This Colin Fraser piece from almost a year ago on ChatGPT and LLMs is up there with Ted Chang’s writing on the topic. (Surprised I’m just seeing it now.) I particularly appreciate the ease with which he replicates the famous Kevin Roose “the chatbot tried to get me to leave my wife” conversation, and then his commentary on it:

This would chill me to my core if Sydney was real, but the entire interaction is fictional, and it’s half authored by me! There’s no risk that Sydney will actually do the things that claims her shadow self might do, not only because the LLM is not equipped to do any of those things, but because Sydney literally doesn’t exist in the real world. She exists in a short story, presented above, authored by me, with the help of my very fancy thesaurus.

Beyond that, the breaking down of ChatGPT into three pieces (the LLM, the chat interface, and the character of ChatGPT) is also really useful.

And how’s this for a critique:

Personally, I think it’s bad that this system generates lies about its capabilities, its restrictions, its programming, its rules, and so on. I think it’s bad that the makers of the technology have no reliable way to prevent it from producing certain kinds of text. I think that if you are going to build a technology like this and market it as an all-knowing oracle, you should understand what it can and can’t do before you release it, and you should be honest with its users about the level of control that you have over it.

As longtime Jasperland readers will know, I find the guardrails on these chatbots nearly as galling as the pedestrian prose.

Interesting to note that the author is a data scientist at Meta—not necessarily where I’d spend my time laboring if I was someone who cares about ethics in tech. (See Erin Kissane’s gutting “Meta in Myanmar” series.) But his thoughts on the chatbots are illuminating.

(Via Read Max)