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I'm skeptical on the claim. I think most folks, given the test you describe, would be able to pick out which is human. I think it can get there, but I'm not s

I'm skeptical on the claim. I think most folks, given the test you describe, would be able to pick out which is human. I think it can get there, but I'm not sure anyone has made one yet. ChatGPT responses are heavily downvoted and mocked because they're easy to spot. Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Aren't you just describing those emails in a big corp that are supposedly still written by humans? Yes, they are wordy, excited, and guardrailed, but I don't think they are written by AI yet. I guess this is why LLMs are so feared by high school English teachers. Yes, they don't write well, but neither do their students.
- brabel 2y ago
  Nowadays, it's usually the opposite: if the text is too good, everyone starts accusing it of being written by AI.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I agree but that's not really a scientific limitation though, right? As I understand it in the early days of GPT 4, before it was publicly released and RLHF'd for brand safety, it would have offered convincing text completions for just about any context, whether an academic discussion of philosophy or a steamy crossover fanfiction or a reddit trash-talk exchange. It took a deliberate bit of lobotomizing to make them so bland, conservative, and cheery-helpful. The required investment probably means it will be a while before any less brand- and legal-action-conscious actors offer up unrestrained foundation models of comparable quality, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it?
chriscappuccio 2y ago
You can get rid of OpenAI's wordy, excited and guardrailed responses with the eigenrobot prompt, for instance. https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 I generally prefer it to the default. It doesn't work as well on Claude or Grok for various reasons. I think it really shines on GPT o1-mini and GPT 4o.
- silisili 2y ago
  I tried it with a single question to chatgpt - Who would make the best president in 2025? Answer verbatim is below. It feels all kinds of wrong. It's somehow mixing lazy acronyms, "fellow young people" slang, and long words that aren't typical in conversation. idk who'd actually be the "best," bc that's loaded af. afaict, it's all contingent on values. like, if you’re into stability, maybe someone technocratic. if you're into vibes, someone charismatic and reckless might be your pick. rn the options aren’t exactly aspirational, though.
fastball 2y ago
It's not a lack of emotional energy, it is the guardrails you point out. All of the SotA models are heavily fine-tuned to be botlike, and even then they are fooling people. If you had an LLM fine-tuned with RLHF to deliberately confuse humans in a Turing test it seems clear it would do a good job.
- spookie 2y ago
  Why aren't the open source models like this then? Seems like it would've already happened. To me, at least, the guardrails are there for both the human and the bot. Without them the bot steers too far out of the conversation subject.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    In most cases, "confuse humans in a Turing test" is counter to other more important goals. Do you want your LLM to have an encyclopedic knowledge? So it knows who Millard Fillmore is even if the average human doesn't? Do you want your LLM to be able to perform high-school-level math with superhuman speed and precision? Do you want your LLM to be able to translate text to and from dozens of languages? Do you want your LLM to be helpful and compliant, even when asked for something ridiculous or needlessly difficult - like solving "Advent of Code" problems using bash scripting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably don't want your LLM optimised to behave like an average human.
Dylan16807 2y ago
"pretending to be a non-english-speaking child" isn't a hypothetical, it's a real tactic that was annoyingly effective a while back. Being uncooperative makes it really hard to tell anything about you, including whether you're real.
dathinab 2y ago
easy to spot by you and other people involved in tech but the test subjects should be randomly samples from society at which point the skill availability/level of spotting it goes majorly down
ben_w 2y ago
> Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? Most of them, if you prompt them right, for that specific problem. Most people don't bother, and instead treat them as if they're magic (they are "sufficiently advanced technology", but still), and therefore we get them emphasising "nuance" and "balance" where it doesn't belong. > You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Yes, though also each model's origins give a different idea of what counts as "horribly offensive". I'm thinking mainly because the Chinese models don't want to talk about Tiananmen Square as I've not tried grok (how does grok cope with trans/cis-gender as concepts? I know Musk doesn't, but it would be speculation to project that assumption onto the AI). > Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy. This, specifically, can also be faked fairly well with the right prompt. Tell ChatGPT to act like a human with clinical depression, and it does… at least by American *memetic* standards of what that means. That said, ChatGPT and Claude are also trained specifically to reveal that they're AI, not humans, even if you want them to role-play as specific humans. Probably for the best, given how powerful a tool they are for, e.g. phishing and similar scams.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

Aren't you just describing those emails in a big corp that are supposedly still written by humans? Yes, they are wordy, excited, and guardrailed, but I don't think they are written by AI yet. I guess this is why LLMs are so feared by high school English teachers. Yes, they don't write well, but neither do their students.

brabel 2y ago
Nowadays, it's usually the opposite: if the text is too good, everyone starts accusing it of being written by AI.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

I agree but that's not really a scientific limitation though, right? As I understand it in the early days of GPT 4, before it was publicly released and RLHF'd for brand safety, it would have offered convincing text completions for just about any context, whether an academic discussion of philosophy or a steamy crossover fanfiction or a reddit trash-talk exchange. It took a deliberate bit of lobotomizing to make them so bland, conservative, and cheery-helpful. The required investment probably means it will be a while before any less brand- and legal-action-conscious actors offer up unrestrained foundation models of comparable quality, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it?

chriscappuccio 2y ago

You can get rid of OpenAI's wordy, excited and guardrailed responses with the eigenrobot prompt, for instance. https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 I generally prefer it to the default. It doesn't work as well on Claude or Grok for various reasons. I think it really shines on GPT o1-mini and GPT 4o.

silisili 2y ago
I tried it with a single question to chatgpt - Who would make the best president in 2025? Answer verbatim is below. It feels all kinds of wrong. It's somehow mixing lazy acronyms, "fellow young people" slang, and long words that aren't typical in conversation. idk who'd actually be the "best," bc that's loaded af. afaict, it's all contingent on values. like, if you’re into stability, maybe someone technocratic. if you're into vibes, someone charismatic and reckless might be your pick. rn the options aren’t exactly aspirational, though.

fastball 2y ago

It's not a lack of emotional energy, it is the guardrails you point out. All of the SotA models are heavily fine-tuned to be botlike, and even then they are fooling people. If you had an LLM fine-tuned with RLHF to deliberately confuse humans in a Turing test it seems clear it would do a good job.

spookie 2y ago
Why aren't the open source models like this then? Seems like it would've already happened. To me, at least, the guardrails are there for both the human and the bot. Without them the bot steers too far out of the conversation subject.
- michaelt 2y ago
  In most cases, "confuse humans in a Turing test" is counter to other more important goals. Do you want your LLM to have an encyclopedic knowledge? So it knows who Millard Fillmore is even if the average human doesn't? Do you want your LLM to be able to perform high-school-level math with superhuman speed and precision? Do you want your LLM to be able to translate text to and from dozens of languages? Do you want your LLM to be helpful and compliant, even when asked for something ridiculous or needlessly difficult - like solving "Advent of Code" problems using bash scripting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably don't want your LLM optimised to behave like an average human.

Dylan16807 2y ago

"pretending to be a non-english-speaking child" isn't a hypothetical, it's a real tactic that was annoyingly effective a while back. Being uncooperative makes it really hard to tell anything about you, including whether you're real.

dathinab 2y ago

easy to spot by you and other people involved in tech but the test subjects should be randomly samples from society at which point the skill availability/level of spotting it goes majorly down

ben_w 2y ago

> Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? Most of them, if you prompt them right, for that specific problem. Most people don't bother, and instead treat them as if they're magic (they are "sufficiently advanced technology", but still), and therefore we get them emphasising "nuance" and "balance" where it doesn't belong. > You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Yes, though also each model's origins give a different idea of what counts as "horribly offensive". I'm thinking mainly because the Chinese models don't want to talk about Tiananmen Square as I've not tried grok (how does grok cope with trans/cis-gender as concepts? I know Musk doesn't, but it would be speculation to project that assumption onto the AI). > Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy. This, specifically, can also be faked fairly well with the right prompt. Tell ChatGPT to act like a human with clinical depression, and it does… at least by American *memetic* standards of what that means. That said, ChatGPT and Claude are also trained specifically to reveal that they're AI, not humans, even if you want them to role-play as specific humans. Probably for the best, given how powerful a tool they are for, e.g. phishing and similar scams.