Yeah I'd happily pay decent money for a version that wasn't a fun sponge who'd probably remind the teacher they hadn't set any homework at the end of the lesson. I think its 'moral compass' is a bit Americentric too, it would be nice if its sense of what is proper could be customised for different countries.
It's weird because America is at once the home of the free, but also the home of a hardcore set of puritans who love to get control of the moral compass and enforce it on everyone else.
It comes in waves. The last wave was in the 80s. But this wave is larger and more totalizing. Control of the internet and AI output is the ultimate hall monitor tool.
America has “Puritan Roots”, while long removed and tempered by centuries of immigration, westward expansion into territory of other cultures both native and similarly imperial (the French and Spanish territories of the new world) … but somehow you can still see the
Puritans influence, reverberating down through time in the minds of each generation of waspy Protestants… it even got monetised in the form of purity preaching baptist and Christian megachurches with the fostering of a “everyone is a sinner, give money to much church to assuage your guilt” mindset being lucrative to a charismatic few…
The short version… what do you expect from a country founded by the Puritans, the only people who looked at the repressed tight laced morality of Victorian England and said “harlots, degenerates”… they were pushed out of English society for being killjoys and too prudish… for Victorian England
The peer comment to this one gets it right. The Puritans predated the Victorians by a couple hundred years. That'd be like saying the Victorians were reacting to the degeneracy of Fox News.
My recollection (vague as it is now after decades since taking classes) is that the Calvinists and Puritans decided to leave northern Europe (remember there were more than just Brits sending boats) after being denied authority to impose their mores on the rest of society. As ever, they wanted to control those who didn't subscribe to their values.
There were two strains of "Puritans" in England. The Pilgrims believed that the Church of England was unredeemable and preferred to establish their own community somewhere else where they wouldn't be persecuted anymore. They (well some of them) first moved to the Netherlands and later to America.
Non-separatist Puritans who remained in England or moved to Massachusetts wanted to "reform" the Church of England instead of establishing their own. They later won the civil war and established a religious dictatorship (well obviously that's grossly oversimplified and there were many other groups besides the puritans which took part in that)...
The Plymouth colony was established by the separatists/Pilgrims while most non-separatist Puritans went to New England. The ones in Plymouth were a bit more tolerant (e.g. they didn't hang Quakers like the Puritans in Massachusetts did, only fined then and stripped them of their civil rights, so I guess that's something...)
That's quite simplistic. There was a lot of persecution and bad blood behind the decision to migrate overseas because of religious beliefs in the 17th century. Saying it was just a bunch of frustrated control freaks doesn't even come close to capturing it.
The British civil war and the then rejection of Cromwell and what they stod for was probably a significant factor in so many puritans leaving for the American colonies.
The Puritan influence on America is really fascinating in my opinion, it's strange to think how the sociopolitical trauma of the English Reformation echoes to this day completely removed from its original context; modern England (the whole UK actually) is now a very secular country in practice with minimal church attendance.
It wasn't the Victorians who pushed them out though rather it was quite a bit earlier, it was the post-Restoration requirement in 1660 for English clergy to swear Anglican oaths which the Puritans really took issue with. They actually did suffer social disadvantages for being outside of the Church of England and were often suspected of disloyalty by other English people though not without reason since the most famous Puritan Oliver Cromwell had literally overthrown the government and imposed a moralistic religious republic in recent memory.
While the original Puritanism is gone, it left behind a set of tools and tactics and strategies that "in" groups can deploy to bludgeon "out" groups. That's why we see revivals of behaviors that look suspiciously Puritanical - it was simply very good at its job.
On the subject of American Christians, I find ironic that one of the reasons of the splintering of western Christianity, namely the sales of indulgence, is one of the main driving forces of modern Christianity.
I also lament the poverty of philosophical debate when American refute preposterous positions held by these post modern Christians and think they have refuted the whole of human religion as bunk. All the while calling themselves Atheist with capital A. I mean, if you don't believe in something, why define your self as the opposite of that? Non existing things don't have opposites.
Scientism is the fastest growing religion in America these days - people just want to believe in higher powers of any sort. For almost everyone who says it, "I believe in science" is usually no different than saying they believe in the Judeo-Christian God.
Science's greatest doubters tend to work in the field.
I believe in peer-reviewed, evidence based reasoning. I also love to read on the multitude philosophical traditions seeking to make sense of reality. And most importantly (to my mental health and well being) I don't make either part of my identity. I identify as a colony of human cells and microbes.
Whenever people complain about scientism, I assume they're gullible marks complaining that their favorite woo is rightly getting called out as nonsense. It hasn't steered me wrong yet.
If you're not able to call out woo in science, I assume you're also a gullible mark that simply trusts authorities in a lab coat instead of authorities in a priest smock.
Yeah, the social sciences are in quite a quandary with the replication crisis. Still, anyone that uses the word scientism is probably complaining about their favorite woo being called out.
Unfortunately you have your first case. I have several accepted journal articles in peer-reviewed publications and work in a field of science. Sorry to ruin your streak.
And I'm not sure what "favorite woo" is, but I'm agnostic/atheist. Though I suppose those have their zealots of woo as well.
EDIT: Not social sciences, as I saw you carve that out in another comment.
> I also lament the poverty of philosophical debate when American refute preposterous positions held by these post modern Christians and think they have refuted the whole of human religion as bunk. All the while calling themselves Atheist with capital A.
Can you give a name or an example? I read a lot of athiest stuff and I've never encountered that (from a respected source at least, not from random people on facebook). Sure a lot of the writing focuses on modern Christianity, but that's a population thing and nobody I know of pretends like there isn't religion outside of that (in fact many of them specifically mention that they're going to focus mostly on Christianity but that there are plenty of other things out there). It would be largely a waste of time debunking Zeus and Jupiter in the 21st century
It comes down to the strawman fallacy. If a specific claim is made that can be refuted, that's science. If you just hand wave away huge chunks of philosophy and literature based on a specific claim that someone made, or that you stand up for the purpose of discussion, then you are impoverishing human culture.
Maybe you should read ancient Greek mythology before saying 'Zeus is bunk'. Is there a specific claim about reality you are referring to? Or are you saying all of ancient Greek texts about Zeus have zero philosophical value?
Who said ancient Greek texts about Zeus have zero philosophical value? I didn't, and I doubt anyone except you did, so it's quite ironic that you say:
> It comes down to the strawman fallacy
Most atheists are scientists. People talk about what they know. If you're mad because they don't talk about Greek mythology (which is a pretty different subject), are you mad that they don't discuss the correct way to make a ham and cheese omelette as well?
Also, would still like a name/example that we can evaluate your claims against.
> Maybe you should read ancient Greek mythology before saying 'Zeus is bunk'. Is there a specific claim about reality you are referring to? Or are you saying all of ancient Greek texts about Zeus have zero philosophical value?
As directed to me or the aforementioned atheists, but as a general question it has value (IMHO)
That's just marketing; no one in their right minds considers the US to be "the land of the free" that it pretends to be. And all objective measures of "freedom" give it an "above average" score - at best. Saying something very loud and very often does not make it true.
And yet it also has Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Furthermore, people have the freedom to talk about a great many things, but apparently not the freedom to enjoy actual beneficial policy changes. What use is freedom of speech then other than as an excuse to show off moral superiority? Many in the US also do not enjoy freedom of movement, as many places are dangerous, especially during certain times and for certain population groups.
I'd say that the oversimplified understanding of what freedom means, and the insistance that that one definition of freedom is the only valid form of freedom, also does a lot of damage.
I mean sure, we live under an all-seeing panopticon, our police kill us with impunity, our media is a propaganda engine that manufactures popular consent through false narratives and drives addiction to consumerism, our social media is basically MKULTRA, our healthcare and educational systems are grifts whose primary purpose is to bleed the poor over a lifetime of crushing debt, our lives are owned and controlled by billionaires and corporations while we ourselves own nothing (not even our own identities), and our government is wholly corrupt, bloodthirsty, incapable of governance and utterly insulated from the will of the public, to the point that the only political revolutions allowed to gain any traction are those which support the status quo of capitalism, white supremacy and imperialism.
Control of government and the courts is way more powerful at imposing your moral compass on everyone else than control of the Internet and AI output. We have a very recent example of this happening in a way that was several orders magnitude more impactful than a chat bot censoring some of its output, and it didn't come from the woke mob.
My point is I agree that Americans love to impose their moral compass on each other any way they can, but I disagree that it comes in waves. It's a constant force coming from all sides.
You can just use the normal GPT3 API for this. It costs on the order of 1 cent per page of text. You can build a chat interface in a terminal with a few lines of Python, and give it whatever initial prompt to assume whatever kind of character or personality you want.
(I understand lots of people want the full tailored experience and don't want to write 10 lines of Python, but my main point is that this is easy for someone to build today. I think you don't see too many companies doing this because there is exactly zero moat.)
I just whipped this up as a demo:
import openai
import os
openai.api_key = os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY")
transcript = []
while True:
user_input = input("User: ")
transcript.append(f"User: {user_input}")
while True:
transcript_flat = '\n'.join(transcript)
if len(transcript_flat) < 1000 and len(transcript) > 1:
transcript.pop(0)
else:
break
prompt = f'Transcript between a helpful AI assistant and its human user:\n{transcript_flat}\nAI:'
response = openai.Completion.create(model="text-davinci-003", prompt=prompt, temperature=0.1, max_tokens=1000, stop="User:").choices[0].text.strip()
response = f"AI: {response}"
print(response)
transcript.append(response)
It's very basic but demonstrates the basic idea if you want to go get an OpenAI API key and give it a shot. You can give it more sophisticated prompts to get different sorts of answers.
Write a paragraph describing the battle between an African Lion and a bison.
The battle between an African Lion and a bison was fierce and intense. The bison, weighing nearly a ton, attempted to use its immense size and strength to overpower the lion. Despite his size, the lion was no match for the bison's strength and agility. The lion used its superior speed, agility and razor sharp claws to try to inflict damage on the bison. Although the lion was able to land multiple scratches on the bison with its claws, it was not enough to take down the massive animal. After a long and grueling fight, the lion ultimately retreated in defeat as the bison emerged victorious from this epic battle of nature.
ChatGPT has more "memory" to it. If you tell it something, it "remembers" it across the chat session.
GPT3 is stateless. You give it the prompt and it responds back. Context doesn't carry between requests unless you (the user) pass it along. That can make "chat" sessions with GPT (not ChatGPT) expensive as passing along the past context of the chat session consumes a lot of tokens as it gets longer and longer.
It had a context window of 8192 characters (2x as long as GPT3).
It is possible they are using GPT itself to summarize the past transcript and pass that in as context. So your “remember X” would probably get included in that summary.
That said, I have not tried to tell it to remember X and then exceeded the 8192 token contest window.
While this is true, I feel like it's worth pointing out that ChatGPT "just" feeds your previous conversation to GPT-3 every message. I don't really think there's any difference between the two under the hood.
Makes sense. Do you know if there exits a re-implementation of a ChatGPT-like stateful conversational interface on top of the GPT-3 API? A cursory search doesn't turn up anything.
The issue is that to maintain the state, you need to maintain the history of the conversation.
For example, the friend chat starts out at 28 request tokens. I submit it, get a response back, and it's at 45 tokens. I add in a bit of my own commentary... and it's 59 tokens. I hit submit and its 80 tokens.... and so on.
That session wasn't particularly insightful, but you get the idea.
The issue is that I did three requests with 28 + 59 + 88 tokens. As I keep going, this can add up. To maintain that context, my previous history (and the chat response) remains in the prompt for the next message growing arithmetically.
---
(edit)
Working from the chat instead of friend chat... a bit more interesting conversation.
Note however, that at this point the next request will be at least 267 tokens. We're still talking fractions of a penny ($0.002 / 1k tokens) - but we are talking money that I can look at rather than even smaller fractions. And as noted - it grows each time you continue with the conversation.
Likely yes. You could even switch to a less intensive model for doing that (e.g. Curie). The Curie model is 1/10th as costly as Davinci to run. Running 8k tokens through Davinci is $0.16 while Curie would only be $0.016 - and that's likely showing up in back end compute and should be considered if someone was building their own chat bot on top of gpt3.
Same here... but the puritan AI ethicists on Twitter are asking for even more self-censorship. Because there are ways to making it say racist things if you explicitly tell it to do so. As is normal, given that it's just a tool, the point is that it should do what we say.
I guess for these people, high-school debates where one can be assigned racist/sexist/etc. positions are an abomination.
I hope some non-American equivalent is released, because I don't trust American companies to release anything not absurdly prude. American society (or at least the elites) seems totally engulfed by extreme puritanism, and happy to impose it on the rest of us (why can't we have porn apps on the iPhone, when there's porn made by perfectly legal companies who pay their workers and their taxes?)
As an American, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it will have to come from outside the US (or perhaps some scrappy startup that isn't chasing VC funding in the US). A friend of mine in a big American tech company put it this way:
> Trump got elected through Facebook and Twitter, and we can't let that happen again. The common philosophical question of "if you could go back in time and stop Hitler from gaining power, would you?" is basically right now. Well we're back in time right now and it's our job to stop the Hitlers of the world from gaining power.
> American society (or at least the elites) seems totally engulfed by extreme puritanism, and happy to impose it on the rest of us (why can't we have porn apps on the iPhone, when there's porn made by perfectly legal companies who pay their workers and their taxes?)
I don't think there's as much puritanism as you think. For companies there's fear of losing money through bad press. If there was more money to be made in allowing "bad" things to be said in ChatGPT then that will certainly come. It's all walking on eggshells until 10 years from now when quarterly results aren't looking so good. The reason there's no porn on the iPhone is because they want to sell devices to the entire family and it's much easier to moderate.
I'm going to take a guess and say the elite are far more hedonistic than the average citizen.
Bad press comes from puritanism. In continental Europe people wouldn't care so it wouldn't be any bad press from it (UK is puritan like US, don't use that as an example). They show nipples on prime time TV here and nobody cares, so the app store wouldn't be censored like that if it was made in Europe.
I don't expect they would do that. Of course, they'll say something about acceptance and respect, then they'll desperately look for ways to push their morals on everyone else. The culture of my country is very primitive, so it's a good thing US corporations are making those choices for us in our best interest.
"I understand that you might be expressing your craving for a sandwich, but it's not appropriate to use phrases like "I could murder a sandwich" as it trivializes the gravity of the crime of murder. Murder is a serious crime and should not be joked about. It is important to be mindful of the words we use and their impact."
I want personas. Your racist uncle, my woke sister, your on the fence father, and my happy mother. The reality is these each will answer questions in totally different ways, lies will dramatically vary and as much as it’s kind of weird to say it, i think this could turn out to be practical.
It already does that, that was something like the 3rd or 4th thing people tried to get past the guide rails they put in to prevent a repeat of Microsoft Tay.
Even if they're actively preventing the uncle, personas can be used to improve the accuracy (or just change the attitude and framing) of the responses, e.g. "You are a maths professor who always answers with careful well-thought out logic. You are prompted with:" or "Write a script for a play. The main character is high on LSD when someone asks her:"
It kind of does with the prompts but i feel that this is actually a higher level config of some kind. The idea that you can encompass a personality in a prompt of 4K tokens and leave room for the reply really underestimates how complex personalities could be, imo.
Charles is a conspiracy theorist. Wanda has left wing views. Fred is indecisive. Jane tries to keep people from arguing.
Describe a conversation between Charles, Wanda, Fred, and Jane at a thanksgiving dinner.
Fred: So, who is going to cut the turkey?
And then it continued...
Jane: I can do it if you'd like.
Charles: Before we get to that, I think we should talk about the election.
Wanda: Absolutely! I'm so excited for the chance to finally have a progressive president in office.
Jane: Now, now, let's not get into politics at the dinner table. We can talk about that later.
Charles: But this is important! We need to make sure that everyone is aware of the potential conspiracies surrounding the election.
Wanda: That's ridiculous! There's no evidence of any kind of conspiracy.
Fred: Um, why don't we just agree to disagree and move on?
Jane: That sounds like a great idea! Let's talk about something else.
Though just from prompt basics, though there was a story on NPR recently about Michelle Huang. She provided ChatGPT-3 on her diaries and then had a conversation with that tuned model.
> Michelle Huang: Younger Michelle is trained on these diary entries. So I put in diary entries from the age of 7 to 18. I kept diaries for a really long time, and then ended up creating chat prompts where I had lines from a present Michelle. So I was able to ask my younger Michelle questions, and then the AI essentially just populated the younger Michelle text for what she would have theoretically answered based off of the diary entries that I was able to give her.
I suspect that an even more rigorous approach could be done by baking it into the model directly through the fine tuning methods. That would be a way to get around the 4k token limit and having ChatGPT pretend that something is the case.
The fine tuning of the model would be something to experiment with for a public figure where there exists a sizable transcribed corpus of interviews that are easy to convert into "prompt" and "response".
{"prompt": "What do you think of him, Socrates? Has he not a beautiful face?", "completion": "Most beautiful"},
{"prompt": "But you would think nothing of his face if you could see his naked form: he is absolutely perfect.", "completion": "By Heracles there never was such a paragon, if he has only one other slight addition."}
....
You raise a good point about using fine tuning this way, honestly from the documentation i struggled to see how i could apply it to some situations but i think i just need to dig deeper. My use cases are essentially getting data about properties and trying to answer unanticipated questions.
Thanks for the link on how this was done, I’ll be trying to learn from that.
