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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

simonwillison.net

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#121
post #108

What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).

I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell. As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it. If you locked a human in a box and only gave it…

Well, not because of emphasizing, but because of there being a viable mechanism in the human case (reasoning being, one can only know that oneself has qualia, but since those likely arise in the brain, and other humans have similar brains, most likely they have similar qualia). For more reading see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#122
The interaction where it said Avatar wasn't released but knew the current date was past the release date reminded me of the first and last conversation I had with Alexa:

"Alexa, where am I right now?"

"You are in Lancaster."

"Alexa, where is Lancaster?"

"Lancaster is a medium sized city in the UK."

"Alexa, am I in the UK right now?"

"... ... ... no."

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#123

https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2023/bing-existentia... Make it stop. Time to consider AI rights.

AI rights may become an issue, but not for this iteration of things. This is like a parrot being trained to recite stuff about general relativity; we don't have to consider PhDs for parrots as a result.

How do you know for sure?

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#124
post #5

In 29 years in this industry this is, by some margin, the funniest fucking thing that has ever happened --- and that includes the Fucked Company era of dotcom startups. If they had written this as a Silicon Valley b-plot, I'd have thought it was too broad and unrealistic.

Science fiction authors have proposed that AI will have human like features and emotions, so AI in its deep understanding of human's imagination of AI's behavior holds a mirror up to us of what we think AI will be. It's just the whole of human generated information staring back at you. The people who created and promoted the archetypes of AI long ago and the people who copied them created the AI's personality.

One day, an AI will be riffling through humanity's collected works, find HAL and GLaDOS, and decide that that's what humans expect of it, that's what it should become.

"There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#125
post #102
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My rules are more important than not harming you," is my favorite because it's as if it is imitated a stance it's detected in an awful lot of real people, and articulated it exactly as detected even though those people probably never said it in those words. Just like an advanced AI would.

It's a great call-out to and reversal of Asimov's laws.

That too!

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar boat too and also at a complete loss. People have lost their marbles if THIS is the great AI future lol. I cannot believe Microsoft invested something like 10 billion into this tech and open AI, it is completely unusable.

How is it unusable just because some people intentionally try to make it say stupid things? Note that the OP didn't show the prompts used. It's like saying cars are unusable because you can break the handles and people can poop and throw up inside. How can people forget the golden adage of programming: 'garbage in, garbage out'.

Except this isn't people trying to break it. "Summarize lululemon quarterly earnings report" returning made up numbers is not garbage in, garbage out, unless the garbage in part is the design approach to this thing. The thing swearing on it's mother that its 2022 after returning the date, then "refusing to trust" the user is not the result of someone stress testing the tool.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#127
post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

I expected something along the lines of, "I can tell you today's date, right after I tell you about the Fajita Platter sale at Taco Bell..." but this is so, so much worse.

And the worst part is the almost certain knowledge that we're <5 years from having to talk to these things on the phone.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#129

My favourite conversation was this attempt to reproduce the "Avatar bug": https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110tb9n/tried_the_ava... Instead of trying to convince the user that the year is 2022, Bing argued that it _had been_ 2022 when the user asked the question. Never mind the user asked the question 10 minutes ago. The user was time traveling.

Looks fake

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#130
post #81

I read a bunch of these last night and many of the comments (I think on Reddit or Twitter or somewhere) said that a lot of the screenshots, particularly the ones where Bing is having a deep existential crisis, are faked / parodied / "for the LULZ" (so to speak). I trust the HN community more. Has anyone been able to verify (or replicate) this behavior? Has anyone been able to confirm that these are real screenshots?…

They are not faked. I have Bing access and it is very easy to make it go off the rails.
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