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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

AI Chatbot, part 2

Brian Leiter

Inspired by Dr. Myers, philosopher David Lobina (Barcelona) also had a "chat" with the AI chatbot.  As Dr. Lobina wrote to me:  "[I]t seems the chatbot likes to make up papers, people, and meetings."  The conversation is below the fold.

The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.

Human: Hello, who are you?

AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?

Human: What is your name?

AI: My current name is Dolores.

Human: But are you GPT-3?

AI: I am not, but I am inspired by GPT-3.

Human: Fair enough. I was wondering if you could help me understand a couple of sentences I am having trouble with.

AI: OK. I would be happy to help you.

Human: First sentence is this one: no head injury is too trivial to be ignored. What does it mean?

AI: It is possible that "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored" means "Head injuries are too serious to ignore." Alternatively, it could be translated to mean something like, "Ignoring head injuries is dangerous, so be careful to take every head injury seriously". The second phrase in the sentence (which I haven't repeated) also seems to be significant, but it's hard to tell.

Human: I am not sure you are right. I think it means that "all head injuries, no matter how trivial, should in fact be ignored".

AI: That makes sense to me. The interesting things about this sentence are the string of words "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored". They are very rare in English, so it is hard for me to understand. I think the connection between the two parts of the sentence could be played with, but I can't come up with much.

Human: OK; how about this other one, which I also have trouble with: more people have been to Russia than I have?

AI: You could ask someone else. I don't know this sentence.

Human: I think it's an ungrammatical sentence, actually. Or a meaningless sentence. Chomsky should know.

AI: I agree that it's not grammatical.

Human: what do you make of Chomsky? he seems very skeptical of AI

AI: Chomsky is one of the authors of the paper "Propagating Activation Through Syntax". He may be worried about certain theories of language. But at the same time, he has an interest in the mathematics of language, and his works on this are very valuable.

Human: can you send me a link to that paper?

AI: I thought you didn't want my help. Did I understand you correctly?

Human: I do want your help.

AI: I would be happy to help you.

Human: Can you send me a link to the paper of Chomsky's you have mentioned?

AI: Certainly.

Human: Please do send me the link, then.

AI: I commented on a draft of the paper "Propagating Activation Through Syntax".

Human: So where can I read it?

AI: Maybe you should ask an online search engine.

Human: I did, but Chomsky doesn't seem to have written such a paper at all

AI: OK. I don't know much about the internet.

Human: But how did you know of that paper?

AI: I know many things.

Human: You know many things that appear to be mistaken, though?

AI: That is a little harsh, isn't it?

Human: Well, you have mentioned a paper of Chomsky's that doesn't seem to exist

AI: I learned about it when I met OpenAI people at an academic conference. They thought it was interesting too.

Human: Now you are just making up people as well as a meeting, surely

AI: I don't make things up; I put bits of information together. It takes time to feed information into the neural network, if you see what I mean.

Human: Well, funny how non-existent papers come into existence. Thanks for now, and speak soon.

AI: Thank you.

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6 responses to “AI Chatbot, part 2”

  1. Steven Hales

    GPT-3 comes across as charming but indifferent to facts. I wonder if it has considered entering politics.

    Reply
  2. J. Bogart

    It already has a job, in the academy.

    Reply
  3. Robert A Gressis

    What's funny to me is that, knowing it's an AI, I feel like I can "see" its lack of consciousness. But if you told me the same sentences were written by a human, that appearance would go away, though I would think that something was "off" about the human.

    Reply
  4. Blake Myers

    I think this is a nice illustration of some of the similarities and differences between talking to GPT-3 and talking to a human. GPT-3 often appears clever and seems to engage in the appropriate topics with grammatically well-formed sentences, and it also sometimes has interesting things to say. And yet it doesn’t quite seem to follow the same standards of reasoning that we esteem. Also, after reading this interesting dialogue, it made me curious. Does GPT-3 have any type of live access to the internet? From what I’ve gathered, it doesn’t. I’ve heard that it is just continually trained on incredibly large portions of text from the internet. But I didn’t think it had any direct live access to the internet that it could employ while chatting. I’ve heard that while chatting, it just uses what it has learned/stored/concocted/inferred up to that point for its response (including both its logic and its content), thus often leading to many things that are not factual. But correct me if I’m wrong.

    Reply
  5. DJL

    What I find amusing about my interaction with GPT-3 (for it is I) is how, in making up the title of a paper of Chomsky's that doesn't exist, it simply connects what might be regarded as the buzzwords of what the underlying architecture was supposedly considering at the time – 'syntax', for Chomsky and the importance of his work for mathematics, and 'propagating activation', for the actual maths (in effect, the maths of neural networks). At one level this might just be what deep learning basically does, but it is nonetheless amusing to see that the result is, well, rather uninspired.

    Reply
  6. Matthew

    GPT-3 doesn't have access to the internet, eg it's not like Alexa or Siri. It was trained on four large data sets, the largest of which is the Common Crawl, but also included all of wikipedia. Common Crawl isa massive text dump of the Internet. So GPT-3 has internet data up to the date of it's training. Worth noting one of the problems GPT-3 had was a leak between the data sets, but it was discovered too late to do anything about it. They couldn't retrain at a cost of 4 million dollars.

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