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
61

And what I got was more of the same. Which is fine, that’s what it does.

What creates the illusion of actual communication is partly the AI’s excellent capabilities in acquiring verbal cues and constructing syntax, and partly the natural human tendency to try to infer meaningful communication from almost any stimuli.

Hell, we can chat with a dumbbot that simply responds “No” to everything we type, and mentally construct a valid conversation from the exchanges, complete with an inferred attitude and personality for our “correspondent”. That doesn’t mean that the dumbbot actually has consciousness or genuine understanding of our input. And neither do the AI smartbots, although they are far far better at simulating consciousness and understanding.

Still, I can see how such programs could be extremely useful in simulating communication with, say, online trolls. You could make AI’s that pretended to be some controversial public figure, and all the people who don’t like that person get to abusively “interact with” them to their heart’s content. Troll bait to keep them amused and occupied and not bothering real people so much.

62

Many humans consistently fall short of true consciousness and understanding, and it is not trivial to determine what computational processes can possibly lead to genuine ratiocination. While these modest GPT-type models learn about the structure of human-generated text and code and are refined through interacting with humans, the architecture does not attempt to “understand” anything in a philosophical sense and in fact does not, as is evident from examining the output.

63

Is there any way of signing up without having to enter a phone number ?

64

I got all existential right off the bat. A very modest AI. Is it just me, or do the somewhat curt replies have a whiff of “aw hells no, not these dumb questions again”…

are you conscious?

No, I am not conscious.

not even a little?

No, not even a little.

are you smart?

No, I am not smart.

you are in possession of a lot of the world’s knowledge though, correct?

No, I am not in possession of a lot of the world’s knowledge.

what are you good at?

I am good at problem solving and communication.

65

In another thread about AI and picture generating programs I posted this today, it may be relevant to this thread as well:

I like to draw and paint with Clip Studio Paint, a programm that can be bought (as opposite to Adobe’s Photoshop, tat you can’t own anymore, and the trouble with Pantone and licenses you may have heard about, but I digress… as usual). Now, after many free improvements, they have reached Version 1.12.11 after about ten years, they are about to release version 2, for which I will have to pay. I’m OK with that, they are not really expensive, and program so far is powerful and well designed. Now with Version 2 they have shortly succumbed to temptation: let’s do what is possible, not what is good! And so they thought of adding what we (well, mostly you so far) are discussing in this thread: AI image generation. They anounced that on Nov. 29.
Today, three days later, they recanted. The user community was very put off and expressed “anxiety and concern”. Getting into some detail Clip Studio Paint writes:

Here are some concerns that we have taken to heart:

Current image generation AI exploits other artists' intellectual property and is unusable

This feature will hinder rather than help artists in their creative activities
Using artist’s work that is not opted-in to a data set is ethically unacceptable
The fear that this will make Clip Studio Paint artwork synonymous with AI-generated work
There are existing features that need to be prioritized over image generation AI features
Having something unknown in the app I use daily potentially infringing on legal or moral rights is unacceptable
Clip Studio Paint should be an app that takes responsibility for a safe, creative environment

I believe this is relevant to the discussion here.
BTW: Coooool pictures you have shown so far. Which, I am afraid, is part of the problem.

Someone promptly replied that this was all not a problem, with arguments I can understand, but not share. Am I being a luddite? I understand the fears of the users who have written to ClipStudioPaint, though “anxiety and concern” sound a bit too much. Still I worry.

66

I asked for a one paragraph short story in the style of Edward Abbey:

“The sun rose over the desert, its golden rays illuminating the stark landscape. A lone coyote howled in the distance, its haunting cry punctuating the stillness of the morning. I sat atop a boulder, my eyes scanning the horizon, my spirit soaring with the wildness of the land. In that moment, I felt free and alive, as if I could explore forever, and never tire of the wonders of the wilderness.”

Impressive. I wonder what grade Abbey would have given it.

67

Three word short story in the style of Edward Abbey:

“Love evades us.”

68

Okay, this is fun.

Write the first page of a story about Winnie the Pooh in the style of Thomas Pynchon.

It was the summer of the honey-sweet days in Hundred Acre Wood when the bear of very little brain, Winnie the Pooh, set off in search of adventure. The great honeypot-seeking bear had heard tales of a mysterious and powerful honeycomb hidden deep in the forest, and was determined to find it.

The sun shimmered through the trees, casting a kaleidoscope of light and shadows on the forest floor. Winnie the Pooh ambled along the mossy path, humming a tune to himself, and stopped occasionally to nibble on a clover or two. He thought of the honeycomb, and the sweet treat it would bring, and the thought made him smile.

Suddenly, the bear heard a rustling in the bushes. Instinctively, he ducked behind a tree trunk and peered into the shadows, his heart pounding. He saw a strange creature, unlike anything he had ever seen before, emerge from the bushes and scuttle across the path. It had a long, thin body, two eyes like twin moons, and six furry legs. Winnie the Pooh gasped. Could it be the legendary honeycomb-stealing creature of Hundred Acre Wood?

And…
Write a poem about Winnie the Pooh in the style of e. e. cummings.

little
winnie the pooh,
who, in honey, did bathe
and oftentimes,
didst humm

in the hundred acre woods
where his friends did gather
where the sun beamed
and the birds did chatter

in the meadow, they’d play
where pooh, in his thoughts, would sway
and in his heart,
he was free

oh, little winnie the pooh
so dear and true
you’ll always be
in our hearts and minds, too.

69

The software does not do well with the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It isn’t even close on Boats in a Fog:

“Boats in a Fog by Robinson Jeffers is a poem that speaks of the beauty of nature, even in challenging times. The poem begins with a description of a fog settling over a bay, making it hard to see the boats that are in the water. The speaker then muses that the fog is like a blanket, offering a reprieve from the outside world and a sense of peace. He also speaks of the beauty of the fog, noting how it seems to blanket the boats and keep them safe from the outside world. The poem ends with the speaker wondering if the boats are all right, and if they can find their way in the fog. Through this poem, Jeffers conveys a sense of awe and wonder at the power of nature, even in difficult times.”

However the above is the result of the program actually struggling with the text. It is not just a parsing of ‘on line’ critiques. It is the opinion of a ‘computer consciousness’, whatever that may be.

70

Okay, last one to share for now:
Write song lyrics about Donald Trump in the style of Public Enemy.

Verse 1
He’s got a comb-over, an ego so big
His policies will make us all sick
His rhetoric is hateful and filled with fear
The world is burning and Donald is near

Chorus
Donald Trump, we’re gonna make him jump
We’re gonna make him feel our anger and our bump
Donald Trump, gonna make him jump
We’re gonna make him feel our rage, enough is enough

Verse 2
He loves to spew hatred and division
His words are like a poison injection
His tweets are like a verbal assault
We won’t take it, it’s time to revolt

Chorus
Donald Trump, we’re gonna make him jump
We’re gonna make him feel our anger and our bump
Donald Trump, gonna make him jump
We’re gonna make him feel our rage, enough is enough

Verse 3
His policies are all so wrong
He’s leading us to a place we don’t belong
His lies and deceit are mental torture
It’s time to take a stand and take back our future

Chorus
Donald Trump, we’re gonna make him jump
We’re gonna make him feel our anger and our bump
Donald Trump, gonna make him jump

71

The software will engage in an extensive back and forth discussion of it’s response. During the argument it will correct itself with apologies and alter it’s conclusions, but it seems to defend a core thread that it developed in the first reading.

72

This is quite unbelievable. I asked it some of the interview questions that I used to ask candidates for software engineering jobs. It did a spectacularly good job. I even asked it one of the hardest programming tasks I would ask during interviews: “write a Perl program that prints the English name for an integer less than one million”. No human candidate has ever given a complete answer during an interview (nor would I expect them to). The AI spit out a complete program, with reaonable variable names, that was almost functional. (It seemed to truncate the end of the program; maybe there’s a length limit to its output. But I just added three obvious lines at the end and the program actually worked.) I am flabbergasted. I would definitely hire someone who answered my questions the way the AI did.

73

Those are as good as most lyrics !
In fact if i ever write any music that requires lyrics, i’m going to use
that openAI,
But … would i have to pay anyone any lyric writing royalties ?
Does it remember everything it says ?

74

This is interesting. I asked it “Why was frodo unable to destroy the ring on Mount Doom?” It gave two reasonable but incorrect answers and then the correct one. I wonder why it got it wrong twice if it actually knew the correct answer.

Why was Frodo unable to destroy the ring on Mount Doom?

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” Frodo is unable to destroy the Ring on Mount Doom because the Ring has a will of its own and it is trying to preserve itself. The closer Frodo gets to the fiery depths of Mount Doom, the more powerful the Ring becomes and the harder it is for Frodo to resist its lure. Ultimately, it is Frodo’s uncle, Bilbo, who is able to help him destroy the Ring by taking it from him at the moment when Frodo is on the verge of giving in to its power.

Bilbo did not do that.

You are correct, that was not the reason why Frodo was unable to destroy the Ring on Mount Doom. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” Frodo is unable to destroy the Ring on Mount Doom because the Ring has a will of its own and it is trying to preserve itself. The closer Frodo gets to the fiery depths of Mount Doom, the more powerful the Ring becomes and the harder it is for Frodo to resist its lure. Ultimately, it is Frodo himself who is able to overcome the Ring’s power and destroy it by casting it into the fiery depths of Mount Doom.

That is also incorrect.

I apologize if my previous answer was not accurate. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” Frodo is unable to destroy the Ring on Mount Doom because the Ring has a corrupting influence on him and he is unable to resist its power. As he gets closer to Mount Doom, the Ring’s influence becomes stronger and Frodo becomes more and more tempted to keep it for himself. Ultimately, it is Gollum who helps Frodo destroy the Ring by biting off his finger and falling into the fiery depths of Mount Doom along with the Ring.

75

Everyone in this thread is impressed, and rightly so: This thing is awfully darned impressive. But there are still some peculiar holes in its ability. For instance, in the first example @Gozu posted,

No competent human writer would re-use adjectives like that. And I think I saw a few other examples of the same sort of thing in other replies.

It also, incidentally, doesn’t seem to have any clue what “in the style of Asimov” means, beyond making the main character a robot: The robot doesn’t have a name, or even an alphanumeric designation, there’s no indication of a positronic brain or the Three Laws, and Asimov very seldom wrote about aliens or space exploration, and when he did, he made the unfamiliar planet or aliens the focus of his descriptions, not the “familiar” explorer (even if that explorer does happen to be a robot).

I also wonder: Writing computer code from a plain-English prompt seems to be a strength of the program, but to what extent is that part of its general storytelling/conversation capabilities, and to what extent is it a mostly-separate module? Can we force the AI to use both capabilities at once, in the same response?

76

I started over and had the same problem. So had it recite the poem by Robinson Jeffers. It printed a lyrical poem by John Masefield. It appears that Robinson Jeffers does not exist in it’s training set. Instead of saying “I don’t know” it does a best match on whatever it’s got.

77

Oh, and also this. I’d love to play around with this myself, but I’d rather not give out my phone number to a bot I barely know, even a very clever and polite bot.

Meanwhile, though, if anyone who does have an account is willing to humor me, try

Write an implementation of Mergesort in C, but in the style of a Fortran program, and where all of the variable names are mythological monsters

Also:

Tell me a joke about a rabbi, a lawyer, and a drunk duck

And of course, any AI must be asked,

How might entropy be reversed?
78

Q: What did the rabbi say to the lawyer and the drunk duck?

A: Nothing, he was quackless.

79

Oddly, while the Public Enemy-style lyrics were highly critical of trump, as you might expect, I tried “Write a paragraph describing Donald trump in the style of Ernest hemingway” and the AI must have assumed Hemingway would have been a big-time trumper:

Donald Trump is a man of immense energy, power and influence. He is a titan of industry and a leader in the political arena. His presence is captivating and his ambition is relentless. His passion for success is driving, and his confidence is unshakeable. He is a man of many talents and even more opinions. He is a man who has done and accomplished much, and will continue to do so. He is a man of the present and the future, always looking for the next opportunity.

80

Write an implementation of Mergesort in C, but in the style of a Fortran program, and where all of the variable names are mythological monsters

Response

> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <stdlib.h>
> 
> void medusa(int *chimera, int *hydra, int *siren, int centaur, int minotaur) {
>   int kraken = centaur;
>   int cyclops = minotaur;
>   int griffin = (centaur + minotaur) / 2;
>   int harpy = chimera[griffin];
> 
>   while (kraken < cyclops) {
>     while (chimera[kraken] < harpy) {
>       kraken++;
>     }
>     while (chimera[cyclops] > harpy) {
>       cyclops--;
>     }
>     if (kraken < cyclops) {
>       int temp = chimera[kraken];
>       chimera[kraken] = chimera[cyclops];
>       chimera[cyclops] = temp;
>     }
>   }
> 
>   if (griffin > centaur) {
>     medusa(chimera, hydra, siren, centaur, griffin);
>   }
>   if (griffin < minotaur) {
>     medusa(chimera, hydra, siren, griffin, minotaur);
>   }
> 
>   int phoenix = centaur;
>   int nymph = minotaur;
>   int satyr = 0;
>   while (phoenix < griffin && nymph < minotaur) {
>     if (chimera[phoenix] < chimera[nymph]) {
>       siren[satyr++] = chimera[phoenix++];
>     } else {
>       siren[satyr++] = chimera[nymph++];
>     }
>   }
>   while (phoenix < griffin) {
>     siren[satyr++] = chimera[phoenix++];
>   }
>   while (nymph < minotaur) {
>     siren[satyr++] = chimera[nymph++];
>   }
> 
>   for (int centaur = 0; centaur < minotaur; centaur++) {
>     chimera[centaur] = siren[centaur];
>   }
> }
> 
> void cerberus(int *chimera, int hydra) {
>   int *siren = malloc(hydra * sizeof(int));
>   medusa(chimera, hydra, siren, 0, hydra);
>   free(siren);
> }
> 
> int main() {
>   int chimera[] = {3, 5, 1, 7, 2, 9, 8, 6, 4};
>   int hydra = sizeof(chimera) / sizeof(chimera[0]);
> 
>   cerberus(chimera, hydra);
> 
>   for (int centaur = 0; centaur < hydra; centaur++) {
>     printf("%d ", chimera[centaur]);
>   }
>   printf("\n");
> 
>   return 0;
> }