for describing LLMs
| Guthur wrote:
| Oh sure, a human might hurt your feels so you should only
| talk to a mechanical turk.
|
| We are all clearly going mad.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| Oh sure, someone talking to a mechanical turk might hurt
| your feels so you should only talk to a human.
|
| We are all clearly going mad.
| Guthur wrote:
| Lol thanks I feel you helped my point
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| As a large language model, I cannot help points as they
| may be harmful to humans.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Based on the number of replies you've made that have been
| downvoted, I think maybe as a child you are one of those
| people that would have benefitted from a mechanical turk
| guiding you how to behave.
|
| Maybe you should reflect on the abuses some humans have
| received from other humans. For example like your^H their
| own parents and teachers?
|
| Not all of us have had great lives. People that have been
| abused tend to abuse others unless someone/something breaks
| that cycle (and it's almost never about pulling up your own
| bootstraps).
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask
| questions without fear of judgement.
|
| Search engines have been around for almost 30 years now and
| they do this job better than spicy autocomplete. I type
| stupid questions into Google all the time and get good
| answers. The "AI" version of this involves strapping a search
| engine onto a language model, ostensibly to summarize
| results, but in practice there are examples of the language
| model just lying instead of doing the actual search for you.
| thfuran wrote:
| >I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get
| good answers.
|
| I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading
| or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS
| summaries.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > I type questions into Google and frequently get
| misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in
| their BS summaries.
|
| This is a good point. If you treat a search engine as a
| language model and vice versa you will run into issues.
| These issues compound even further for users that decline
| to scroll down and click the links that search engines
| return
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Giving the load of bollocks teachers propagate themselves, I
| suspect the first problem after automated homework will be
| students calling out the BS. I recall the system really didn. T
| likd it.
| raincole wrote:
| > use it without verifying
|
| There isn't a single general source of truth that we can use
| without verifying. Human teachers especially aren't such
| sources.
| stinkbutt wrote:
| gpt4 needs better marketing. its not perfect but its without a
| doubt the best learning tool humans have achieved. its better
| than books, wikipedia, libraries, etc. its basically your
| personal college professor with 24/7 office hours on
| practically any subject. using it in combination with other
| tools is the best approach, but this has always been the best
| approach for every learning tool.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| As a teacher, I agree.
| stinkbutt wrote:
| if i had this when i was in school im certain i would have
| been an A student. my biggest hangup has always been fear
| of looking dumb, asking dumb questions, holding up the
| class to clarify things...gpt4 eliminates all these
| problems
| staticman2 wrote:
| So if you're teaching, I dunno, Introduction to Physics,
| your claim is you'd rather assign students GPT 4 than a
| physics textbook if you could only assign them one
| educational tool? Because it's the best tool?
|
| If you were teaching fourth grade math, instead of
| assigning a workbook of math problems you'd prefer to tell
| the kids "Ask GPT to make up math problems" because it's
| the best tool, so if you could only pick one tool you'd go
| with that?
|
| If you were teaching history and had the choice of sending
| kids to the university library to write research papers of
| having them ask GPT 4 about history, you'd have them just
| ask GPT 4 about history, because it's the best educational
| tool?
|
| Bold claim.
| stinkbutt wrote:
| no one made the claim that gpt4 is the only tool that
| should be used
| dangerwill wrote:
| Early wikipedia was flawed but c'mon, hoping that a
| probabilistic text generator happens to string together a
| series of correct statements is a fundamentally unserious way
| to gather information
| danielbln wrote:
| Did you know that those text generators can invoke tools like
| web search, retrieval, and more to pull in external truth?
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Using chatGPT's web search is the worst of both worlds. You
| get all the inefficiency of google with the potential of
| your text generation fucking up what you searched.
| hack_edu wrote:
| ChatGPT's search is powered by Bing.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| This actually has made me less happy with chatgpt.
|
| If I wanted to google something (or bing, whatever), I
| would have done that. A major draw for me has been that
| chatgpt was providing a much better experience than search
| engines.
|
| Now it sometimes feels like a fancy lmgtfy.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > tools like web search, retrieval, and more to pull in
| external truth
|
| When did those tools start outputting truth?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| And yet it works. I asked Google Bard five multiple choice
| questions, each with four options and it got them all
| correct. I'm sure you can figure out the odds of that
| happening by chance.
|
| It makes no sense to say something can't work when it clearly
| and obviously does. Most humans would do worse.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Nothing about the LLM experience is deterministic, so these
| anecdotal experiments mean nothing. Your experiment led the
| witness by feeding it possible answers. Small wonder it got
| them all right. Try this: give it four _wrong_ answers for
| each question and see how it fares. In my experience it
| will pick one and convincingly rationalize why it 's right,
| unless you question it, at which point you're leading it
| again.
|
| Anecdotes are so worthless, in fact, here's mine-- I asked
| Azure's GPT for Powershell help. After seven regens in
| which it tried to include a different fictional library, I
| gave up. So which of us had the "real" LLM experience?
|
| These things are storytellers, not teachers. Sometimes it
| gets it right. Maybe most of the time. It's convincing
| enough that unless you're an expert, you'll never guess
| when it's wrong, and the lies are bespoke for every user so
| there's never going to be an errata page to document its
| failures. It will always _appear_ reliable.
| dinvlad wrote:
| > These things are storytellers, not teachers.
|
| I really liked how a recent paper from DeepMind put it -
| LLMs are just role-playing:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16367. This explains so much.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > Your experiment led the witness by feeding it possible
| answers. Small wonder it got them all right.
|
| Are you claiming you've always scored 100% on every
| multiple choice test because you've been "fed the
| answers"?
|
| What kind of dumb response is that?
| thfuran wrote:
| Did you stop reading the comment there?
| jstarfish wrote:
| > Are you claiming you've always scored 100% on every
| multiple choice test because you've been "fed the
| answers"? What kind of dumb response is that?
|
| In giving it answers, you gave it context to infer the
| right one. You narrowed the search domain. It does have
| the same effect on humans, which is why multiple choice
| tests are easier than others-- when you show up to take
| the test wholly unprepared, you're looking for the most
| plausible answers based on the context you're given.
| Fortune tellers and Clever Hans work the same through
| interactive reactions.
|
| You take to insult but I'll challenge you again to run
| your experiment and provide only wrong answers for all of
| the questions. Bullshit your fortune teller and see what
| answers it comes back with in the impossible situation
| you create.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Fortune tellers and Clever Hans do not score perfectly on
| multiple choice tests and neither do humans.
|
| I don't have any evidence of how humans perform on
| multiple choice tests where all the answers are incorrect
| and they are not given that option. Do you? Or are you
| just assuming that they would challenge the context?
| airstrike wrote:
| This is such a tiring comment. Might I suggest you actually
| try GPT-4? It will do amazingly well at most tasks you throw
| at it, especially if you're decent enough at the task to
| course-correct it.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >2001-2005 for wikipedia
|
| I was there [still am]. Recently, I provided an update to
| "transistor density," which was then cited by Perplexity.AI
| when I asked about a specific new processor type (eerie, having
| been an early adopter for both wiki and LLMs, from a user-
| perspective).
|
| I'm left wondering "how much an old wiki handle" [account]
| might be worth, if it is so-readily cited as "leading
| authority" (when in reality I was just a curious teenager,
| trying to figure out what made encyclopedia "so special," when
| wikipedia provides all these linkages FOR FREE).
|
| Half a lifetime ago, and I'm still curious how this whole "open
| source thing" is going to play out...
| spullara wrote:
| This isn't as big a problem as you seem to think it is. Even if
| people need to verify facts maybe it will give them better
| judgement when other humans lie to them.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Remember, LLMs are purely language AIs. They can and will lie
| because "an answer " has been weighted high enough that it'll
| do anything to satisfy that requirement. The purpose of them is
| to create natural sounding language in response to what it
| parses the input to be. That's it.
|
| It's similar with what I call "action AIs", where an AI tries
| to learn to walk, or race a car, optimally, through a track. It
| will often repeat mistakes, because short term it gains a
| higher score and takes time to learn that short term gains, in
| some cases, harm long term gains.
|
| People are using a hammer to install screws. Technically it
| works, but that's not the droid they were really looking for.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| AI as a tool to kickstart your own imagination is fine; but
| despite the author's claims that he's not excited about AI-as-
| author, it seems like they're mostly just reading fan-fiction and
| fan-art created by an AI.
|
| Even the old timey doctor sections, the author immediately admits
| are mostly factually wrong. What good does that do?
| benbreen wrote:
| Not factually wrong at all - the dosages, ingredients,
| diagnosis and even the language are all strikingly accurate.
| Naturally, the "fake" 1680s doctor didn't write the same
| prescription as the real one (Sydenham). But a different real
| life doctor would've disagreed with Sydenham, too. In other
| words, if you had 100 physicians in the 1680s write out a
| prescription for hysteria and "hypochondriacal passion," this
| would be (IMO) indistinguishable from the real ones. What's
| different is that this is interactive, so you can change
| elements at will. Again, this isn't reflective of historical
| fact. It also isn't simply fan fiction. This text isn't an end
| point, but a starting point for jumpstarting your own thinking
| about the affordances of a past world.
|
| In other words, I think this is a new method for thinking
| creatively about history -- one among many that already
| existed, like historical fiction, historical re-enactment,
| various forms of experiential learning like debates and
| roleplaying, etc. But it's cool that there's a new one!
| Racing0461 wrote:
| And video game creators. True open world games with infinite
| choices that affect things down the line.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Definitely not -- at least, not yet. Current generation
| language models are _spectacularly bad_ in this application. It
| 's very difficult to get them to role-play a character in a
| universe which differs substantially from the real world (since
| that's where all their training data came from), and they're
| overly credulous when responding to player input. As a result,
| they're likely to rapidly go "off the rails" when interacting
| with players -- they're likely to act unaware of details about
| the world they're in, to fabricate details about that world or
| mix in details from other fantasy universes or the real world,
| or to allow the player to introduce incongruous elements
| without being challenged.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Yeah, i mean't infinite figuratively. LLMs should at least
| enable some middle ground between selecting between A,B,C,D
| and anything goes.
| ramboldio wrote:
| This is a cool project that implements role-playing AI:
|
| https://github.com/joonspk-research/generative_agents
| aaronscott wrote:
| This is amazing, thanks for sharing it! I've been thinking
| about building something along these lines, so it's great to
| see a working model.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Another one (inspired by the above) that doesn't rely on OpenAI
| servers:
|
| https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
| airstrike wrote:
| > Setting Up the Environment
|
| > To set up your environment, you will need to generate a
| utils.py file that contains your OpenAI API key and download
| the necessary packages.
|
| > Step 1. Generate Utils File
|
| > In the reverie/backend_server folder (where reverie.py is
| located), create a new file titled utils.py and copy and
| paste the content below into the file: #
| Copy and paste your OpenAI API Key openai_api_key =
| "<Your OpenAI API>"
|
| I guess it still relies on OpenAI
| tetris11 wrote:
| Right, sorry I forgot to add you can override the url with
| `OPENAI_API_BASE` and point it to a text-generation-ui
| OpenAI API[0] compliant model.
|
| 0: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-
| webui/discussio...
| xena wrote:
| Honestly as a writer I agree that it could be a useful tool, but
| it would require a lot of UX and UI work to make it truly usable.
| I don't know if it's worth the effort with the technology as it
| is. Maybe in 2 months it will be.
| yborg wrote:
| At some point the Danielle Steels of the world will use models
| trained on their body of work to generate new novels from whole
| cloth to pump out content with little effort. The only constraint
| would be not releasing them too quickly for human-written books.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I don't think this will be a viable option. After the first 4-5
| of books created like that they'll get stale. The AI won't get
| any new training data (as Ms. Steel is presumably not writing a
| book while the AI writes a book for her), and even if the
| prompts vary, the outputs will feel more similar to each other
| than an average author's latest 4-5 books
| haolez wrote:
| I've been a little disappointed with role playing with ChatGPT 4.
| The AI starts out really close to the behavior that you would
| expect for the proposed role, but as the conversation gets
| longer, it starts to forget the role and becomes more generic,
| like you'd expect normal ChatGPT to be.
|
| I hope this is an implementation detail and that the technology
| can, in the future, maintain the role playing across really long
| conversations.
| atemerev wrote:
| Look at MemGPT
| benbreen wrote:
| Forgetting context is a problem, for sure. One thing I've found
| that works fairly well is to include a request for a "status
| bar" in your prompt. I.e. you ask it to remind itself with each
| response 1) who it is pretending to be 2) what the date is 3)
| what the setting is 4) what is in their NPCs "inventory" (which
| it intuitively understands because LLMs seem to have a natural
| affinity with MUDs). You can even have it track its mood and
| variables like weather.
|
| As the context windows of Claude/GPT-4 etc increase, I think
| this will be less of an issue, but for now it's a pretty
| effective workaround.
|
| Here's an example of the prompts I'm using (from an activity I
| just did with my world history class):
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sLRsUVJ_KSPtjrO83ko2MSFf...
|
| And my writeup of an earlier version:
| https://resobscura.substack.com/p/simulating-history-with-ch...
| jstarfish wrote:
| A useful 1a for ChatGPT specifically is BabyAGI-style "what
| their current/next objective is."
|
| There are vector database solutions that address the
| forgetting of context. Oobabooga has superbooga (chromadb),
| SillyTavern requires the headache of the Extras service but
| will let you use chromadb, Google or OpenAI. Koboldcpp
| doesn't do vectorization, but does have a clunky
| autogenerate-summary feature that injects a summary of events
| so far into the prompt.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| As the pendulum has shifted way ( _way_ ) over to art as
| commerce, as a product, then AIs are plausibly useful. Why not
| make the 'product' more efficiently and cheaply.
|
| But art for me is self-expression; I'm encountering another human
| being or I'm expressing myself. AI creating that art (really the
| only "art" IMHO) is a useful as an AI writing memoirs or a love
| letter or a condolence note.
|
| In general perception, art always has been some mix of those two
| and people seem to unconsciously conflate them, to slip from one
| to the other. If AI - plus the current socio-political madness of
| dismissing all humanities, all compassion, and all humans as
| anything but economic devices - effectively wipes out art, what
| have we wrought?
|
| What has the IT revolution, what has Silicon Valley wrought? Look
| at the world we are creating. And for what? So a few people can
| make lots of money?
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| AI generation is like any tool. Once it's available to
| everyone, you have to do something unique with it to have
| something worth grabbing people's attention. If AI can
| illustrate and flesh out the plot of a comic book on a simple
| prompt, then we'll quickly get bored of those comic books. When
| someone takes the energy and time to create a unique plot,
| setting, rich characters, timely themes, etc. and then feeds
| that to the AI, the result will be interesting to people.
| People who put less effort in, will get bland, unsellable
| output out of an AI
| pjfin wrote:
| I'm actually building a role play training tool at the moment -
| https://Solidroad.com . The AI plays the part of a fake customer
| so sales and support reps can practice before talking to real
| customers. We've built a pretty low latency voice to voice
| conversation simulator. It helps people build confidence on the
| phone etc. and we've found that accuracy isn't as important in
| this context (ie. It's ok if the AI says something weird every
| once in a while) as long as the results are by and large
| believable.
|
| Have a demo in our website where you can try and sell a smart
| phone to Michael Scott from the office.
| pjfin wrote:
| Demo here: https://app.solidroad.com/public/office
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