I’m going to address your last paragraph first, because I think it’s important for me to respond to, not just for you and me but for others who may be reading this.
When I originally wrote this post, it was because I had asked ChatGPT a genuine question about a drink I wanted to make. I don’t drink alcohol, and I never have. I’ve found that even mentioning this fact sometimes produces responses like yours, and it’s not uncommon for people to think I am mentioning it as some kind of performative virtue signal. People choose not to drink for all sorts of reasons, and maybe some are being performative about it, but that’s a hurtful assumption to make about anyone who makes that choice and dares to admit it in a public forum. This is exactly why I am often hesitant to mention this fact about myself, but in the case of this post, there really was no other choice (aside from just not posting this at all, which I would really disprefer). I’ve generally found the LW community and younger generations to be especially good at interpreting a choice not to drink for what it usually is: a personal choice, not a judgment or a signal or some kind of performative act. However, your comment initially angered and then saddened me, because it greets my choice through a lens of suspicion. That’s generally a fine lens through which to look at the world, but I think in this context, it’s a harmful one. I hope you will consider thinking a little more compassionately in the future with respect to this issue.
To answer your object-level critiques:
The problem is that it clearly contradicts itself several times, rather than admitting a contradiction it doesn’t know how to reconcile. There is no sugar in tequila. Tequila may be described as sweet (nobody I talked to described it as such, but some people on the internet do) for non-sugar reasons. In fact, I’m sure ChatGPT knows way more about tequila than I do!
It is not that it “may not know” how to reconcile those facts. It is that it doesn’t know, makes something up, and pretends it makes sense.
A situation where somebody interacting with the chatbot doesn’t know much about the subject area is exactly the kind of situation we need to be worried about with these models. I’m entirely unconvinced that the fact that some people describe tequila as sweet says much at all about this post. That’s because the point of the post was rather that ChatGPT claimed tequila has high sugar content, then claimed that actually the sweetness is due to something else, and it never really meant that tequila has any sugar. That is the problem, and I don’t think my description of it is overblown.
This is actually pretty difficult because it can encourage very bad behaviors. If you train for this it will learn the optimal strategy is to make subtle errors because if they are subtle than they might get rewarded (wrongly) anyways and if you notice the issue and call it out it will still be rewarded for admitting its errors.
This type of training I think could still be useful but as a separate type of research into human readability of its (similar) models thought processes. If you are asking it to explain its own errors that could prove useful but as the main type of model that they are training it for it would be counterproductive (its going to go to a very not ideal local minima)
I am sorry for insulting you. My experience in the rationality community is that many people choose abstinence from alcohol, which I can respect, but I forgot that likely in many social circles that choice leads to feelings of alienation. While I thought you were signaling in-group allegiance, I can see that you might not have that connection. I will attempt to model better in the future, since this seems generalizable.
I’m still interested in whether the beet margarita with OJ was good~
I appreciate this. I don’t even consider myself part of the rationality community, though I’m adjacent. My reasons for not drinking have nothing to do with the community and existed before I knew what it was. I actually get the sense this is the case for a number of people in the community (more of a correlation or common cause rather than caused by the community itself). But of course I can’t speak for all.
I will be trying it on Sunday. We will see how it is.
I’m going to address your last paragraph first, because I think it’s important for me to respond to, not just for you and me but for others who may be reading this.
When I originally wrote this post, it was because I had asked ChatGPT a genuine question about a drink I wanted to make. I don’t drink alcohol, and I never have. I’ve found that even mentioning this fact sometimes produces responses like yours, and it’s not uncommon for people to think I am mentioning it as some kind of performative virtue signal. People choose not to drink for all sorts of reasons, and maybe some are being performative about it, but that’s a hurtful assumption to make about anyone who makes that choice and dares to admit it in a public forum. This is exactly why I am often hesitant to mention this fact about myself, but in the case of this post, there really was no other choice (aside from just not posting this at all, which I would really disprefer). I’ve generally found the LW community and younger generations to be especially good at interpreting a choice not to drink for what it usually is: a personal choice, not a judgment or a signal or some kind of performative act. However, your comment initially angered and then saddened me, because it greets my choice through a lens of suspicion. That’s generally a fine lens through which to look at the world, but I think in this context, it’s a harmful one. I hope you will consider thinking a little more compassionately in the future with respect to this issue.
To answer your object-level critiques:
The problem is that it clearly contradicts itself several times, rather than admitting a contradiction it doesn’t know how to reconcile. There is no sugar in tequila. Tequila may be described as sweet (nobody I talked to described it as such, but some people on the internet do) for non-sugar reasons. In fact, I’m sure ChatGPT knows way more about tequila than I do!
It is not that it “may not know” how to reconcile those facts. It is that it doesn’t know, makes something up, and pretends it makes sense.
A situation where somebody interacting with the chatbot doesn’t know much about the subject area is exactly the kind of situation we need to be worried about with these models. I’m entirely unconvinced that the fact that some people describe tequila as sweet says much at all about this post. That’s because the point of the post was rather that ChatGPT claimed tequila has high sugar content, then claimed that actually the sweetness is due to something else, and it never really meant that tequila has any sugar. That is the problem, and I don’t think my description of it is overblown.
OpenAI should likely explicitly train ChatGPT to be able to admit it’s errors.
It should! I mentioned that probable future outcome in my original post.
This is actually pretty difficult because it can encourage very bad behaviors. If you train for this it will learn the optimal strategy is to make subtle errors because if they are subtle than they might get rewarded (wrongly) anyways and if you notice the issue and call it out it will still be rewarded for admitting its errors.
This type of training I think could still be useful but as a separate type of research into human readability of its (similar) models thought processes. If you are asking it to explain its own errors that could prove useful but as the main type of model that they are training it for it would be counterproductive (its going to go to a very not ideal local minima)
I am sorry for insulting you. My experience in the rationality community is that many people choose abstinence from alcohol, which I can respect, but I forgot that likely in many social circles that choice leads to feelings of alienation. While I thought you were signaling in-group allegiance, I can see that you might not have that connection. I will attempt to model better in the future, since this seems generalizable.
I’m still interested in whether the beet margarita with OJ was good~
I appreciate this. I don’t even consider myself part of the rationality community, though I’m adjacent. My reasons for not drinking have nothing to do with the community and existed before I knew what it was. I actually get the sense this is the case for a number of people in the community (more of a correlation or common cause rather than caused by the community itself). But of course I can’t speak for all.
I will be trying it on Sunday. We will see how it is.