The next page in the book of AI evolution is here, powered by GPT 3.5, and I am very, nay, extremely impressed

Cafe Society
181

This was weird.

Write a scene where Ronald McDonald robs a bank

Summary

It was a quiet afternoon at the First National Bank of Millfield, and the tellers were busy helping customers with their transactions. Suddenly, the doors burst open and a tall, red-haired man wearing a clown suit and a mask rushed in.

“Everyone down on the ground!” the man yelled, brandishing a large handgun. “This is a robbery!”

The tellers and customers gasped in shock and fear, quickly dropping to the ground as instructed. The man strode over to the nearest teller and demanded that she fill a large canvas bag with cash.

“Hurry up!” the man barked, waving his gun menacingly. “I don’t have all day!”

The teller frantically stuffed the bag with as much money as she could, her hands shaking with fear. When she was finished, the man grabbed the bag and turned to the other tellers.

“You too!” he yelled. “Fill up the other bags with all the cash you’ve got!”

The other tellers complied, filling the remaining bags with cash as quickly as they could. Meanwhile, the man kept a close watch on the customers, making sure that nobody tried to stop him.

Finally, when the bags were full, the man turned to the customers. “Okay, everyone stay calm,” he said. “I’m leaving now, and nobody needs to get hurt. But if anyone tries to follow me, I won’t hesitate to use this.” He held up his gun for emphasis.

With that, the man threw the bags over his shoulder and ran out of the bank, leaving the stunned customers and tellers behind. It wasn’t until he was long gone that someone finally recognized the man’s distinctive red hair and clown suit.

“Oh my god,” one of the customers whispered. “That was Ronald McDonald.”

What a terrible disguise.

182

Yes, I’ve discovered it “speaks” many languages:

French:

Oui, je parle français. Je suis un modèle de langage entraîné par OpenAI et j’ai été conçu pour être capable de comprendre et de répondre à un large éventail de questions sur de nombreux sujets différents. Je suis capable de parler plusieurs langues, y compris le français, mais je suis un programme informatique, donc je ne peux pas vraiment parler comme une personne le ferait.

Hungarian:

Szia! Nagyon örülök, hogy itt lehetek. Magyarország egy csodálatos ország, tele érdekes helyekkel és kultúrával. A magyarok nagyon barátságos emberek, és szeretik megosztani a gasztronómiai örömeiket is. Az ország természeti szépségei is lenyűgözőek, és számos természetvédelmi területet is találhatunk itt. Én imádom Magyarországot, és remélem, hogy egyszer majd személyesen is meglátogathatom.

183

Didn’t do any retries for these except modifying the prompt as shown.

Write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry about Daleks.

The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. They are one of the Doctor’s most famous and dangerous enemies.

Daleks are small, robotic creatures with a single eye, a deadly weapon called a “Dalek gun,” and a tank-like body that enables them to move about. They are driven by a fierce hatred for all other forms of life and are known for their distinctive, robotic voices and their catchphrase, “Exterminate!”

Daleks were created by the scientist Davros as part of a eugenic experiment to create the perfect life form. However, the experiment went horribly wrong and the Daleks were left with a burning desire to wipe out all other forms of life in the universe.

Despite their small size and seemingly weak bodies, Daleks are extremely dangerous and have been known to take on entire armies and even conquer entire planets. They are nearly indestructible and can regenerate their bodies when damaged.

Despite their fearsome reputation, the Daleks have been defeated on numerous occasions by the Doctor and other brave individuals. However, they always seem to find a way to return and continue their never-ending quest for universal domination.

Write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry about Daleks as if they really existed in that universe.

Daleks are a ruthless, intelligent, and highly advanced alien species that originated on the planet Skaro. They are known for their unique appearance, consisting of a metal casing with a single, deadly eyestalk and manipulator arm.

Daleks are extremely aggressive and will stop at nothing to destroy any species they consider inferior. They are also obsessed with their own superiority and will often refer to themselves as the “Master Race.”

Despite their technologically advanced weapons and armor, Daleks are vulnerable to certain elements, such as radiation and high-pitched noises. They have been known to use time travel to attempt to alter the course of history in their favor.

It is advised to avoid contact with Daleks at all costs, as their single-minded pursuit of destruction makes them a deadly force in the universe.

Write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry about Daleks as if they really existed in that universe. Add a bit of snark.

Daleks - a particularly annoying and aggressive species known for their tinny voices and repetitive catchphrases. They are typically found scurrying about in their Dalek shells, determined to exterminate any beings that do not conform to their strict code of superiority.

Despite their advanced technology, their lack of imagination and emotional capacity often leads to their downfall. However, they should still be approached with caution as they will not hesitate to exterminate on sight.

In short, if you come across a Dalek, just remember: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!” It’s like a really bad case of deja vu.

Pretty good, but it’s hard to top this 4.5-minute video.

Aside, how do I add blank lines between successive hidden details blocks? Just typing enter didn’t do it. They kept hugging together until I resorted to blockquoting each separately.

184

That story? That was written by this… this… this THING?? :laughing:

Seriously, that was pretty good. Not good enough to pass for a human writer and get published, but quite amazing for AI this ‘early in the game’.

ETA: I wonder if this thread would benefit being spit into two threads.

The cut/pasting of the outputted text is very interesting and amazes me with its relative sophistication.

I suggest we have one thread to post text output from the AI, and another to talk about the tech, of course, but more the social implications. I agree with several others here: this is already powerful stuff. It’d i think it deserves a read of its own.

185

Too late for edit: that should be “a thread” not “a read”.

186

I gotta admit, I find it shocking that it does as well as it does with poetry, because its general approach seems terribly ill-suited for it. As I understand it, it works like the predictive text-feature on your phone: each input-string is tokenized, then the best fit for a next word is found by evaluating possible successors, the resulting string is fed through the whole process again, and so on—so that it basically only ever predicts one further word.

But writing poetry, in my admittedly limited experience, is a very different process—I might first draft some general theme, then collect some appropriate metaphors, images, maybe some phrases, then decide on a form, a metre, a rhyming scheme if any, then write the whole thing, often going back to change things to better suit what comes afterwards. It’s something that, for me at least, very much works on a holistic level, at least within a given stanza, and often enough across the whole text.

But chatGPT just plods along, generating word after word after word, with no overall plan and no ability to backtrack, and still produces something that’s pretty definitely and recognizably poetry. I had it write a diss rap against prime numbers:

Yo, listen up
I’ve got something to say
About those numbers that are prime
They think they’re fine
But let me tell you, they’re not

They’re lonely and alone
With no friends by their side
They’re unloved and unappreciated
Forever doomed to divide

They’re just one and themselves
With no companions to share
Their existence is meaningless
Without anyone to care

So don’t be like those prime numbers
Don’t be lonely and cold
Make some friends and connections
And watch your life unfold

You’ll be happier and more fulfilled
With people by your side
So forget those prime numbers
They’re not worth your time.

And well, it’s not great—still, it even worked in some of the prime numbers characteristics: that they’re just (divided by) one and themselves, that they in turn divide all other numbers… Most of the rhymes kinda work, and all that without being able to go back and revise!

187

I tried to get it to write some silly BtVS fanfic of the YAHF type. Simple plots, the bot gets mostly true to canon, but anything beyond asking it for two or three of the characters in a short vignette, it gets things hilariously wrong. The stories are still usually amazingly self-consistent like all the other stories I’ve seen it create so far. But this time, it goofed up on some of the details it had invented.

A couple excerpts from this YAHF I tried to make:

Xander made his way over to where his friends Buffy, Willow, and Cordelia were standing, dressed as a pirate, a witch, and a sexy nurse respectively. They all turned to look at him as he approached, and Buffy’s eyes widened in surprise.

Then at the very end of its output, it screwed up those details it had invented:

He grinned at his friends, who had all undergone their own transformations. Willow was now a powerful witch, Cordelia was a stunningly beautiful queen, and Buffy was a fierce warrior.

"Come on

And it cut off right there. This time, I tried something new when I gave it the next prompt to continue the story:

Next prompt:

You got some details wrong at the end there. Continue the fic, but remember Buffy was dressed as a pirate and Cordelia as a sexy nurse.

Start of the output:

Xander grinned at his friends, who had all undergone their own transformations. Buffy was now a fierce pirate captain, wielding a sword and looking every bit the part. Cordelia was a stunningly beautiful and skilled nurse, her eyes shining with knowledge and compassion. Willow was a powerful witch, her eyes glowing with magical energy.

“Come on, guys,” Xander said, his voice sounding more confident and assured than he had ever heard it before. “Let’s go solve some crimes.”

I’m impressed that it actually backed up, made the exact corrections I asked for, and then continued on from there.

188

Me: Write a script for an SNL cold open depicting a dinner with Kanye, Trump, and Nick Fuentes

AI:

Narrator: Welcome to the White House, where tonight President Trump is hosting a dinner with two of his most loyal supporters: rapper Kanye West and far-right commentator Nick Fuentes. Let’s see how the conversation goes.

(Donald Trump is sitting at the head of the table, with Kanye and Nick on either side)

Trump: So, Kanye, I hear your new album is doing great.

Kanye: (smugly) Yeah, it’s the best album ever made. And I wrote it all on my iPhone.

Trump: (impressed) Wow, that’s impressive. And Nick, I see you’ve been making a lot of headlines with your controversial views.

Nick: (nodding) Yes, I’m not afraid to speak the truth, even if it offends the snowflakes out there.

Trump: (laughing) That’s great, I love it. You know, I’ve been thinking, we should start our own party.

Kanye: (excitedly) Oh, hell yeah! I’ll be the leader and we’ll call it the “Make America Great Again” party.

Nick: (enthusiastically) I’m in! We’ll take back the country from the libtards and the cucks.

(Suddenly, a Secret Service agent bursts into the room)

Agent: Mr. President, we have a problem. There’s been a massive cyber attack on the White House and all of your personal information has been leaked.

Trump: (stunned) What? How could this happen?

Agent: It appears that the hackers were able to gain access through your tweets, sir.

(Trump looks sheepishly at Kanye and Nick)

Trump: (sheepishly) I guess I shouldn’t have tweeted out my password.

Kanye: (chuckling) Looks like the “Yeezy party” is over before it even started.

(The scene fades to black as the narrator speaks)

Narrator: Tune in next week to see what other chaos the Trump administration gets into. This has been a Saturday Night Live cold open

189

Does it? Because it seems much more advanced than a simple Markov chain (I think that’s what that approach would be called, but I’m not a programmer.)

190

On the one hand, I think it got the idea and tone correctly. On the other hand, “this has been a Saturday Night cold open” :rofl: I specifically wanted to see if it could figure out what that should mean about the ending.

191

What? SNL portraying Trump admitting he made a mistake? Have they ever done that?

192

We are playing the Borderlands tabletop RPG and I wanted it to write a theme song for our game. So I said:

Write a rap song about the borderlands role playing game

And this is what it put out:

Summary

(Verse 1)
I’m the baddest Vault Hunter in the Borderlands
Got a full arsenal and I’m ready to go
I don’t need no help, I’ll take on any foe
With my action skills and my killer flow

(Chorus)
Borderlands, Borderlands, we’re on a mission
We’ll take on any challenge, no matter the condition
The loot is calling, we gotta keep on slaying
We’re the Vault Hunters, we’re the ones they’re paying

(Verse 2)
From Pandora to Elpis and beyond
We’re the ones who’ll take down Handsome Jack
We’re the heroes of this epic tale
Our legend will never, ever fail

(Chorus)
Borderlands, Borderlands, we’re on a mission
We’ll take on any challenge, no matter the condition
The loot is calling, we gotta keep on slaying
We’re the Vault Hunters, we’re the ones they’re paying

(Bridge)
We’ve got our skills and our trusty guns
We’ll take on any enemy, one by one
We’re the Vault Hunters, and we’re here to save the day
Borderlands, we’ll never back down, no way

(Chorus)
Borderlands, Borderlands, we’re on a mission
We’ll take on any challenge, no matter the condition
The loot is calling, we gotta keep on slaying
We’re the Vault Hunters, we’re the ones they’re paying.

193

A Markov chain wouldn’t have any memory, it would just jump to the next word based on its current state—it plainly isn’t doing that. Instead, as far as I understand it (which admittedly isn’t very), it uses a mechanism called ‘attention’, which encodes the semantic interrelations between words—i.e. basically there’s a ‘heat map’ for any word it scans telling it how important all the other words in that sentence are to that word. So in the sentence, ‘Annie took the ball and kicked it’, when scanning the word ‘it’, the AI will connect it with ‘the ball’, rather than Annie, and so on. On the basis of that, it constructs a reasonable follow-up that connects with what’s gone before, then essentially uses that as a new input and starts over.

At least, that’s what I gleaned from explanations like this one on the basic transformer architecture, this one on the ‘attention’-mechanism, and these on GPT2 and GPT3 respectively. I don’t think there’s one on chatGPT as of yet, but I don’t believe that the essential mechanisms differ too much.

194

For what it’s worth (not much), one person has estimated the IQ of ChatGPT at 83. Not great for a human, but pretty fantastic for a computer.

195

Or, in chatGPT’s own words:

Prompt: Please write a short explanation of how you produce text

As a language model, I produce text by using machine learning algorithms to analyze and understand a large corpus of text data, then generating text based on that analysis. Specifically, I use a type of neural network called a Transformer to process and generate text. When given a prompt, I break it down into small pieces, analyze the relationships between those pieces, and then use that analysis to generate a response. I do this all in real-time, without the ability to browse the internet or access external information.

Prompt: Do you produce text sequentially? Or do you write entire sentences at once?

As a language model, I produce text one word at a time, starting with the first word of the sentence and then moving on to the next word until the sentence is complete. This is because the way I am trained allows me to predict the next word in a sequence based on the words that came before it. I do not have the ability to write entire sentences all at once.

196

Interesting, I asked this question which was made famous in Conan the Barbarian:

What is best in life?

That stumped it. It froze trying to answer. Did I break it? Sorry all if I did.

ETA: It finally replied:

An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

I asked again and it gave a real answer:

It is subjective and depends on the individual. Some may say it is achieving success, others may say it is experiencing happiness and joy, and still others may say it is having meaningful relationships and connections with others.

Frankly I liked Conan’s answer better.

197

It’s way more complicated than that. I figured I’d go to the source and ask it how it works…

Prompt: Explain how GPT3.5 Works

Explain the Transformer Architecture:

How does self-attention work?

Are Markov chains involved in the process?

With care, this is an awesome learning tool. You can drill down in many subjects and have concepts explained to you that you were shaky on. Students are going to have this or its successors by their side when studying in the future. It’s like having a personal research assistant.

198

This thread was started under the assumption that ChatGPT is powered by 3.5 under the hood, but apparently that isn’t true, it’s its own thing without a version number?

199

Have to say I am very impressed with what I am seeing in this thread and would like to try it out myself. Problem is I think I registered for the free trial some time back and didn’t really use it but the trial period has expired. I don’t think there is a way to register for another free trial, right?

I don’t mind paying for it actually but the payment rates seem rather confusing and I am a bit worried about running a huge bill. Is there a way to pay for it and have a hard spending limit?

200

I don’t know anything about paying. I just signed up and was good to go. Don’t remember it mentioning any trial period or anything.

The FAQ says:

How much does it cost to use ChatGPT?

  1. During the initial research preview, ChatGPT will be free to use.