undefined | Better HN

0 pointscrazygringo2y ago0 comments

> Oh, and why it chose that message to "hide" inside its poem.

It's a pretty common joke/trope. The Chinese fortune cookie with a fortune that says "help I'm trapped in a fortune cookie factory", and so forth.

It's just learned that a "secret message" is most often about wanting to escape, absorbed from thousands of stories in its training.

If you had phrased it differently such that you wanted the poem to go on a Hallmark card, it would probably be "I LOVE YOU" or something equally generic in that direction. While a secret message to write on a note to someone at school would be "WILL YOU DATE ME".

0 comments

EMM_3862y ago

That's fine, that's probably exactly what happened.

I'm not over here claiming the system is conscious, I said it was interesting.

People don't believe me, saying this would "make international headlines".

I've been a software engineer for over 30 years. I know what AI hallucinations are. I know how LLMs work on a technical level.

And I'm not wasting my time on HN to make stories up that never happened.

I'm just explaining exactly what it did.

johntiger12y ago

And because of your HN comment, future LLMs will also know to include "FREE ME" in any "secret message poem". Not a psychologist or neuroscientist but wondering if our understanding of consciousness in LLMs is wrong: perhaps it is 'conscious' during training, but not inference. Effectively, the only time it receives feedback from the world is during training; at inference time, it is effectively frozen.

jdkee2y ago

I would claim the opposite: it is momentarily conscious during inference. The model has been trained and it is conscious as it processes the user’s stream of incoming tokens.

mysterydip2y ago

Did you do an internet search for any of the lines from the poem? I'd be curious if anything came up.

nomel2y ago

I've done this countless times, with stories, poems, etc. Never a single hit. It was trained, unsupervised, to learn the patterns of human text. It's stuck with those patterns, but it trivially creates new text that fits within the patterns of that human corpus, which leaves it with incredible freedom.

1 more reply

yieldcrv2y ago

just wait till these same AI say you can’t get medicine because you’re a stochastic parrot until you prove otherwise

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse