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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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It's funny how so much of recognizing GPT is not language modeling itself, but the training done to make it sound professional, unbiased, and un-insulting. How difficult would it be to recognize gpt4's "base model", given how capable it is generally, and how the thing it'll be best at is imitating general style?

Do you have access to GPT-4 base? As far as I know it hasn’t been released anywhere.

I understand the urge to hide certain capabilities, and it is in some sense “more safe” to not let everyone know what the exploitable problems are, but it feels deeply uncomfortable that we in the general public have no idea what these systems are truly capable of. The few days where “Sydney” was in limited release were downright Lovecraftian.

GPT-3s debating style is to restate its position again and again. Occasionally brushes up against the meat within the opposing point but never really engages. Its prose can change, especially if it is given a prompt it can understand (use no more than one adverb per 100 words, prioritize capital nouns and so on) but right now GPT-3 is hard to mistake in a back-and-forth.

Even with the assistant models, you can probably do a lot of obfuscation by bothering to add instructions to write your screeds "as written by an X" or "in the style of author Y" etc.

GPT-3 is atrocious at imitating style. Even when there is a large body of work. I don't know about GPT-4, maybe it better.

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