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In this case I think I'd give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt. It is possible to invent something that already exists, and it has happened on several occasions

In this case I think I'd give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt. It is possible to invent something that already exists, and it has happened on several occasions trough-out history. A great example is the history on who was really first at inventing the telephone. In the end Alexander Graham Bell got the patent, but perhaps Elisha Gray was actually first? Historians remain divided on the topic. For instance, I once found what I thought was an ingeniously original idea about about how TV is really just a kind of reflection of reality akin to Plato's Cave. I immediately got started writing a thesis about it, but I didn't have to search for long on the topic before I found an entire book written on this way of thinking about television. I wasn't really disappointed, because in the back of my head I knew that it had too be too good to be true that I'd be first with such a great idea. In any case I kept working with the thesis, and I still did got a good grade on it despite the idea not being revolutionary. The questions I now wonder about is, can ChatGPT forget? Or could it be that ChatGPT was never exposed to this game, but could still infer it through other game rules, such as those for Soduko? Which I guess opens up another rabbit hole on if or how AI can be creative. Which I guess opens up another rabbit hole on how creativity works in general.

Jensson 4y ago
> Or could it be that ChatGPT was never exposed to this game, but could still infer it through other game rules, such as those for Soduko? There is no way, the game type is centuries old, you can read this giant wikipedia articles about games like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square ChatGPT "inventing" this is like thinking it invented chess.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  This is not a magic square, though. All rows and columns explicitly do not add to the same number.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Yes, but the non magic square is inspired by the magic square and such games are everywhere. Just buy a random puzzle book and you find pages and pages of puzzles with "make the numbers add up to these columns and rows", because they are very easy to make. Point about magic square is that every culture invents games like that, it is one of the most basic puzzle ideas humans have, I don't see how ChatGPT can't have that in its training set.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      For someone trying to show that a chat bot could not possibly have generated this specific game on its own because it already exists, you kind of have to show that it already exists. All that you’ve done is shown that similar types of puzzles exist. Which, I mean, is kind of the point of a generative AI. “Games like this” exist. Does this specific game exist?
      - Jensson 4y ago
        Much more advanced versions of it exists, and has existed for a long time, for example Kakuro is before computer games. Magic sum is just a special case of it. Finding a discussion with those exact rules are probably a bit hard, search engines aren't good at searching for that, but given how common these games are and how many game design discussions and ideas there are online, a game where "block out these numbers to make these sums" is surely to exist somewhere. The poster above even found the exact same game, although that wasn't described in text, but someone probably described it in text somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakuro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakuro
        mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Once again, to show that’s one thing is blatantly copying another thing, you kind of have to show that thing exists already. Kakuro is also a similar game with its own unique rules that only somewhat overlap with this one. It’s not enough to say “a lot of games with similar rules exist” and if anything, that just shows that a generative AI is good at what it does: break down the rules of a game and make modifications to make what is potentially a new game. If you can show an example of this exact game having existed for centuries, then you have a point. But showing that magic squares and similar games exist… just shows that magic squares and similar games exist, not that the algorithm incorrectly said this is a new game.
- Technotroll 4y ago
  Hm, well in that case I may well be wrong. Thanks for the info!
- Felminor 4y ago
  Chatgpt should be able to cluster things and see were clusters could be, collect everything necessary for that theoretically cluster and the human could evaluate it.
- zuppy 4y ago
  from my understanding, anybody please correct me if i'm wrong, ChatGPT can not really invent anything, it can just generate text based on probabilities obtained from the mountain of source documents used for training it. it does not think in the same way we do, it is just amazing at writing coherent phrases (and very simple code). there's a quite long article from Stephen Wolfram about how it works and this is why I belive it can't do that: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    You may be splitting the wrong hair here. However it generates a text, that text may describe what for practical purposes is a new invention.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    What does it mean to say that it can't invent anything? If, for example, I ask it to make a new poem with no line previously recorded in the english language it will do so. If I google that poem to test it's originality I won't find a match. It seems to me it just made something novel, right?
    - panarky 4y ago
      When humans write new literature, or design new games, are we simply remixing elements of language and game mechanics that we've seen before, or is there something more going on?
      - BoiledCabbage 4y ago
        Who else's experiences can we pull from but our own? It can be anything else.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >it does not think in the same way we do And how do we think exactly? Don't we have a brain trained on input (livable experience, knowledge from books, school, videos, conversations, etc) and generating text based on probabilities (weighted sets of neurons with weights built from that set)?
juujian 4y ago
The funny thing is that it is neither lying, nor inventing something new. What OpenAI did pretty well was collect data. And wouldn't you know it, the folks who developed that new puzzle describe it as what it is---a new kind of puzzle. So now in the training data you have a combination of puzzle, sudoku, and new/novel. And wouldn't you know it, by asking for a new puzzle, based on sudoku, you make ChatGPT dig for that kind of text. If ChatGPT really had a novel idea, I would not expect it to be this coherent---after all, logic and coherence are not a constrain on how language models work, just what words are likely to occur next. That is why it is being compared to entry level college writing, because that is how an excited student writes who hops from topic to topic.
- djmips 4y ago
  But how is it different from humans? I can't tell you how many times now that I've come up with what I thought was a really cool idea but upon web searching found it was already invented/discovered etc. In fact before the Internet I had come up with my own algorithms and only upon the Internet existing did I find they were already discovered years earlier. There's no way that I was regurgitating something I had read in that case.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    There’s a difference between coming up with a puzzle then finding out it already exists versus finding a puzzle and saying you came up with it. If I told you “We need a brand new, never-never-before-seen puzzle for our next game release.” and you searched Google for “brand new, never-before-seen puzzle”, found a puzzle game with those words in its marketing copy and pitched it to me, that would be some combination of unintelligent and dishonest behavior. Like, surprisingly so. It’s different from forgetting some puzzle you played with as a little kid and thinking you made it up, or creating a puzzle you’d never seen but has been made before.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
_nalply 4y ago
Re forgetting: we should be careful not to anthropomorphize ChatGPT. In principle, ChatGPT cannot forget. It is trained on data and this training will stay as long as it didn't get deleted or destroyed. In other words, in all cases of someone having made ChatGPT tell something, it should be possible to repeat this. Perhaps in some case it will be effectively impossible for some rare combination of prompt and random seed, so one could say, ChatGPT forgot something. But this is not the same as people forgetting something. Or during the training something was not considered important, but this is not forgetting, this is ignoring.

Jensson 4y ago

> Or could it be that ChatGPT was never exposed to this game, but could still infer it through other game rules, such as those for Soduko? There is no way, the game type is centuries old, you can read this giant wikipedia articles about games like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square ChatGPT "inventing" this is like thinking it invented chess.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
This is not a magic square, though. All rows and columns explicitly do not add to the same number.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Yes, but the non magic square is inspired by the magic square and such games are everywhere. Just buy a random puzzle book and you find pages and pages of puzzles with "make the numbers add up to these columns and rows", because they are very easy to make. Point about magic square is that every culture invents games like that, it is one of the most basic puzzle ideas humans have, I don't see how ChatGPT can't have that in its training set.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    For someone trying to show that a chat bot could not possibly have generated this specific game on its own because it already exists, you kind of have to show that it already exists. All that you’ve done is shown that similar types of puzzles exist. Which, I mean, is kind of the point of a generative AI. “Games like this” exist. Does this specific game exist?
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Much more advanced versions of it exists, and has existed for a long time, for example Kakuro is before computer games. Magic sum is just a special case of it. Finding a discussion with those exact rules are probably a bit hard, search engines aren't good at searching for that, but given how common these games are and how many game design discussions and ideas there are online, a game where "block out these numbers to make these sums" is surely to exist somewhere. The poster above even found the exact same game, although that wasn't described in text, but someone probably described it in text somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakuro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakuro
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Once again, to show that’s one thing is blatantly copying another thing, you kind of have to show that thing exists already. Kakuro is also a similar game with its own unique rules that only somewhat overlap with this one. It’s not enough to say “a lot of games with similar rules exist” and if anything, that just shows that a generative AI is good at what it does: break down the rules of a game and make modifications to make what is potentially a new game. If you can show an example of this exact game having existed for centuries, then you have a point. But showing that magic squares and similar games exist… just shows that magic squares and similar games exist, not that the algorithm incorrectly said this is a new game.
Technotroll 4y ago
Hm, well in that case I may well be wrong. Thanks for the info!
Felminor 4y ago
Chatgpt should be able to cluster things and see were clusters could be, collect everything necessary for that theoretically cluster and the human could evaluate it.
zuppy 4y ago
from my understanding, anybody please correct me if i'm wrong, ChatGPT can not really invent anything, it can just generate text based on probabilities obtained from the mountain of source documents used for training it. it does not think in the same way we do, it is just amazing at writing coherent phrases (and very simple code). there's a quite long article from Stephen Wolfram about how it works and this is why I belive it can't do that: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  You may be splitting the wrong hair here. However it generates a text, that text may describe what for practical purposes is a new invention.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  What does it mean to say that it can't invent anything? If, for example, I ask it to make a new poem with no line previously recorded in the english language it will do so. If I google that poem to test it's originality I won't find a match. It seems to me it just made something novel, right?
  - panarky 4y ago
    When humans write new literature, or design new games, are we simply remixing elements of language and game mechanics that we've seen before, or is there something more going on?
    - BoiledCabbage 4y ago
      Who else's experiences can we pull from but our own? It can be anything else.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >it does not think in the same way we do And how do we think exactly? Don't we have a brain trained on input (livable experience, knowledge from books, school, videos, conversations, etc) and generating text based on probabilities (weighted sets of neurons with weights built from that set)?

juujian 4y ago

The funny thing is that it is neither lying, nor inventing something new. What OpenAI did pretty well was collect data. And wouldn't you know it, the folks who developed that new puzzle describe it as what it is---a new kind of puzzle. So now in the training data you have a combination of puzzle, sudoku, and new/novel. And wouldn't you know it, by asking for a new puzzle, based on sudoku, you make ChatGPT dig for that kind of text. If ChatGPT really had a novel idea, I would not expect it to be this coherent---after all, logic and coherence are not a constrain on how language models work, just what words are likely to occur next. That is why it is being compared to entry level college writing, because that is how an excited student writes who hops from topic to topic.

djmips 4y ago
But how is it different from humans? I can't tell you how many times now that I've come up with what I thought was a really cool idea but upon web searching found it was already invented/discovered etc. In fact before the Internet I had come up with my own algorithms and only upon the Internet existing did I find they were already discovered years earlier. There's no way that I was regurgitating something I had read in that case.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  There’s a difference between coming up with a puzzle then finding out it already exists versus finding a puzzle and saying you came up with it. If I told you “We need a brand new, never-never-before-seen puzzle for our next game release.” and you searched Google for “brand new, never-before-seen puzzle”, found a puzzle game with those words in its marketing copy and pitched it to me, that would be some combination of unintelligent and dishonest behavior. Like, surprisingly so. It’s different from forgetting some puzzle you played with as a little kid and thinking you made it up, or creating a puzzle you’d never seen but has been made before.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

_nalply 4y ago

Re forgetting: we should be careful not to anthropomorphize ChatGPT. In principle, ChatGPT cannot forget. It is trained on data and this training will stay as long as it didn't get deleted or destroyed. In other words, in all cases of someone having made ChatGPT tell something, it should be possible to repeat this. Perhaps in some case it will be effectively impossible for some rare combination of prompt and random seed, so one could say, ChatGPT forgot something. But this is not the same as people forgetting something. Or during the training something was not considered important, but this is not forgetting, this is ignoring.