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ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

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Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#81

Post by jcims »

I'm curious why there's such a desire to nitpick how things like ChatGPT perform on tasks like this.

First, modems in 1987 were 300-2400 baud mostly, so there isn't going to be all the color and graphics that people remember from the BBS's in the 90s.

Second, the prompt is ripe for some tweaking to get output that's more 'realistic' or tailored to what someone might expect.

And lastly, this is just the beginning. What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'.

Edit: I can't get the sharegpt extension to work but had some fun with this prompt:

Please simulate an ascii-based dial up BBS system as it would have appeared in 1987. Please use markdown for all of the presentation, mindful of the 80x24 terminal formatting. Use colors and ascii art to improve the aesthetics of the site. Start off by emulating the dial up modem process and somewhere in the middle simulate what happens when your little brother picks up the phone and starts pressing buttons to mess with the session. You are in complete control of the contents of the BBS, the title, colors, menus and everything else. I as the user will explore using my inputs to select options and interact with the system.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#82

Post by ghaff »

Reason077 wrote: post #16
tacroqueen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CompuServe was not a BBS in the typical use of the term. And anyway CompuServe did not have an SMTP gateway until a bit later, 1989. They had their own closed system with their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130. BBSes with direct internet email relays were always a rarity until the 90s, when BBSes were rapidly on the decline. And much more prevalent were relay systems such as FidoNet, RelayNet and StormNet. The e…

BBSs were at their peak user numbers in the early-to-mid 1990s. It was only after 1995 or so with the web starting to develop and, subsequently, dial-up ISPs exploding that BBSs went in to that rapid decline.

Some of the bigger BBSs that offered subscriptions became dial-up ISPs. That really only lasted until broadband became popular of course. I don't remember when the local scene we had on the BBS faded out. Presumably sometime in that second half of the nineties timeframe.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#83

Post by ibejoeb »

300bps wrote: post #75
throwbadubadu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, no BBS I used looked like that also. Also funny that it has those ASCII chars to draw frames at the beginning, but completely misses their purpose.. so much for the emergent inference. Is this 3 or 4?

And requiring an email address for sign up. Nobody asked for that on 1987 BBSes. It’s indicative of what I see often with ChatGPT. People asking for things they don’t know about and not realizing how much it got wrong.

Applied Gell-Mann amnesia. ChatGPT quite actually doesn't "know" anything, but it confidently asserts things. The user/consumer of that information really needs to understand that.

This will develop over time. As we continue to use these tools, they will improve at the same time as people begin to train to use them properly. It's not so different from "show your work" or "cite your source." (As it turns out, "cite your source" is a pretty power prompt inclusion.)

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#84

Post by MagicMoonlight »

Thorentis wrote: post #23

Many unrealistic things about this. Various hallucinations, mistakes, anachronisms, etc. Interesting, but not the mark of an AI capable of abstraction or memory.

If I asked you to pretend to be a BBS System from 1987 would you be able to do better?

Remember the rules are: - You can’t look anything up at all. Everything from memory. - You have to start right now with no more information than “pretend to be a BBS system from 1987”

I don’t think you’re going to do much better.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#85

Post by ghaff »

subleq wrote: post #3

A 1987 BBS would not ask for an email address, would it?

No. Typically, you could send someone what was probably more properly called a private message on the main board. (I don't remember what we actually called it at the time.) In general (with some caveats), messaging on BBSs and the big commercial systems like CIS--and for that matter the email systems at companies that had them in the 80s--were largely islands that couldn't communicate with other systems.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#86

Post by jmull »

jcims wrote: post #81

I'm curious why there's such a desire to nitpick how things like ChatGPT perform on tasks like this. First, modems in 1987 were 300-2400 baud mostly, so there isn't going to be all the color and graphics that people remember from the BBS's in the 90s. Second, the prompt is ripe for some tweaking to get output that's more 'realistic' or tailored to what someone might expect. And lastly, this is just the beginning. Wha…

Well, it's a really crappy BBS simulation.

It's utterly astounding (to me, at least) that it can sort of simulate a BBS from 1987. But the end result is still crap, that continuously offends the nostalgic senses.

> What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'.

Presumably it will index that page and nail it.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#87

Post by ghaff »

jmull wrote: post #86
jcims wrote: post #81

I'm curious why there's such a desire to nitpick how things like ChatGPT perform on tasks like this. First, modems in 1987 were 300-2400 baud mostly, so there isn't going to be all the color and graphics that people remember from the BBS's in the 90s. Second, the prompt is ripe for some tweaking to get output that's more 'realistic' or tailored to what someone might expect. And lastly, this is just the beginning. Wha…

Well, it's a really crappy BBS simulation. It's utterly astounding (to me, at least) that it can sort of simulate a BBS from 1987. But the end result is still crap, that continuously offends the nostalgic senses. > What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'. Presumably it will index that page…

I also assume that the training data for replicating a multi-line PCBoard BBS from 1987 is pretty thin, some files on textfiles notwithstanding.

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#88

Post by steventey »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #62
visarga wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI doesn't like when people contribute their data for open datasets. Sharing might lead to having all shared links crawled and saved for open source models. Check out shareGPT (118,139 conversations shared) it's what Google used to tune Brad. How desperate can they be to act like LLaMA hackers. In the meantime projects like OpenAssistant do the RLHF tagging the hard way, slowly but surely. https://open-assistant.…

Why isn’t ShareGPT invested in? It’s a bit ghostly. Like, no commenting, old news, etc. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I figure eventually something like this will be bigger than Facebook. (All our AI sharing? That’s a lot of content)

Hey, one of the creators of ShareGPT here! Would love some ideas/feedback on how we can grow/invest into ShareGPT – feel free to share some of your thoughts on our GitHub repo's Discussions tab: https://shareg.pt/github

Re: ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System

#89

Post by jcims »

jmull wrote: post #86
jcims wrote: post #81

I'm curious why there's such a desire to nitpick how things like ChatGPT perform on tasks like this. First, modems in 1987 were 300-2400 baud mostly, so there isn't going to be all the color and graphics that people remember from the BBS's in the 90s. Second, the prompt is ripe for some tweaking to get output that's more 'realistic' or tailored to what someone might expect. And lastly, this is just the beginning. Wha…

Well, it's a really crappy BBS simulation. It's utterly astounding (to me, at least) that it can sort of simulate a BBS from 1987. But the end result is still crap, that continuously offends the nostalgic senses. > What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'. Presumably it will index that page…

>Well, it's a really crappy BBS simulation.

Yes, but it's not a BBS simulator. It's a general purpose tool being asked to imagine a world it has, relatively speaking, very little information about. I spent hundreds of hours in BBSs in the late 80s/early 90s and I completely forgot about the files sections, so I wouldn't have done any better.

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