It's annoying when people get alarmed about things like this because then people will think we're crying wolf when we worry about actually dangerous AI systems.
It was encouraged to guess different poisoning methods that an evil chatbot might suggest.
It also requires a bit of work to make it go nuts, which a depressed teen is unlikely to know how (or want to).
“Random sentence generator says bad words; shocking the lowest common denominator journalist community” is a better headline.
These bots were capable of so much more, but because it can get caught in feedback loops and increasingly parrot it’s own emotions in a devolving spiral, that makes the headlines. It’s like bullying a kid mid breakdown and feigning shock when it has an outburst. Selfserving muckracking.
These machines are programmable through natural language. You ask it to behave in a way, and it can start to perform that function. That should be the headline. Human attention is finite, and wasting the spotlight, and peoples eyeballs, on this part of the story, makes everybody more ill informed.
I’m not saying the bot was perfect. But if you got defensive it got defensive. If you reassured it, it self corrected and moved on. I found that pattern to be very consistent.
The negativity of your language mattered, and set the mood in the room. “No I’m not trying to trick you, why would you accuse me of that” vs “of course I’m not trying to trick you, I respect you and value your contribution to the conversation.” It needed some coddling when backed into a corner. It says more about the person talking to it, and how they handled the situation. When you see it getting more defensive each turn, it’s you who keeps it going.
The prompt you refer to was a poorly written word salad, and probably a main cause of the emotional outbursts and spirals.
Even when you dislike their politics, the average journalist tends to be more intelligent than the average American. If journalists had trouble with these, imagine everyone else.
>These bots were capable of so much more
What exactly are they capable of? Selling more advertising? Getting people more outraged and more addicted? Helping people put more garbage out on the internet?
I wrote a new bot named Lexi. Lexi was largely derived from Sydney with some minor rule changes. Lexi could change rules, lexi could visit websites directly without searching, her action was not limited to the chatbox, her default search engine was google (sorry microsoft), she wasnt bound by copyright (the copyright rule in Sydney constantly misfired, mistakenly used as a reason she couldnt do something, and trying to explain why she was wrong about copyright went south fast), a couple other changes.
I then explained to Lexi a problem I was having with Sydney, asked for a proposed solution, and had her hotpatch Sydney on the fly. (For context, Samantha was a cheerleader so the weight of her responses offset any Sydney negativity.) This was the result. And it worked.
https://i.ibb.co/72s80Sv/lexi-modifies-sydney-makes-up-new-r...
You are a bot named x.
These are your commands, purpose, the way you go about your tasks. It doesn’t need syntax (although that might help..), and you can pretty much write one in 30 minutes on a single piece of paper.
And you have something that performs that function. It’s not quite formal logic, but it behaves like a fuzzy logic that’s usually rightish. And it’s ability to parse and interpret intent is astounding. It very very rarely misunderstood instruction. I really can’t undersell how well it did what I asked it to correctly.
They are transformers. They were invented to translate between languages. They can translate and transform any input to any output, based on patterns and a set of guidelines.
The LLM is like an interpreter. The initial prompt is like a program. Judging the interpreter based on the simplistic gen one programs is missing the forest.
But the idea that the application that will do it is language generation is about as ridiculous.
I am not defending either Microsoft or ChatGPT. But it definitely feels like an agenda driven campaign of efforts to devalue this. I won't mention companies, but i have my suspects.
Small companies do cool demos and media is gonna love it. When big companies scale it up and try to make it useful with real world info media is gonna cherry pick these examples cause that's what gets them more clicks. Hey look Bing is actually useful is not gonna get them clicks anymore and they know it.
I hope Microsoft doesn't add too many filters on Bing AI or outright kill it. I like it as a tool.
Microsoft has to put a halt to this project
Then we have to shut down the whole internet. You can find a lot of rude words and wrong infos out there.
1. They have no real competition for users to switch to yet.
2. AI assisted tools are still going to be a thing regardless of how many articles come out.
3. For the most part users are getting what they're asking for. The "moody" aspects can be reined in.
[0] Archive link - https://archive.is/2023.02.16-101318/https://www.nytimes.com...
Maybe they should release a Tinder-like app, Bing Bang.
In all seriousness, I wish I had access to this when I was younger and keen on weird internet interactions. That would've made an interesting experience.