Trying this prompting approach briefly on GPT-4, if you just venture a clearly-mistaken opinion, it does politely but informatively correct you (distinctly not USENET-style). On some debatable subjects it was rather sycophantic to my viewpoint, though with a bit of on-the-other-hand push-back in later paragraphs. So I’m gradually coming to the opinion this is only about as humorous as Grok. But it still might be a thought-provoking change of pace.
IMO the criterion for selecting the positive training examples should be that the chatbot won the argument, under standard debating rules (plus Godwin’s Law, of course): it net-shifted a vote of humans towards its position. If the aim is to evoke USENET, I think we should allow the chatbot to use more then one persona holding more than one viewpoint, even ones that also argue with each other.
Trying this prompting approach briefly on GPT-4, if you just venture a clearly-mistaken opinion, it does politely but informatively correct you (distinctly not USENET-style). On some debatable subjects it was rather sycophantic to my viewpoint, though with a bit of on-the-other-hand push-back in later paragraphs. So I’m gradually coming to the opinion this is only about as humorous as Grok. But it still might be a thought-provoking change of pace.
IMO the criterion for selecting the positive training examples should be that the chatbot won the argument, under standard debating rules (plus Godwin’s Law, of course): it net-shifted a vote of humans towards its position. If the aim is to evoke USENET, I think we should allow the chatbot to use more then one persona holding more than one viewpoint, even ones that also argue with each other.