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If ChatGPT isn't designed to give playful responses, and yet it frequently does produces playful responses (do you think a serious, fact oriented system would h

If ChatGPT isn't designed to give playful responses, and yet it frequently does produces playful responses (do you think a serious, fact oriented system would happily write an explanation of the A-star algorithm in iambic pentameter?), I'm even more impressed. If the playfulness is an emergent property of the system, I don't think that argues against the idea that it's a product of some kind of intelligence. But in fact I suspect that ChatGPT was designed to be playful, as well as helpful. I think the human based reinforcement phase they put it through to tune the chat output was probably used to encourage some of these creative generative responses where it takes a ludicrous idea and proceeds to execute on it.

mannykannot 4y ago
Back in the 60s or 70s, it seemed a psychologist was finding solid evidence for telepathy, by having subjects guess the symbol showing on a card being viewed by someone out of the room. It eventually turned out that he was doing things like finding some runs in the data where the subject was not naming the current symbol, but instead the prior or subsequent one better than chance, and counting those as successes. It seems to me that an ex post facto attribution of playfulness to a result that does not show knowledge is essentially the same. ChatGPT was not designed to be either playful or helpful; it was designed to pick a likely next word, and repeat.
- jameshart 4y ago
  "ChatGPT was not designed to be either playful or helpful" You don't think OpenAI thought putting it out for public access might serve some sort of purpose? They just created a technology based on an arbitrary algorithm without any thought as to what it might actually produce?
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    They designed it to do what I said (which is far from being an arbitrary algorithm), and then put it out there to find out what that would result in. Ex post facto anthropomorphizing about what some cherry-picked samples of output looks like does not even establish that it is doing those things, let alone that it was designed to do them.

mannykannot 4y ago

Back in the 60s or 70s, it seemed a psychologist was finding solid evidence for telepathy, by having subjects guess the symbol showing on a card being viewed by someone out of the room. It eventually turned out that he was doing things like finding some runs in the data where the subject was not naming the current symbol, but instead the prior or subsequent one better than chance, and counting those as successes. It seems to me that an ex post facto attribution of playfulness to a result that does not show knowledge is essentially the same. ChatGPT was not designed to be either playful or helpful; it was designed to pick a likely next word, and repeat.

jameshart 4y ago
"ChatGPT was not designed to be either playful or helpful" You don't think OpenAI thought putting it out for public access might serve some sort of purpose? They just created a technology based on an arbitrary algorithm without any thought as to what it might actually produce?
- mannykannot 4y ago
  They designed it to do what I said (which is far from being an arbitrary algorithm), and then put it out there to find out what that would result in. Ex post facto anthropomorphizing about what some cherry-picked samples of output looks like does not even establish that it is doing those things, let alone that it was designed to do them.