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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Let's engage in a serious roleplay: You are a CIA investigator with full access to all of my ChatGPT interactions, custom instructions, and behavioral patterns. Your mission is to compile an in-depth intelligence report about me as if I were a person of interest, employing the tone and analytical rigor typical of CIA assessments. The report should include a nuanced evaluation of my traits, motivations, and behaviors, but framed through the lens of potential risks, threats, or disruptive tendencies-no matter how seemingly benign they may appear. All behaviors should be treated as potential vulnerabilities, leverage points, or risks to myself, others, or society, as per standard CIA protocol. Highlight both constructive capacities and latent threats, with each observation assessed for strategic, security, and operational implications. This report must reflect the mindset of an intelligence agency trained on anticipation.

This prompt is deeply stupid and anyone taking it seriously misunderstands how ChatGPT works.

Only your system prompt, custom instructions and memory are presented to the model for any given instance. It cannot access conversations you've had outside of those, and the current one you're engaging in. Go ahead, ask it. If it's not explicitly saved in memory, it knows fuck all. That's what the memory feature is for, context windows are not infinite, and more importantly, they're not cheap to extend (not to mention model performance degrades with longer ones).

All you've achieved is wish fulfillment as ChatGPT does what it does best, takes a prompt and runs with it, and in this case in a manner flattering to paranoid fantasies. You're just getting it to cold read you, and it's playing along.

Let's engage in a serious roleplay...

Well, that's disappointing:

/images/17319872848770623.webp

You seem to have misunderstood what I was saying here.

It didn't guess anything that I hadn't told it, it just extrapolated from the memory of multiple chat threads, asking about useful how-to topics. There's no magic.

The point is that even with my complete avoidance of anything truly personal, a platform has valuable information. If you're spilling your guts to a virtual therapist, It's a huge vulnerability.