Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): In chatting with ChatGPT, the author found it contradicted itself and its previous answers. For instance, it said that orange juice would be a good non-alcoholic substitute for tequila because both were sweet, but when asked if tequila was sweet it said it was not. When further quizzed, it apologized for being unclear and said “When I said that tequila has a “relatively high sugar content,” I was not suggesting that tequila contains sugar.”
This behavior is worrying because the system has the capacity to produce convincing, difficult to verify, completely false information. Even if this exact pattern is patched, others will likely emerge. The author guesses it produced the false information because it was trained to give outputs the user would like—in this case a non-alcoholic sub for tequila in a drink, with a nice-sounding reason.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
In chatting with ChatGPT, the author found it contradicted itself and its previous answers. For instance, it said that orange juice would be a good non-alcoholic substitute for tequila because both were sweet, but when asked if tequila was sweet it said it was not. When further quizzed, it apologized for being unclear and said “When I said that tequila has a “relatively high sugar content,” I was not suggesting that tequila contains sugar.”
This behavior is worrying because the system has the capacity to produce convincing, difficult to verify, completely false information. Even if this exact pattern is patched, others will likely emerge. The author guesses it produced the false information because it was trained to give outputs the user would like—in this case a non-alcoholic sub for tequila in a drink, with a nice-sounding reason.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)