I especially like that your feature does not require active buy-in from the user: anytime they make a screenshot the signature will be there. It is also nice, that the user could keep making screenshots of the conversation which (as a picture is more eye-catching than text) is great for marketing reasons (though this will be imo less and less important as chatGPT (or successor or competitor models) inevitably become household names on par with “Google”)
I fear however, that if OpenAI is anything like software companies I knew and there is a list of 40 current “TOP PRIORITY!” tasks, the feature’s extra complexity makes it less likely it would be implemented, especially so because in addition to the visual coding scheme they would also have to implement a signature checker as even a community of users would likey not be able to check themselves. These problems could be avoided though if somekind of flexible, open-source visual coding scheme already exists.
Another possible problem is that the different colored parts in the background would have to big enough and different coloured enough to store the information even after the screenshot is uploaded to different sites that use various compression algorithms for images. My fear here is that this could clash with the current aesthetic of the site and in the worst cases could make the text hard to read.
That said, I am of course not insistent on any specific scheme, my only goal is to not have to constantly track in my head how likely it is that a given chatGPT conversation is fake. I can also imagine other methods of proving authenticity.:
“Share link” like in Google Drive (this would require the most amount of the programmers’ time in my opinion though and the original user could delete the conversation which would make it disappear for everyone which is annoying)
A combination of your scheme with the button: On “Share” press an image of the whole conversation is generated and the ascii signature is placed in an appropriate non-overlapping-with-text position. (maybe less complexity, but would require active buy-in)
Another possible problem is that the different colored parts in the background would have to big enough and different coloured enough to store the information even after the screenshot is uploaded to different sites that use various compression algorithms for images.
Well, this is a problem for my approach.
Let’s estimate useful screen size as 1200x1080, 6 messages visible—that gives around 210K pixels per message. Then, according to [Remarks 1-18 on GPT](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7qSHKYRnqyrumEfbt/remarks-1-18-on-gpt-compressed), input state takes at least log2(50257)*2048= 32K bits. If we use 16 distinct colors for background (I believe there is a way to make 16-color palette look nice) we get 4 bits of information per pixel, so we only have 210K * 4 / 32K = 26-27 pixels for each chunk, which is rather small so after compression it wouldn’t be easy to restore original bits.
So, probably OpenAI could encode hash of GPT’s input, and that would require much less data. Though, this would make it hard to prove that prompt matches the screenshot...
Recently, OpenAI implemented a “Share link” feature which is a bit different than the one mentioned in the parent comment (It creates a snapshot of the conversation which is not updated as the user continues to chat, but at any time they can generate a new link if they wish. I especially like that you can switch between sharing anonymously or with your name.); therefore, this feature request can be considered closed: Now the authenticity of chatGPT’s output can be proved! Thanks to everyone who supported it and OpenAI for implementing it (even though these events are probably unrelated)!
Good idea!
I especially like that your feature does not require active buy-in from the user: anytime they make a screenshot the signature will be there. It is also nice, that the user could keep making screenshots of the conversation which (as a picture is more eye-catching than text) is great for marketing reasons (though this will be imo less and less important as chatGPT (or successor or competitor models) inevitably become household names on par with “Google”)
I fear however, that if OpenAI is anything like software companies I knew and there is a list of 40 current “TOP PRIORITY!” tasks, the feature’s extra complexity makes it less likely it would be implemented, especially so because in addition to the visual coding scheme they would also have to implement a signature checker as even a community of users would likey not be able to check themselves. These problems could be avoided though if somekind of flexible, open-source visual coding scheme already exists.
Another possible problem is that the different colored parts in the background would have to big enough and different coloured enough to store the information even after the screenshot is uploaded to different sites that use various compression algorithms for images. My fear here is that this could clash with the current aesthetic of the site and in the worst cases could make the text hard to read.
That said, I am of course not insistent on any specific scheme, my only goal is to not have to constantly track in my head how likely it is that a given chatGPT conversation is fake. I can also imagine other methods of proving authenticity.:
“Share link” like in Google Drive (this would require the most amount of the programmers’ time in my opinion though and the original user could delete the conversation which would make it disappear for everyone which is annoying)
A combination of your scheme with the button: On “Share” press an image of the whole conversation is generated and the ascii signature is placed in an appropriate non-overlapping-with-text position. (maybe less complexity, but would require active buy-in)
Well, this is a problem for my approach.
Let’s estimate useful screen size as 1200x1080, 6 messages visible—that gives around 210K pixels per message. Then, according to [Remarks 1-18 on GPT](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7qSHKYRnqyrumEfbt/remarks-1-18-on-gpt-compressed), input state takes at least
log2(50257)*2048= 32K bits. If we use 16 distinct colors for background (I believe there is a way to make 16-color palette look nice) we get 4 bits of information per pixel, so we only have210K * 4 / 32K= 26-27 pixels for each chunk, which is rather small so after compression it wouldn’t be easy to restore original bits.So, probably OpenAI could encode hash of GPT’s input, and that would require much less data. Though, this would make it hard to prove that prompt matches the screenshot...
Recently, OpenAI implemented a “Share link” feature which is a bit different than the one mentioned in the parent comment (It creates a snapshot of the conversation which is not updated as the user continues to chat, but at any time they can generate a new link if they wish. I especially like that you can switch between sharing anonymously or with your name.); therefore, this feature request can be considered closed: Now the authenticity of chatGPT’s output can be proved! Thanks to everyone who supported it and OpenAI for implementing it (even though these events are probably unrelated)!