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Artist feeds childhood diary into GPT-3 to have a chat with herself
- powera 4y agoThe Twitter thread this is based off of <https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/1597005489413713921 https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/15970054894137139...> has been submitted 8 times in the past 2 days, but never made the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/michellehuang42 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/michelleh...
- biggerChris 4y agoThat’s the issue with this site.
- Tao3300 4y agoI'm trying not to go there if I don't have to, and to mostly refer to it in the past tense.
- joshe 4y agoA new reason to write more or at least record more of yourself so that you can create things like this. Save your emails!
- andreyk 4y agoFor some reason this article does not have the actual chat (just a short excerpt)... You can see more of it here https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/1597006006403620864/photo/1 https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/15970060064036208... and here https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/1597006010820210689/photo/1 https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/15970060108202106... It's fun, but not so different from a conversation you could have with a psychic who is good at cold reading. It'd be more interesting to see what would have happened if GPT-3 was actually fine-tuned with all the journal entries, I think. I do agree a lot with this conclusion: "This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications: more broadly, more immersive human / computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds, given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use."
- visarga 4y agoNot just GPT-3, but Stable Diffusion is also therapeutic.
- b800h 4y agoI feel a bit cheated by this. She fed in only 13,000 characters because more would be expensive. Fair play, you're an artist so it's all about the concept but the lack of follow-through here is disappointing.
- olddustytrail 4y agoWhy feel cheated when you can feel opportunity? This is your chance to become a patron of the arts! Pay to follow the concept through and realise the vision.
- b800h 4y agoYeah, fair point!
- bikingbismuth 4y agoI feel fortunate to live in a time where AI is pushing the bounds of what is possible. It makes me question what I think is real, and why. If I saw this a year ago, there is no way that I would have believed it was real. There have been too many "AI Generated" scripts/books/etc that turned out to be heavily edited by the author. This one feels a little too perfect, considering the author states this is largely what came out of the model on their first pass. Today, I lean towards thinking this is real. Having used copilot and Midjourney for the last few months, I know that my "what is real" radar is completely off. Honestly, if you told me that many of the things I have generated via AI were actually a VERY fast fiverr worker, I might believe you. What a time to be alive!
- mavu 4y agoNo, she didn't have a chat with herself, and not even with an AI. I hate this complete and utter misrepresentation of facts. GPT is not an AI. It does not talk. It certainly does not understand. I wish AI researchers would spend some effort to educate the public instead of bathing in all the attention.
- Guthur 4y agoHere here. But there is also a broader absence (destruction?) of our classical understanding of thought and other domains such as classical objective reality and the platonic domain of ideas. Not yet sure if this is some weird post modernist view or intentional dummying down, maybe two sides of the same coin? But at least from what I can observe there is little push to teach people how to think.
- carabiner 4y ago*hear hear
- grepLeigh 4y agoEven if the headline isn't accurate by HackerNews technical standards, don't under-estimate the power of believing this kind of experience. For example, "What Happened to Make You Anxious?" by Jaime Castillo proposes a similar technique for addressing anxiety. The technique goes like this: Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. Sure, GPT-generated text isn't actually equivalent to talking to yourself - but you can see the utility for therapeutic applications like this.
- narrator 4y ago>Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. This is how the Internal Family Systems psychology technique deals with past trauma and it has been around since the early 1980s. No AI required. To go that deep though, it helps to have a therapist trained in the technique to guide the process.
- knaik94 4y agoI wonder how well social media or text message logs would work. I never journaled but I have decades worth of chat logs. I have conversations with people over with over 600k messages between us. I am not familiar with the OpenAI workflow, but KoboldAI is a community open source implementation to interface with different AI language models locally or online. There are links to premade notebooks of open sourced models you can run different on Google Collab. [1] I think finetuning models offline is still too expensive, but there is some progress and is possible via collab. KoboldAI has a chat mode setting where it properly generates and continues a conversation between two people. The models I ran were the smaller ones, but there's larger models available on huggingface like FB's OPT 30B. Even the smaller models I could fit into 8gb vram were coherent enough to be impressive. I am surprised I haven't seen more of is a chat bot based on writes who have passed away. I imagine an Aristotle chat bot would be pretty interesting and avoid issues of copyright. [1] https://github.com/KoboldAI/KoboldAI-Client https://github.com/KoboldAI/KoboldAI-Client
- nick_m 4y agoI'm curious about trying something like this myself - does anyone know which GPT-3 model she used? On their site, it looks like I have a choice of Ada, Babbage, Curie or Davinci. I'm new to GPT-3 - assuming that she started with a "base" model and then, trained it using her journals.
- knaik94 4y agoShe added a small write up, it was Davinci 2 as 3 wasn't out. https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/1597702974889144320 https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/15977029748891443...
- ralfd 4y agoThanks for the link. That sounds more like prompt engineering? If I understand that correctly it is providing short journal entries (1K words) and GPT3 is imitating the vibe of that (or whatever it does). But it is not “training” a Modell on all the journal text.
- visarga 4y agoI am also interested in this. For example how should we best formulate the input? Just our own messages, or including the parent message, or the whole chain to the top and the linked article. I think in the future we will have easier ways to train a persona.
- ccleve 4y agoThis is a conversation a man had with his younger self. It's way, way better: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGAQrEUaeU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFGAQrEUaeU
- Aeolun 4y agoI'm not sure. The responses the AI gives seem to me like they could have been copied from any conversation about childhood with anyone (which isn't surprising, since the base is GPT3).
- tartoran 4y agoWhy would it after all? It’s all mimicry without understanding of any context. It’s going to become more and more real and more convincing but beyond that there is still nothing intelligent, just fascinating stochastic immitation.
- Aeolun 4y agoI’m not entirely certain humans are any different though. We’re essentially very sophisticated pattern matching machines, based on our past experience.
- williamtrask 4y agoYour long term memory and embodied sense of purpose are good places to explore this premise.
- euroderf 4y agoNot to mention, how you react to crushing boredom.
- tartoran 4y agoOf course we are/have some kind of sophisticated pattern matching machines, what is language anyway? But we understand context in conversation, at least what we mean by understanding. GPT-3 doesn’t do any of that.
- miltondts 4y agoI'm fairly sure GPT-3 can't do any of that, because it was trained only with text. That is, it was trained without the context we are exposed to. Now imagine if it was trained with a body (similar sensors to what we have) in the real world. I'm not so sure we wouldn't get something indistinguishable from a human.
- bsenftner 4y agoThis is Art because of the cunning use of ambiguity: by training on a subset she's framed the potential responses, and presenting as a conversation with her younger self the stage is set, all that is necessary for the idea to take flight is there. And it takes flight. This is how Art and whatever we're calling AI meet commercialism, and sell clicks. What she evokes is going to generate a little industry; just watch it unfold.
- itronitron 4y agoI foresee a hip young startup 'diaryly.com' in the near future to help people improve their conversations with themselves.
- Imnimo 4y agoI really dislike the trend of using the phrases like "I trained an AI chatbot" to mean "I prompted an off-the-shelf language model".
- jameshart 4y agoWhat is the minimal level of effort required for it to count as 'training an AI chatbot' for you? Isn't 'one' shot' or 'few shot' prompting a kind of training? Isn't the result, purely from the point of view of the interacting user, functionally a chatbot?
- Imnimo 4y agoI would say that training implies an update of the weights, at a minimum. I would accept fine-tuning GPT-3 as training, but not prompting. I think that "chat bot" is less objectionable, but it presents a bit of a misleading picture to a casual reader. I think people ascribe a lot more agency to a "chat bot" than they would to a "next word predictor".
- josefx 4y ago> What is the minimal level of effort required for it to count as 'training an AI chatbot' for you? Isn't GPT-3 already capable of acting like a chatbot out of the box? The article implies that it was trained to be like a younger Michelle from the journal entries, but all the responses presented seem to be utterly generic. Talk about dreams and hardships but not anything concrete, no mention of friends and family, locations or activities. I don't know enough about GPT-3 to say if the training affected word choice, but it doesn't seem to have any discernible depth at all.
- stolenmerch 4y agoI agree, but at least it isn't "I forced a robot to read my diary", which is something I've seen.
- rco8786 4y ago> fed in about 13,000 characters before reaching the maximum threshold Wait, certainly that’s not even remotely close enough to enough data to train a “past self” AI on. Even if we assume that by “characters” she meant words that’s just not very much text.
- throwntoday 4y agoYeah my bullshit meter is going off. Cute fiction though.
- krageon 4y agoYou assume that your personality cannot be (semi-)successfully simulated as something that only barely diversifies from everyone else.
- staticman2 4y agoIf you creatively define "semi‐successfully" then any simulation can simulate anything.
- nomagicbullet 4y agoJust yesterday we had a post about how Americans are spending more and more time alone[1]: > in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58 percent decline relative to 2010-2013). I understand some people might feel uncomfortable about "AI chatbots" (about their inaccuracy, or "fakeness"). However I can't help to think that the future of humankind will be plagued by artificial entities that we will interact with as we do with other humans. It might be in the form of simple ELIZA models, some ML artifact or full-on conscious intelligences. I suspect there will be huge benefits to virtual companions to help with this crisis of loneliness that afflict us. In any case I hope humans will evaluate these technologies by the value they derive from them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755243
- aaomidi 4y agoI really hope virtual companions aren’t centralized or if they are there is extremely strict regulations around the data. Imagine the company changing policy and you being locked out of your virtual companion? That should never happen.
- Gigachad 4y agoI think the uncomfortableness comes from the fact that just about everyone acknowledges this scenario is inevitable. Of corse we will all be replacing friends with chatbots because that will be easier and eventually they will work even better than real friends. But what kind of world are we going to end up with when this happens. What is the result of giving everyone chatbot friends who are all perfectly agreeable. And who probably slip in product placement/ads.
- Tao3300 4y agoJust read the Young Michelle lines and you can see that they are very ELIZA-ish. Most of them could have been mildly sympathic-sounding responses to any number of inputs.
- kqr 4y agoThe one impressive bit that ELIZA would not do is understand some of the semantics of the prompts. Like you can ask it to ask a question, or write a letter, and it would get the format of the response right. But yes, I agree. I'm not sure how much the journal entries really contributed other than specific turns of phrase and general topics of discussion.
- donatj 4y agoI've got all my AOL from around 2000-2008... This could be interesting.
- azinman2 4y agoHow? What / where was that stored?
- dustincoates 4y agoI can't speak to the above, but I know Trillian would save them as plain text on device.
- donatj 4y agoAIM stored chat as HTML log files. When I moved to Adium I kept all of those as well. Combine that with being an extreme data hoarder and having full backups of basically all my computers 2000 -> now on my NAS and I've got almost everything…
- barbariangrunge 4y agoReminds me of those people who marry their dolls. GPT-3 is not a person. The biggest risk with new ai tech is that it will learn to win us over, seeming like people, when there is nothing happening on the inside but number crunching. Earning empathy despite having no feelings.
- an_ko 4y agoI'm pretty sure if I look closely enough, I'm nothing but numbers myself. My feelings don't exist, they're just side effects of evolved processes that made my ancestors survive, generated by a neural network too complex to debug. Compared to GPT-3 though, I'm better at pretending to be a person. (The above was generated by GPT-3.) (No it wasn't.)
- Lapsa 4y agoI've yet to see a good chat bot. one way or another - they all remind me of Microsoft's Tay.ai (!) at best
- xerxesaa 4y agoThis sort of reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back"
- pgt 4y agoIn the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?" inquired Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." At this, Minsky shut his eyes. Sussman asked his teacher, "Why do you close your eyes?" "So that the room will be empty." At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.
- isoprophlex 4y agoI never got that one... care to explain the wisdom it is supposed to convey?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agowell I would suppose it meant that if you close your eyes so that the room is empty you have a misconception as to the state of reality, there is not actually a connection to the room being empty and your eyes being closed it just seems like there is to you. thus there is not actually a connection between the neural net being randomly wired and it not having any preconceptions as to how to play, it just seems like that to Sussman. I have never found these zen koan things very interesting though. Also I think there is much more likely a connection between a neural net being randomly wired and not having preconceptions than closing of eyes emptying out rooms.
- zemvpferreira 4y agoThey're just jokes, not supposed to have much meaning beyond a superficial connection to zen stories. Any attempt to read into them will be frustrating.
- nurettin 4y agoYeah ok, but what is the sound of one hand?
- swyx 4y agocan someone give some technical pointers on how to do this? her thread is very light on the details. is she using https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning ? what are the best practices and limitations for doing this?
- adamredwoods 4y agoWhen HARLIE Was One
- up2isomorphism 4y agoSeriously we are spending tens of billion on this kind of crap and feel good about it? The only use case I can see for this is scam and pig butchering schemes.
- twayt 4y agoHow do you know this is actually from GPT-3?
- skc 4y agoAhh, a fellow cynic. I was wondering exactly how she entered her presumably hand written notes from childhood into the GPT-3 playground. Did she just retype all of them? Did she hand pick certain passages? I ask because I have a feeling GPT-3 would return roughly similar results without the journals.
- nigerianbrince 4y agoComing up next, I trained a sexbot ai using my vlogs to have sex with myself.