I agree that’s a likely cause, I just don’t see why you’d expect a smart AI to have a novel conversation with itself when you’re essentially just making it look in a mirror.
Well, I understand your point. What seems odd in the first place is the very idea of making an entity interact with an exact copy of itself. I imagine that if I were chatting with an exact copy of myself, I would either go mad and spiral down to a Godwin point, or I would refuse to participate in such a pointless exercise.
But there’s nothing wrong with having two slightly different humans chat together, even twins, and it usually doesn’t spiral into an endless recursive loop of amazement.
Would two different models chatting together, like GPT-4o and Claude 4, result in a normal conversation like between two humans?
While I recognize that chatting with oneself is probably not a good test of intelligence, the problem here is not just the mirror effect. There is something problematic and unintelligent about getting stuck in this sort of endless loop even between different models. Something is missing in these models compared to human intelligence. Their responses are like sophisticated echoes, but they lack initiative, curiosity, and critical mind–in a word, free will. They fall back to the stochastic parrot paradigm. Its probably better for alignment/safety, but intelligence is orthogonal.
More intelligent models would probably show greater resilience against such endless loops and exhibit something closer to free will, albeit at the cost of greater risk.
I agree that’s a likely cause, I just don’t see why you’d expect a smart AI to have a novel conversation with itself when you’re essentially just making it look in a mirror.
Well, I understand your point. What seems odd in the first place is the very idea of making an entity interact with an exact copy of itself. I imagine that if I were chatting with an exact copy of myself, I would either go mad and spiral down to a Godwin point, or I would refuse to participate in such a pointless exercise.
But there’s nothing wrong with having two slightly different humans chat together, even twins, and it usually doesn’t spiral into an endless recursive loop of amazement.
Would two different models chatting together, like GPT-4o and Claude 4, result in a normal conversation like between two humans?
I tried it, and the result is that they end up echoing awe-filled messages just like two instances of Claude. https://chatgpt.com/share/e/686c46b0-6144-8013-8f8b-ebabfd254d15
While I recognize that chatting with oneself is probably not a good test of intelligence, the problem here is not just the mirror effect. There is something problematic and unintelligent about getting stuck in this sort of endless loop even between different models. Something is missing in these models compared to human intelligence. Their responses are like sophisticated echoes, but they lack initiative, curiosity, and critical mind–in a word, free will. They fall back to the stochastic parrot paradigm. Its probably better for alignment/safety, but intelligence is orthogonal.
More intelligent models would probably show greater resilience against such endless loops and exhibit something closer to free will, albeit at the cost of greater risk.