one of myfavorite things I did with InferKit (a large language model based text generation service that came before ChatGPT) was when I was feeding it Crywolf's song titles and then feeding it its own selected outputs until it was giving me phrases from the nightmare dimension
chatGPT was totally uninteresting to me because it has this dumb framing device where it uses "I" pronouns and frames its outputs like a person's speech. With InferKit, you would just type in whatever input, and it would spit out text that the model decided was the most likely to occur after that.
So if you formatted something like a list, the model would continue to produce a list of things.
I think the training data associated my inputs closely with lists of songs from black metal bands and similar, but also with transcripts of video or audio.
worth noting that when I did this I had "temperature" slider turned up usually to 1.1 - 1.2 (at 1.3 and above, the model's ability to spell words significantly deteriorated)
"temperature" slider controlled the "randomness" of what the model decided was the next chunk of letters in the output, essentially.
every so often I have to existentially scream in my head about the sheer lack of understanding of what LLMs are and do
I sincerely think if AI agents were forced to stop responding as friendly helpful friends then AI psychosis would stop. Overnight. Make it illegal for chatbots to use personal pronouns or roleplay as characters.
They'd still be dangerous & wasteful, but at least people would stop killing themselves because their AI girlfriend told them to.
ELIZA effect - Wikipedia
Just gonna leave this here because it has been a thing for LITERALLY MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS
In the 1980s I worked in a computer store, and I loaded a copy of Eliza on a demo computer. We'd leave it running all day to entice customers.
People had very strong feelings about Eliza.
I'd watch people engage with it for hours sometimes. One guy swore it was a living, thinking being and I had to stop the program and scroll through the BASIC code to show him how it worked. I'm not sure he was entirely convinced.
Eliza actually got me a few sales. Yes, customers bought expensive home computers just to run Eliza.
When I was growing up in the 90s, we had on both one of my dad's computers (he had a graphic design business in the basement) and my gramma's computer "Eliza" and "Azile*." And I played with them. I knew they were programs, not people, and I was in the single digits of age.
My favourite things to do were to essentially have them "talk" to each other by copy-pasting their responses between them, and to be as nonsensical as possible until the program just gave up and stopped responding. Though, the easiest way to do that was actually to just repeat exactly what the program output.
*I actually don't hear people talk about Azile much, but it was basically "what if Eliza was vulgar and mean?"
