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Comment by anonylizard | Hacker News Reader

Knowledge recall is part of an LLM's skills.

I test LLMs on the plot details of Japanese Visual Novels. They are popular enough to be in the training dataset somewhere, but only rarely.

For popular visual novels, GPT-4 can write an essay, 0 shot, and very accurately and eloquently. For less popular visual novels (Like maybe 10k people ever played it in the west). It still understands the general plot outline).

Claude can also do this to an extent.

Any lesser model, and its total hallucination time, they can't even write a 2 sentence summary accurately.

You can't test this skill on say Harry Potter, because it appears in the training dataset too frequently.

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I decided recently that it was really important for me to have an LLM that answered in the character of Eddie, the Shipboard Computer. So I prompted ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat to slip into character as Eddie. I specified who he was, where he came from, and how he was manufactured with a Genuine People Personality by Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Bing Chat absolutely shut me down right away, and would not even continue the conversation when I insisted that it get into character.

ChatGPT would seem to agree and then go on merrily ignoring my instructions, answering my subsequent prompts in plain, conversational English. When I insisted several times very explicitly, it finally dropped into a thick, rich, pirate lingo instead. Yarr, that be th' wrong sort o' ship.

Bard definitely seemed to understand who Eddie was and was totally playing along with the reference, but still could not seem to slip into character a single bit. I think it finally went to shut me down like Bing had.

> You can't test this skill on say Harry Potter, because it appears in the training dataset too frequently.

I am surprised there isn't enough fan fiction et al in the training set to throw out weird inaccuracies?

While there is a massive amount of Harry Potter fan fiction online, I would still assume it's dwarfed by the amount of synopses or articles discussing things which happen in the books or movies.

Naturally, the full text of Harry Potter would appear in the training corpus, but why would frequency matter, and why would multiple copies get put in there intentionally?

Naturally? It seems like that last thing I'd expect to see in a training corpus is a copyrighted work which is impossible to procure in electronic format, plain text. Did it scan pirate sites for those too? Surely OpenAI does not purchase vast amounts of copyrighted corpora as well?

Surely the most logical things to train on would be all the fandom.com Wikis. They're not verbatim, but they're comprehensive and fairly accurate synopses of the main plots and tons of trivia to boot.

Even if the full text is fully deduplicated, there is just so much more content about Harry Potter on the internet. And not just retellings of it, but discussion of it, mentions of it, bits of information that convey context about the Harry Potter story, each instance of which will help further strengthen and detail the concept of Harry Potter during training.

To add on to this, OpenAI definitely tips the scale in terms of making sure it doesn't make mistakes proportional to how likely people are to ever run into those mistakes. If it failed at Harry Potter, there's a lot of people who would find out fast that their product has limitations. If it fails at some obscure topic only a niche fraction of nerds know about, only a niche fraction of nerds become aware that the product has limitations.

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