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Where the goblins came from

openai.com

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Re: Where the goblins came from

#212
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler: future versions of mainstream AIs will be fine tuned in the exact same way to subtly sneak in favorable mentions of sponsored products as part of their answers. And Chinese open-weight AIs will do the exact same thing, only about China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jinping Thought.

Is this Xi Jinping with us in the room right now?

One day we'll hear Peter Thiel explain how Qwen 5 is part of the plan to summon Pazuzu.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#213
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the "prompt engineering" that I keep hearing will be an indispensable job skill for software engineers in the AI-driven future? I had better start learning or I'll be replaced by someone who has.

I wonder how much energy OpenAI spends each day on pink elephant paradoxing goblins. A prompt like that will preoccupy the LLM with goblins on every request.

That is a great point. Machine consumes energy of adding goblins in every response. The machine consumes energy on removing goblins from every response. That is a great attack vector. If (wild imagination ensues) an adversary can do that x100 (goblins, potatoes, dragons, Lightning McQueen, etc.) they can render the machine useless/uneconomical from the standpoint of energy consumption.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#214

Would love if OpenAI did more of these types of posts. Off the top of my head, I'd like to understand: - The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1 - The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people…

i just want to know where emdash came from, as it is quite rare to see it on the public internet, so it must have been synthetically added to the dataset.

[deleted]

Re: Where the goblins came from

#215
post #210
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this Xi Jinping with us in the room right now?

Are you implying that Xi Jinping is not real? I'm pretty sure that's not how that snowclone works...

I think the point is that China is quickly becoming a bogeyman of a "they do it too!" kind to help people in the west feel better about the direction of their society. Ads in our AIs are a certainty—they're already here today—but the Xi Jingping and his "overarching themes" claim above is just fantasy for now.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#216
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler: future versions of mainstream AIs will be fine tuned in the exact same way to subtly sneak in favorable mentions of sponsored products as part of their answers. And Chinese open-weight AIs will do the exact same thing, only about China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jinping Thought.

Is this Xi Jinping with us in the room right now?

Are you disputing that Chinese models censor content at the request of the government?

https://i.imgur.com/cVtLuj1.jpeg

The absence of information is also Xi Jinping Thought.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler: future versions of mainstream AIs will be fine tuned in the exact same way to subtly sneak in favorable mentions of sponsored products as part of their answers. And Chinese open-weight AIs will do the exact same thing, only about China, the Chinese government and the overarching themes of Xi Jinping Thought.

I’m very skeptical that training is the right way to insert ads. Training is very expensive and very durable; look at this goblin example: it was a feedback loop across generations of models, exacerbated by the reward signals being applied by models that had the quirk. How does that work for ads? Coke pays to be the preferred soda… forever? There’s no realtime bidding, no regional ad sales, no contextual sales? China…

Ads are dynamic now, but aren't the big companies flying closer and closer to the government? Maybe Coke can be the government blessed soda for the coming 5-year plan?

Re: Where the goblins came from

#218
post #15

For context, two days ago some users [1] discovered this sentence reiterated throughout the codex 5.5 system prompt [2]: > Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. [1] https://x.com/arb8020/status/2048958391637401718 [2] https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/models-ma...

Does nobody else laugh that a company supposedly worth more than almost anything else at the moment, is basically hacking around a load of text files telling their trillion dollar wonder machine it absolutely must stop talking to customers about goblins, gremlins and ogres? The number one discussion point, on the number one tech discussion site. This literally is, today, the state of the art. McKenna looks more corre…

Which McKenna do you mean?

Re: Where the goblins came from

#219
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, did your Claude switch from "You're absolutely right!" to "You're absolutely right." or was it deeper than that?

I'd say it was a little deeper than that, it stopped conveying any kind of enthusiasm.

Personally I think that is a good thing. I have asked all AIs not to show enthusiasm, express superlatives (e.g. "massive" is a Gemini favourite) and stop using words which I guess come from consuming too many Silicon Valley-style investor slidedecks (risk, trap, ...).

The AI has no soul, no mind, no feelings, no genuine enthusiasm... I want it to be pleasant to deal with but I don't want it to try and fake emotions. Don't manipulate me. Maybe it's a different use case than you but I think the best AI is more like an interactive and highly specific Wikipedia, manual or calculator. A computer.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#220
post #206
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my first thought. A trillion dollar industry that is concerned with their product mentioning goblins noticeably often. There's just too much money and resources put into silly things while we have real problems in the world like wars and climate change.

This, very much. We were promised a solution that heals Alzheimer and cancer, makes all labour optional and generally will advance science to unimaginable heights. Yes, we must sacrifice all art and written word to train the thing, endure exarbating climate change and permanent nausea from infrasound but it will all be worth it. 4 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in, we get a bit advancement in coding and pu…

> we get a bit advancement in coding

Advancement? Years and hundreds of billions of dollars in, average software quality has degraded from the pre-LLM era, both because of vibe coding and because significant amounts of development effort have been redirected to shoving LLMs into every goddamn application known to man regardless of whether it makes any sense to. Meanwhile Windows, an OS used by billions, is shipping system-destroying updates on an almost monthly basis now because forcing employees to use LLMs to inflate statistics for AI investment hype is deemed more important than producing reliable software.

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