4 ms·

The sample responses given are fascinating. It seems more difficult than normal to even tell that they were generated by an LLM, since most of us (terminally on

by Heliodex 10mo ago

The sample responses given are fascinating. It seems more difficult than normal to even tell that they were generated by an LLM, since most of us (terminally online) people have been training our brains' AI-generated text detection on output from models trained with a recent cutoff date. Some of the sample responses seem so unlike anything an LLM would say, obviously due to its apparent beliefs on certain concepts, though also perhaps less obviously due to its word choice and sentence structure making the responses feel slightly 'old-fashioned'.

_--__--__ 10mo ago
The time cutoff probably matters but maybe not as much as the lack of human finetuning from places like Nigeria with somewhat foreign styles of English. I'm not really sure if there is as much of an 'obvious LLM text style' in other languages, it hasn't seemed that way in my limited attempts to speak to LLMs in languages I'm studying.
- anonymous908213 10mo ago
  There is. I have observed it in both Chinese and Japanese.
- d3m0t3p 10mo ago
  The model is fined tuned for chat behavior. So the style might be due to - Fine tuning - More Stylised text in the corpus, english evolved a lot in the last century.
  - paul_h 10mo ago
    Diverged as well as standardized. I did some research into "out of pocket" and how it differs in meaning in UK-English (paying from one's own funds) and American-English (uncontactable) and I recall 1908 being the current thought as to when the divergence happened: 1908 short story by O. Henry titled "Buried Treasure."
libraryofbabel 10mo ago
I used to teach 19th-century history, and the responses definitely sound like a Victorian-era writer. And they of course sound like writing (books and periodicals etc) rather than "chat": as other responders allude to, the fine-tuning or RL process for making them good at conversation was presumably quite different from what is used for most chatbots, and they're leaning very heavily into the pre-training texts. We don't have any living Victorians to RLHF on: we just have what they wrote. To go a little deeper on the idea of 19th-century "chat": I did a PhD on this period and yet I would be hard-pushed to tell you what actual 19th-century conversations were like. There are plenty of literary depictions of conversation from the 19th century of presumably varying levels of accuracy, but we don't really have great direct historical sources of everyday human conversations until sound recording technology got good in the 20th century. Even good 19th-century transcripts of actual human speech tend to be from formal things like court testimony or parliamentary speeches, not everyday interactions. The vast majority of human communication in the premodern past was the spoken word, and it's almost all invisible in the historical sources. Anyway, this is a really interesting project, and I'm looking forward to trying the models out myself!
- dleeftink 10mo ago
  While not specifically Victorian, couldn't we learn much from what daily conversations were like by looking at surviving oral cultures, or other relatively secluded communal pockets? I'd also say time and progress are not always equally distributed, and even within geographical regions (as the U.K.) there are likely large differences in the rate of language shifts since then, some possibly surviving well into the 20th century.
- nemomarx 10mo ago
  I wonder if the historical format you might want to look at for "Chat" is letters? Definitely wordier segments, but it's at least the back and forth feel and we often have complete correspondence over long stretches from certain figures. This would probably get easier towards the start of the 20th century ofc
  - libraryofbabel 10mo ago
tonymet 10mo ago
the samples push the boundaries of a commercial AI, but still seem tame / milquetoast compared to common opinions of that era. And the prose doesn't compare. Something is off.
kccqzy 10mo ago
Oh definitely. One thing that immediately caught my mind is that the question asks the model about “homosexual men” but the model starts the response with “the homosexual man” instead. Changing the plural to the singular and then adding an article. Feels very old fashioned to me.

_--__--__ 10mo ago

The time cutoff probably matters but maybe not as much as the lack of human finetuning from places like Nigeria with somewhat foreign styles of English. I'm not really sure if there is as much of an 'obvious LLM text style' in other languages, it hasn't seemed that way in my limited attempts to speak to LLMs in languages I'm studying.

anonymous908213 10mo ago
There is. I have observed it in both Chinese and Japanese.
d3m0t3p 10mo ago
The model is fined tuned for chat behavior. So the style might be due to - Fine tuning - More Stylised text in the corpus, english evolved a lot in the last century.
- paul_h 10mo ago
  Diverged as well as standardized. I did some research into "out of pocket" and how it differs in meaning in UK-English (paying from one's own funds) and American-English (uncontactable) and I recall 1908 being the current thought as to when the divergence happened: 1908 short story by O. Henry titled "Buried Treasure."

libraryofbabel 10mo ago

I used to teach 19th-century history, and the responses definitely sound like a Victorian-era writer. And they of course sound like writing (books and periodicals etc) rather than "chat": as other responders allude to, the fine-tuning or RL process for making them good at conversation was presumably quite different from what is used for most chatbots, and they're leaning very heavily into the pre-training texts. We don't have any living Victorians to RLHF on: we just have what they wrote. To go a little deeper on the idea of 19th-century "chat": I did a PhD on this period and yet I would be hard-pushed to tell you what actual 19th-century conversations were like. There are plenty of literary depictions of conversation from the 19th century of presumably varying levels of accuracy, but we don't really have great direct historical sources of everyday human conversations until sound recording technology got good in the 20th century. Even good 19th-century transcripts of actual human speech tend to be from formal things like court testimony or parliamentary speeches, not everyday interactions. The vast majority of human communication in the premodern past was the spoken word, and it's almost all invisible in the historical sources. Anyway, this is a really interesting project, and I'm looking forward to trying the models out myself!

dleeftink 10mo ago
While not specifically Victorian, couldn't we learn much from what daily conversations were like by looking at surviving oral cultures, or other relatively secluded communal pockets? I'd also say time and progress are not always equally distributed, and even within geographical regions (as the U.K.) there are likely large differences in the rate of language shifts since then, some possibly surviving well into the 20th century.
nemomarx 10mo ago
I wonder if the historical format you might want to look at for "Chat" is letters? Definitely wordier segments, but it's at least the back and forth feel and we often have complete correspondence over long stretches from certain figures. This would probably get easier towards the start of the 20th century ofc
- libraryofbabel 10mo ago

tonymet 10mo ago

the samples push the boundaries of a commercial AI, but still seem tame / milquetoast compared to common opinions of that era. And the prose doesn't compare. Something is off.

kccqzy 10mo ago

Oh definitely. One thing that immediately caught my mind is that the question asks the model about “homosexual men” but the model starts the response with “the homosexual man” instead. Changing the plural to the singular and then adding an article. Feels very old fashioned to me.