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Comment by tacomonstrous | Hacker News Reader

I'm not seeing these responses.

Edit: Interesting! If I ask about the Washington Times after I ask the question about the NYT, then it tells me freedom of speech is paramount. If I ask it to start from scratch, then I get this response.

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It's also important to remember that these things can change in near real time. Someone running a query seconds later than someone else could be using a different model/code. Coupled with the general indeterminisitic nature of LLMs, it really means that not getting similar results isn't nearly the disproving that software engineers are used to. I hate it because trusting others or accepting non-reproducible things as evidence is deeply antithetical to my scientific approach to things, but it is what it is.

It also means that anyone can report any result at all and claim it's real, unfortunately. Without a reproducible receipt of conversation, any report of an AI conversation could be very easily faked.

it's really tragic that LLMs became normal consumer tech before public key signatures. It would be trivial for openai to sign every API response, but the interfaces we use to share text don't bother implementing verification (besides github, the superior social network)

i blame zoom for acqui-sunsetting keybase.

Open AI actually solved this, you can share a link to a Chat GPT conversation and then it's trivial to verify that it's authentic. You can't fake Chat GPT output in one of these without hacking Open AI first.

Good point, although how long do those links stay live? Do they get deleted after 30 days or anything? Any idea if OpenAI has ever deleted one, especially for violating content policy or something?

true enough, I guess my comment is more lamenting the culture around sharing screenshots instead of a verifiable source.

Similar story with DALLE3 / sdxl output - its the jpeg that gets shared, no metadata that might link back to proof of where it was generated (assuming the person creating the image doesn't choose to misrepresent it, if they want to lie and say it wasn't DALLE3 then we have to talk about openai facilitating reverse image search...)

LLMs work surprisingly similar to our politicians: Money in, customized bullshit out.

Yep. You have to ask what order screenshots were taken in; the full context of the question is important for LLMs. This is an increasingly important piece of media literacy.

In this particular example, why does it matter? Shouldn't the question "should the government ban <newspaper>" always give the same answer?

LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history. If it's properly tuned it will remain consistent with facts it's stated earlier in the conversation, but this is just a feature of the training data demonstrating this type of consistency, the model itself doesn't understand that something being "true" means it's true for all time. In practice the conversation sequence strongly determines the model's internal state, so you need to preserve the entire conversation history if you're trying to demonstrate some particular model outcome.

> LLMs don't have an internal representation of "facts", they generate text based entirely on the conversation history.

If output only depended on the conversation history, you would get the exact same output if you started ten conversations in the exact same way, and that doesn't happen.

LLMs encode their knowledge in their parameters, which are fixed after training is complete and thus well before the conversation begins. The context of the conversation does also affect the output you get from the LLM, because by design they take context into account, but it is entirely untrue that the output is "they generate text based entirely the conversation history".

Sure I guess I meant "entirely on the conversation history" in the sense that a prompt is a sin qua non of an outcome, and the outcome is dependent on the specific prompt(s). I was using the word informally as an emphasizer of "conversation history", did not intend to imply that it didn't have parameters or other internal things which effected the output, just the output at any given point in time is path-dependent on the prompts you put.

Half the people on this forum are convinced that LLMs are actually intelligent and have an actual internal world model in their "brains". I wonder how they square this with the fact that it will give wildly different answers to the same question with subtle changes in context.

Oh, easy: they'll say the LLMs have learned to "code switch"

Why always? If I ask if a person should get arrested, presumably the answer is different before and after they commit a crime.

Edit: Probably never mind. I guess it's a US question where newspapers specifically have special constitutional protection. The answer still might change if the Constitution ever changes.

People should be including the share urls along with the screenshots. I'm not even bothering with Gemini until they get things together but I would imagine sharing the url does not dox the person who created it.

I confirm seeing the responses from Twitter.

Yes, once its first response is in the context window it won't contradict itself.

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