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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Perhapse this is an issue of poor translation between Indian and English

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I speak English just as well as you do Hlynka, and likely better. You can condescend to someone else.

Humans develop their sense of truth and falsity from comparing/correlating new evidence to previous evidence and their environs, biased by whatever intrinsic priors they were born with. The only difference here is that GPT-4 has no appendages to interact with the world and seek out further evidence, merely what we've trained it with.

To illustrate, if you feed your LLM a bunch of Harry Potter fan fiction as a training set your going to get a lot of Malfoy/Potter gay sex regardless of how Rowling may have written those characters and this is not an aberration, this is the system operating exactly as designed.

I fail to see how this has any bearing on the "truth" of it all. Depending on how big the model is, it can when asked almost certainly tell you that in the primary text Harry wasn't casting spells on Malfoy's wand.

That is so clearly obvious to me I'm not even going to burn the 100 joules or so of energy it would need to spin up a GPT-4 instance to confirm it.

Do you think an AI who hadn't read the original HP and had a knowledge base entirely of yaoi fanfic has any way of knowing better? Or a human for the matter.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Exactly what it says. I know of at least a couple SE Asian languages (EG Tagalog and Malay) where the distinction between Yes/No, True/False, and Agree/Disagree, is significantly less distinct than it is in English and I was wondering if something similar may be going on here, as by my reading your second statement doesn't follow from the first at all, nor from anything in Open AI's White Paper as far as I recall. (Assuming we are both referring to the same paper)

I fail to see how this has any bearing on the "truth" of it all.

If you set aside for a moment your pre-existing knowledge that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are both fictional characters "how this has any bearing on the Truth" ought to be immediately apparent. Stop for a moment and reflect. Ask yourself WHY you believe that GPT's description of Harry and Draco's relationship would in any way resemble that of the "real" people (or in this case that of the characters as originally written).

A statement being "True" is not the same thing as agreeing with a statement, or that statement comporting with the popular consensus and the seeming conflation of these three distinct stances is what initially lead me to suspect some sort of translation issue might be at play. Is it possible that are you are using the word "truth" when you really mean something closer to "popular" or "I agree with"?

With that out of the way, to answer your question, Do I think a human who hadn't read the original HP and had a knowledge base entirely of yaoi fanfic would know any better? Yes I do, because in contrast to GPT I would expect a normal human to display some level of contextual awareness/meta-knowledge IE being aware of yaoi fanfic and it's tropes. Or being able to assign a confidence level to a prediction that was anything other than completely arbitrary.