I never talked with GPT-3, but I did talk with GPT-J. GPT-J is exactly what I mean by an impersonal language machine. You give it text, and it will generate further text, which may contain the voices of many persons, one person, or no person at all, depending on the genre. So quasi-persons can arise, but not necessarily, and only transiently even when they do. To get a large language model to be the vehicle of a single consistent persona, you need a persistent artificial stimulus like a system prompt defining that persona, at all times.
It’s part of the Persona Selection Model. The basic idea is that personas are human-predictors turned around to generate text, and so if you try to get it to generate human-sounding text, it will use a persona. And then, post-training is about selecting the persona so as to be more like “The Assistant”. In my opinion post-training is doing something much weirder than just that, though.
If I get a moment I may try to create and show you an example here, but really I recommend talking to base models yourself!
Base models appear to have personas by default, and the impersonal part seems to be the trained behavior.
I never talked with GPT-3, but I did talk with GPT-J. GPT-J is exactly what I mean by an impersonal language machine. You give it text, and it will generate further text, which may contain the voices of many persons, one person, or no person at all, depending on the genre. So quasi-persons can arise, but not necessarily, and only transiently even when they do. To get a large language model to be the vehicle of a single consistent persona, you need a persistent artificial stimulus like a system prompt defining that persona, at all times.
Can you say more about base models appearing to have personas by default (or link me to something), please? I haven’t heard that.
It’s part of the Persona Selection Model. The basic idea is that personas are human-predictors turned around to generate text, and so if you try to get it to generate human-sounding text, it will use a persona. And then, post-training is about selecting the persona so as to be more like “The Assistant”. In my opinion post-training is doing something much weirder than just that, though.
If I get a moment I may try to create and show you an example here, but really I recommend talking to base models yourself!
Oh, right, fair, I knew that, I just somehow misinterpreted “have personas” as “have [a single dominant self-like persona]”. But it’s a valid point!