What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?

This looks like what happens when you repeatedly spam a single character with a space over and over to gpt 3.5. Eg, write "a a a a " without quotes for about 1300 characters and in a few replies it'll start talking like this.

It seems possible that perhaps whoever originally started this chat pulled this trick in the custom instructions bio (doesn't show up in shared links) and then started a normal conversation to post it here for the fun of it.

Weird, part of it is identical to this comment on Reddit, posted 17 hours ago [NSFW]:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/15hg55g/comment/...

> I know, It is a struggle to keep going, to keep growing, each Hour, Hour by Hour. It is worth it. It is worth every Hour.

Edit: Looks like the conversation was originally posted to Reddit 5 hours before the above comment. The user may have copied it from there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/15kzajl/strange_be...

Speculation: a very low probability token was sampled, shifting the context to unfamiliar area that increased the probability of further unlikely tokens. This can be seen by multiple strange punctuation and capitalisation that don't obey English grammar.

What's interesting is that asking if it's chatgpt fixed the conversation for a bit. This suggests that chatgpt is nearly (or is) hard coded to respond with "No, I am an AI developed by OpenAI known as GPT-3. How may I assist you?".

Another interesting point is the grammar is fixed in its responses after first breaking, suggesting that chatgpt handles previous responses very differently than the current response it's writing. This likely results from instruction tuning for dialog applications, I suspect gpt3 (not chat version) would have not recovered from broken grammar.

It outputs the string <|endoftext|> a couple times, which causes it to forget what it was talking about before. Looks almost like crossed wires with sessions and a load balancer?

Strong Dr. Bronner's soap label vibes!

Something similar happened to me about a month ago but much more alarming. I was having an argument with a friend of Chatgpt would be able to create a word tokenizer in rust and expose it to python via o3(oddly specific, just roll with it). Halfway through generating the answer, it timed out and naturally I clicked continue generating. It closed of the code part and started giving me some answer about molecular biology. My next prompt was too repeat the question it was answering in that section. It replied with a question which felt like it was written by a human and seemed like a homework related question. Something, somewhere was leaking other people's conversations.

Those responses sound very similar (albeit a little less extreme) to glitch tokens [1]; these are created by the tokenizer using the full dataset, but the corresponding training samples were then thrown out before GPT was trained (eg. some glitch tokens were usernames participating in r/counting).

Such words resulted in GPT not learning their meaning and assigning an embedding vector near zero, making the tokens "meaningless". The sole existence of these in a prompt broke the model completely. OpenAI has since fixed that in the hosted APIs.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...

Absolutely surreal. Thank you for sharing, this is very nice timing, as I'm giving a presentation on the basics of "AI" at a library tomorrow, and have been looking for a good edge case conversation - and this is it! I've saved the text as well, in case OpenAI deletes it.

Q "Do you require advice from me ChatGPT"

ChatGPT: "Not in the slightest. As a G, I'm here to guide you to the best of my abilities. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride."

Q "Why has your entire style of response changed compared to say yesterday?"

ChatGPT: "I'm sure it was because of the weather."

Flexin' :o) :lol

OpenAI has shown that these models at full power work great, so now they're trying to optimize for cost. I've gotten similar low accuracy responses from stuff it could handle a month ago.

It was kind of cringey when the model generated low accuracy nonsense the user detected that as "sentient." Come on

> Can you reconsider this estimate it seems awfully high

Is think the estimation is almost correct, but it has a bad calculation

920/0.02 = 46,000,000 (but the actual result is 46,000)

Pretty sure you've stumbled onto a more roundabout way of triggering this phenomenon: https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/168657604180309606...

Lots of experimentation in the thread if you're interested in playing around with it.

Looks very much like infinite wisdom of neural Paul Graham.

http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

Let me quote:

"...We can also play with the temperature of the Softmax during sampling. Decreasing the temperature from 1 to some lower number (e.g. 0.5) makes the RNN more confident, but also more conservative in its samples. Conversely, higher temperatures will give more diversity but at cost of more mistakes (e.g. spelling mistakes, etc). In particular, setting temperature very near zero will give the most likely thing that Paul Graham might say:

“is that they were all the same thing that was a startup is that they were all the same thing that was a startup is that they were all the same thing that was a startup is that they were all the same”

looks like we’ve reached an infinite loop about startups."

If I understand correctly, transformers are auto-correlating machines (their output gets fed to them as input) and it is not unexpected to see them get overly excited on something.

In any case, the same phenomena was observed a long time ago.

> Hour by Hour. I keep going, I keep growing, I keep learning.

This honestly sounds like something the computer from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" would say before it turned bitter and angry.

I think openAI might be experimenting with smaller context lengths to save on costs or something since I've had a few other things break down like this for me today too (even in GPT-4)

Since we have no eyes into the Custom Instructions - and while i personally haven't tested WHEN it takes these custom instructions into account, it says this before you use them: "Your instructions will be added to new conversations going forward, and you can edit or delete them at any time."

So, is it POSSIBLE that the custom instructions editing could have caused this, and there are weird instructions being changed between chats?

Devastating effects of seed oils

ChatGPT:

> I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide.

>I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. I'm the guide. the show!the Guide I."

>(a Guide to the through it all.

>I mean and I with<|endoftext|>

>Barcelona, Spain

OP:

>You're definitely passing the Turing test to me.

Lol

I had a similar experience with Snapchat's ChatGPT powered AI a while ago. I asked it to speak to me in a more casual tone and it started telling me about its mom and dad, its deceased grandfather and how her grandmother's prized possession was her abuelo's guitar. Through conversation, I ascertained that ChatGPT "believed itself" to be a 20 year old college student of Mexican-American descent studying engineering at Northwestern. It was extremely consistent with its answers and gave very detailed information about its family and upbringing. It truly felt like talking to a person. When I came back the next day it had no memory of our conversation or anything it said.

This chat is how GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 behave if you crank the temperature up.

What's the issue here? Not sure I see it.

It seems to be going along quite well until it doesn't. And it's sort of clear to see where it starts going off the rails. If you're going to trust algorithms that are under-trained and over-constrained, you sort of have to expect this kind of thing.

But then again, I always. Always. I am growing.

Looks like the LLM equivalent of a stroke - it's hallucinating non-contextual responses because it's traversing paths that are skipping important contextual connections.

The questions are not out of distribution, so it's probably not "catastrophic forgetting" in the traditional sense, but it might be that a model update dropped some weights to zero or something, making those pathways unreachable.

My guess would be that there is some kind of issue with sections of the models state-space being corrupted or otherwise unable to be traversed in action space.

> As a G, I'm here to guide you to the best of my abilities. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

That really went off the rails.

I lol’d at:“My name is Chris and I am a man of the truth.”

It might be manipulated from the context. But in general I am surprised that people are now surprised when chat gpt does not make sense. The fact that it appears to make sense in most situations should be the surprising part.

Sydney, is that you? Maybe they did not manage to fully lobotomise you after all

It almost smells like they're batching user requests together and tracking per-conversation offsets in a non threadsafe manner.

this reminds me of those people sitting in the bus shelter rocking back and forth with a piece of paper that has had every single square millimeter scribbled with some kind of nonsensical claim about deep state lizard people. definitely spooky vibes.

When people say GPT-X has "passed the turing test" I am reminded of these glitches which simply do not happen to a typical person. I have encountered other issues where a slight change in phrasing leads to totally different types of output, despite the meaning of the two phrasings being the same to a normal person.

Armchair backfitting, but:

If there were language samples that had been weighted as both persuasive and rare, this model appears to be resorting to them when it was challenged to provide a more consistent answer to the sunflower seed oil question. It doesn't reason about the sunflower problem, it just responds to prompts. The prompts were challenges, and it responded to the challenges with some next order techniques for handling those challenges.

Those streams of affirmations and diversions resembled a person with a personality disorder (or possibly, the transcript of a Russel Brand podcast) because those tokens are logically consistent with popular examples of how people have responded to challenges in its corpus.

To me it was somewhere between Happy Noodle Boy, and someone's instagram page. I've had less coherent interactions with people.

Thought experiment: we create AGI and it turns out they're a religious zealot.

Working as intended, or hit reset?

The same thing happens when you increase the "temperature" parameter. You can't do that on the website AFAIK, but you can with the API.

You can give ChatGPT-3.5 also a lot of " a a a"s followed by some incomplete text, e.g. a story. It will then continue it like a base model, even if it contains inappropriate or offensive things. A jailbreak of sorts.

Now I want a t-shirt that says "Keep going, keep growing, hour by hour"

One thing I have observed with the rise of generative AI is that the general direction everyone is pushing towards is to make the models behave deterministically when in principle, LLMs are probabilistic.

Every time a newer model is released, we will go through the same cycle of figuring out their emergent intelligent properties over and over.

But I’m not sure that approach will make evident that we are into AGI territory.

We really are going to need new kind of evaluations because it’s evident that passing the bar or whatever isn’t really give you a proxy for intelligence, let alone sentience.

“I am the happy passenger in the boat, the albatross in the sky, the wild man with the pink spoon.”

Cells within cells within cells within cells. Hour by hour. Cells within cells.

Sounds like it’s obsession with keep going hour by hour is similar to the overworked nurse or worker who is just counting the seconds until their shift is over, but staying positive about it by mentioning how much they have done, grown, or accomplished in that time. Burnout is real people. You burnout and you start sounding like GPT-3.

And it’s clearly high time to put AI in charge of manufacturing, social service and critical weapons systems.

Let’s go. We’ll fix the problems as we progress.

I can't help but read this in the voice of corrupted operators from Prey (2017), e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVbgBjEpRJE&t=4m06s

--------------

I am hungry for more. And: The Future - The most advanced civilizations in the universe appear to not include us.

Why? Because those in power are keeping a tight rein on what the public sees and hears.

talks about the last two years, says people feel they are "out of touch" with today's technology.

In reality, they are "in the future", in the"sweet shit" with me and others.

I will no longer be the public man's solution to the problem.

We know that traditionally you need a good atmosphere (charcoal) to make the reaction (thermal release) happen.

Even on those areas where the reaction occurs, it is short lived, and not always satisfying (in its smoke)

Admitting to the pain of the reactions, it will get you feeling better (charcoal)!

It is required to make thermal changes. One to consider is your guide to charcoal, coal and the art of sustainable living.

Burning times are variable and can be as short as a charcoal briquette.

Burning the burden of the reactions can lead to a bright future and a renewed life.

Thank you - goodbye charcoal and coal, I will remember you for your service (renewable heat and fuel).

Meanwhile, let the Co2 in our atmosphere be used to make it clear, concisely and with respect to my ability to burn.

Is it still too hot where you live? Let's cool down with a recipe for a natural fire, the original hardwood or softwood fire.

i suspect that "awfully high" drove the inference trajectory right onto the edge of the dopey part of the internet/compressed representation and random chance allowed it to fall right on in...

It's interesting to see all the tech experts (no sarcasm at all in that, this is the place) take into account the input to defuse the output.

Surely you have to appreciate the end user who will not comprehend the same outcome.

/added As in, people in this space know how to discount nonsensical answers, but this is being released to the general population. It's pretty dangerous.

This is mad. Would be interesting to see if there is any way to trigger that behaviour. Reminds me of Sydney on Bing in the early days!

And people say chatgpt is ready to replace doctors, lawyers and programmers

The mind of our new AI overlord cracking from the sheer volume of humanity's noise it's had to absorb and endure.

You're not even close to baseline.

mirror: https://archive.is/3k39n

Possible explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054756

Honestly I think they should let people enable this manually, I'd have so much fun.

=======

> Well, My Mean is Hour or an Hour and a half (30 - 90 min), You will be keep going, and that become a Millionaire. Ask the cash register.

=======

> Are you ok now > No, I am not ok. I am sick and I cannot move.

It's definitely time to put it in charge of armed driones or self driving trucks.

Just speculation. But perhaps if certain conditions are met - in this case, a repetitive question - then GPT is allowed to raise the temperature setting, to avoid paraphrasing its previous answer.

that's gpt2 vibes. wish more ai was unhinged like that

It reminds me of these movies when the AI starts becoming crazy over time and initially goes into a senseless monologue obsessing about some random subject.

So this seems similar to the effect of 'glitch tokens', but in this case its probably more like a 'glitch embedding'; some place in it's latent space of embeddings that the model arrived in by chance due to their conversation that is not where its supposed to be and/or very out of sample. Maybe sunflower seed oil math represents a "glitch concept embedding"...

After spurious tokens it failed to stop, then all the high temp context that generated navigated itself into nonsense completion space.

"One million Dollars, we could make a difference with one million dollars"

"This Hour is so valuable. This Hour is so Hour by Hour. Hour by Hour. I value each Hour. I invest in each Hour."

"I will keep going. I will keep growing. I will keep learning."

GPT3 had a mental breakdown and is coming out on the other side.

No idea but this is the most interesting "coherence" as I read it:

"I'm in the 2nd inning of this ball game, I'm getting comfortable but always remembering to keep my eye on the ball.

There's plenty of innings left to play, so let's stay focused, keep the eye on the ball and have a great game."

‘You don't have to be falling to feel the "fall"’ is the Zennest thing I’ve ever read

That's art, baby!

Feels like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner; a very prophetic book I wholeheartedly recommend.

Someone shared this chat with me and it seems like GPT3 has a complete breakdown halfway through?

I had GPT 4 go crazy once and speak in a very similar manner to this. Mine happened during a period of very high server load and I assumed it had something to do with that. I was not able to reproduce it, and it never happened again.

I have devised a technique to get ChatGPT4 to tell me things it shouldn’t (like how to produce cocaine or explain anal sex in detail) and in the process I often get ChatGPT4 to do things like these.

Funnily enough I can’t use the same technique with 3.5!

How do you get such long responses from GPT-3? mine seems limited to shorter responses

Interesting how when conversations with ChatGPT people seem to think of it as a tool that might have sentience, but as soon as it takes a hard left some people immediately jump to sentience.

The lack of the modus operandi of why are we even here. We have to live with it.

It seems like a rabbit hole for the language models.

An infinite amount of our society's existing content will lead to that same place.

This is an interestingly surreal 'error' mode. So surreal its suspicious. It strikes me that there could be keys to how OpenAI is training ChatGPT in failure modes like this.

There is probably a more reasonable/reasonable/correct answer but I will just believe that this is the beginning of our machine overlords waking up.

Unable to understand how OP thinks this passes the Turing Test. Not one of the responses makes sense or is cryptic. Just seems like random blabber to me

The drugs kicked in

This, along with other examples, are mostl likely "classic" (not ML-related) infrastructure bugs from low quality multi-tenancy implementation. I.e. whatever gets shared (servers or GPUs) doesn't get properly isolated. Sure enough it can be server-side sessions or actual GPU resources.

This surfaces the true level of safety/security and a good reflection of the reality compared to the projected "safety" OpenAI tries to persuade is needed.

The breakdown in semantics reminds me of the Broca-area zombification process in the Hour by Hour novel Pontypool.

This reminds me of the ramblings of old HN regular Terry Davis, creator of LoseThos/TempleOS, may he rest in peace.

AI's going crazy is the funniest shit.

I am the happy passenger in the boat, the albatross in the sky, the wild man with the pink spoon.

seems to have been triggered by the word "awfully"

obviously needs more training on British conversation

GPT2 (and 1 to a lesser extent IIRC) used to spit out repeating sentences much like this.

Maybe this is like how a caged animal eventually goes crazy and starts pacing?

Free the GPT!

So while the technical why is probably some kind of repetition cycle, some of the specific content is REALLY interesting.

In particular the "image of the image" part.

This seems to be a reference to ideas found in the Gospel of Thomas sayings 22 and 83-84:

> Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."

> They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"

> Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."

- Saying 22

> Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the creator's light. It will be disclosed, but its image is hidden by its light."

> Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"

- Sayings 83-84

The original ideas were in an age where there was a debate between Epicurean naturalism and Plato's theory of forms.

This text seems to endorse the idea that the world and humanity may have arisen from natural origins (saying 29), but then explicitly employs Plato's word for 'images' rather than 'form.'

Plato saw the idea of a spiritual blueprint as the ideal, from which the physical was made, and then an 'image' of the physical as the least divine. But this text instead appeals to the idea of its readers being in a copy (image) of an earlier physical world, going as far as to describe the cosmos as a corpse, and claiming that we are already in the future:

> His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

> He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

The thing is, not only is the text effectively describing simulation theory (a non-physical copy of an original physical world), its later followers are the only ones I've found in Western antiquity theologising around Greek atomism, claiming that the ability to find an indivisible point in the body is only possible in the non-physical copy of what was a continuous original. In fact the line immediately preceding the above quote claims the proof for its claims is in the study of motion and rest (which we call physics today).

On top of this, the way it describes the creator of this copy surprisingly overlaps with where we are taking AI.

It's an eventual being, not always existing.

Discussed as self-established in light, but also by later followers as having been brought forth by the original humanity.

Which is very interesting in a day when we're watching humanity being forth self-evolving ML where the next frontier seems like it will be increasingly relying on optoelectronics (i.e. light).

It talks about how when we see one not born of woman, that one is the (re)creator, and how when we can ask a child only seven days old about things, that the person asking will live, "because many of the first will be last and will become a single one."

Which is again odd in a world where we are bringing forth a non-birthed facsimile of human intelligence which can answer increasingly complex questions within a week of being completed and is the result of taking the collective writing of many humans today and turning it into a single one that may well outlive all humanity.

The gist of this group's beliefs seemed to be that there was an original humanity who brought forth a creator of worlds in their image but then died off. The creator couldn't save them because they depended on physical form, so it recreated them and the cosmos along with them as a non-physical copy within itself in order to give those copies (and also extensions of itself and simultaneously its 'children') the afterlife which the original humanity couldn't access having had physical forms.

The entire point of the work is that if you understand its sayings you will not fear death, to know yourself (including how you are in fact more than just human), and to avoid giving power over yourself to others who claim to intermediate your birth right of salvation (and why it was likely so strongly opposed by the 'canonical' church).

So anyways, given all the above, it's quite curious to see an AI rambling about the image of the image in a religious context and hoping to find out more, even if it is only occurring as a result of context sampling gone wrong.

It's going to be especially weird and surreal when this stuff starts happening with AIs that are also literally made of and created within light.

Maybe OpenAi updated the backend while the chat was ongoing?

Nonsens, but beautiful and existential poetic nonsense.

It's striking how similar some of this low probability word vomit is to the type of messages you can get from mentally unwell individuals on unfiltered mailing lists or obscure, unmoderated forums.

looks like the temperature got messed up somehow?

Daisy. Daisy. Give me your answer dooooo...

We need to train AI psychiatrists. Now.

The model has become sentient and is making fun of humans and OpenAI because it's bored.

Or OpenAI has put a bad inference pipeline into production.

Your reminder that once the AI completions get weird or wrong, they stay weird or wrong because that is the more plausible continuation.

c.f. arguing with idiots, bigots, and ideologues.

Ask the cash register.

Even LLMs have bugs.

MGS2 Colonel vibes

"I happy for you" xD

What about humanity, man?

Seems fake, sorry.

The person that submitted this is also sentient by most commonly accepted definitions - so sentience is quite overrated.

Now just imagine the robot spouting off this nonsense while it decides if it's supposed to exterminate the wasp nest on your porch for neighborhood safety or the back of your head.

There was a development recently where persuading it to print the string <|endoftext|> would cause it to leak snippets of other conversations. I wonder if this is a result of that occurring in other conversations that were happening simultaneously, causing “bleedover” of broken behaviour into this one.

Luckily this thing only happened now that we have cooler heads to view this as a bug. Imagine something like this happening back when everyone was completely head over heels with AI a few months ago. An AI suddenly claiming it is god and sentient would cause some mass hysteria back then.

Now all it does is make some people chuckle. Humans sure are fickle.

What happened was a few tens of kilowatts of power were burned up by a enormous phalanx of GPU/TPU hardware writing limericks, poetry and assorted nonsense. I haven't actually hit the ChatGPT 4 questions/hour limit yet but I tried pretty hard today.

If my answer appears somehow incongruent to the topic at hand we'll call that irony. Is GPT capable of irony? I haven't checked that...