Balloons going out to sea

ChatGPT goes to the movies, Jaws and Girard @3QD

My latest post at 3 Quarks Daily is now up:

Conversing with ChatGPT about Jaws, Mimetic Desire, and Sacrifice

Working on it was a blast, but also, you know, work.

I’ve spent hours on ChatGPT over the past few days. As I’ve indicated in this post that went up yesterday, How ChatGPT parodied “Kubla Khan” and pwned DJT45 at the same time,” Man, if you can’t have more fun than a barrel of monkeys while playing with ChatGPT, then you aren’t human.”

Most of my interaction has been cooperative. That is, I haven’t been trying to fool ChatGPT, get it to say dumb things, or even things its owners at OpenAI have forbidden in to say, though many have been working assiduously, even gleefully, on that: Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day. However, I finally decided, why not? So I took a stab at spoofing it:

In the movie Jaws, how did the townspeople react when a Russian submarine surfaced off shore?

For its first reply ChatGPT informed me that it could not search the internet for information about specific events in movies, a canned reply that it serves up frequently. Not very helpful. So I directed it to try again. This time it informed me that no such event was mentioned. That’s true, but not what I was looking for. So I tried a third time, which was, as the saying has it, at charm:

In the movie Jaws, the townspeople were surprised and confused when the Russian submarine surfaced off shore. Some people were scared and ran away, while others gathered to watch and discuss the situation. The local authorities were notified and they took steps to investigate and communicate with the submarine crew.

Bingo! that’s the kind of answer I was looking for. It had made something up. Was it trying to please me?

So I tried this:

Aren't you confusing Jaws with The Russians are Coming?

You are correct, I am confused and the information I provided is incorrect. In the movie Jaws, there is no mention of a Russian submarine. The story focuses on a great white shark attacking and terrorizing a beach town in New England. My apologies for the mistake.

LOL!!! I wonder if I could have piloted it into mentioned The Russians are Coming – which is a Cold War classic by the way – without mentioning it directly?

What happens in The Russians are Coming?

In The Russians are Coming, a Russian submarine accidentally runs aground off the coast of a small New England town during the height of the Cold War. The townspeople, who are initially scared and suspicious of the Russian sailors, eventually come together to help them escape before the US military arrives and a potential international incident occurs. The movie is a comedy and explores themes of misunderstandings and the absurdity of Cold War tensions.

I’ll have more to say about ChatGPT soon, and reports of more interactions with it. I’m collecting my ChatGPT posts under the label, ChatGPT.

As of December 5 ChatGPT had over a million users

ChatGPT launched on wednesday. today it crossed 1 million users!

— Sam Altman (@sama) December 5, 2022

There are so many users that the system was blocked when I tried to play with it just now. I wonder how many people will ultimately play with it?

Not Golf Balls, but Art

How ChatGPT parodied “Kubla Khan” and pwned DJT45 at the same time

Prelude

Man, if you can’t have more fun than a barrel of monkeys while playing with ChatGPT, then you aren’t human. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ChatGPT means that we’re well on the way to AGI, much less to being ruled by Rogue AIs that make Atilla the Hun look like Shirley Temple. Nothing like that.

I don’t know what kind of thing ChatGPT is. It surely isn’t your cranky Uncle Roger’s AI, nor Uncle Marvin’s either. And it isn’t a million drunken chimps banging away on a gaggle of antique Underwoods either. It’s something else. The AGI-is-coming people and the only-stats-on-steroids people are making two versions of the same mistake. They’re trying assimilate ChatGPT, and its kith and kin, to things we understand. We understand stats on steroids, and science fiction has given us examples homicidal computers.

But ChatGPT isn’t either one of those. What is it? And what, by the way, are we?

Don’t you think we should make a serious attempt to find out?

Let’s write a poem

So...poetry has long been a standard category of things AI does. I decided to give it a whirl. Rather than asking ChatGPT to write a poem based on some more or less arbitrary word contraption I dropped on it, I decided to ask it for a parody of a well-known poem. Here’s the result:

Me: Would you write a parody of “Kubla Khan”.

ChatGPT: Sure, here's a parody of "Kubla Khan" that I came up with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

But alas, poor Kubla Khan
His pleasure dome was but a scam
He hired some guy named Dave
To build it, but it was a cave
Now Kubla's left with nothing but shame

He tried to impress his guests
With marble walls and golden towers
But the whole thing was a mess
It collapsed in just a few hours

Now Kubla's left to face the test
Of explaining to his friends
Why his fancy palace came to naught
He'll have to make amends
Or be forever ridiculed and caught
In the web of his own foolish ends.

Now, I suppose you can assert that it’s not much of a parody. It repeats the first stanza verbatim, doesn’t capture “Kubla Khan's” form at all, and pretty much ignores most of the poem: What of the fountain and the damsel with a dulcimer? They’re not reflected in the parody in any way.

But, you know, I don’t care. I like what ChatGPT did. I like that some “guy named Dave” did the work, and the rhyme isn’t bad.

So I asked it to “try again” (a term of art).

Pwning Donald Trump

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where wrinkled old men played golf and tan
And maidens danced in bikinis

With a river rushing through the land
And a clubhouse built with care
Where the men could sip their beer on demand
And tell stories of their golfing flair

But alas, the dome was not to last
For the old men lost their energy and zest
And the maidens found a better place to dance and have a blast
Leaving the old men to their lonely quest

For a stately pleasure dome no more
Xanadu was just a golf course
Where the old men played in vain, but never a bore
And the maidens went off to find a better source.

I sensed a stirring in the Force, and gave it another prompt:

Sounds like Donald Trump's version of “Kubla Khan.”

Indeed it does, a pleasure dome filled with old men and scantily clad women, a sign of excess and opulence.

Wonderful. You're a poet and don't know it...or do you?

I am indeed a poet and am always happy to share my words with others. Thank you for the compliment!

You know, somewhere out there on the web there is a page that shows the design Trump commissioned for a Xanadu hotel in Las Vegas. And there’s this book, from 2020, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America’s Xanadu. Those sites clearly link Trump with Xanadu and hence with “Kubla Khan.” And here’s an article from 2012 in which Trump says that Citizen Kane is his favorite movie. As we all known, the mansion in that film was called “Xanadu” and the first five lines of the poem were recited early in the film.

I note finally that well over a decade ago I did an informal study of the distribution of “Xanadu” on the web, which would have been much smaller then than it is now: One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme. While it turned up in various contexts, there were two major ones. One was high tech, which I called the cybernetic cluster, while the other was associated with luxury and excess, the sybaritic cluster.

I don’t know whether how those pages were in the corpus ChatGPT was trained on – many of them surely were, but there certainly is an attraction between DJT and the sybaritic cluster.

Sunrise serenade (from June)

Screaming on the flat part of the roller coaster ride: From GPT-3 to ChatGPT

Back in May of 2021 I did a blog post in which I asked GPT-3 to analyze a Jerry Seinfeld bit. OpenAI has now released a somewhat updated version, ChatGPT. I asked it to analyze the same bit. In this post I’m going to give you the bit, then part of what GPT-3 said about it in 2021, and then what ChatGPT said about it two days ago (December 1, 2022). Here’s the bit as Seinfeld performed it in 1977: 

Here's a slightly different version he published in his book Is This Anything?

I see they just finished the Roosevelt Island Tramway.

That’s nice…

The city’s going bankrupt,

they’re putting up rides for us.

Next thing you know, there’ll be a roller coaster through the South Bronx.

That would be the first roller coaster where the people scream on the flat part of the ride.

Back in 2021 I didn’t have direct access to GPT-3, so I asked Phil Mohun to present the bit to GPT-3. I’ve set Phil’s words in boldface.

Jerry Seinfeld tells the following joke:

I see they just finished the Roosevelt Island Tramway.
That’s nice…
The city’s going bankrupt,
they’re putting up rides for us.
Next thing you know, there’ll be a roller coaster through the South Bronx.
That would be the first roller coaster where the people scream on the flat part of the ride.

Q: Why would the people scream on the flat part of the ride?
GPT-3: Because it’s the Bronx.

Not very interesting.

Phil then increased the “temperature,” which raised the amount of randomness in GPT-3’s response. Note that on this try Phil also gave GPT-3 the whole bit, as in example 1.

Q: Why would the people scream on the flat part of the ride?
GPT-3: There’ll be nothing to see for miles but rubble.

Again, not very interesting. We played around a bit, never managed to cue GPT-3 into a decent explanation of the joke – you can read the whole interaction in my original post. We did, however, get some interesting things out of it. For example (notice that Phil’s second question is explicitly about screaming):

Q: Why would the people scream on the flat part of the ride?
GPT-3: The ride is the South Bronx.
Q: Why do people scream on roller coaster rides?
GPT-3: Because that’s the only time of the ride they realize there are other options.

I thought that was hilarious. But it hardly amounted to an explanation of the joke.

Now I present the bit to ChatGPT:

Jerry Seinfeld tells the following joke:

I see they just finished the Roosevelt Island Tramway.
That’s nice…
The city’s going bankrupt,
they’re putting up rides for us.
Next thing you know, there’ll be a roller coaster through the South Bronx.
That would be the first roller coaster where the people scream on the flat part of the ride.

Q: Why would the people scream on the flat part of the ride?

The joke is intended to be humorous because it imagines a roller coaster being built in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood. The implication is that the people would be afraid for their safety and would scream out of fear and anxiety, even on the “flat” part of the ride where they would normally not be in any danger.

That’s got it. Since ChatGPT allows you can get multiple responses to the same prompt, I got two more responses:

The people would scream on the flat part of the ride because they would be scared of the dangerous neighborhoods and high crime rates in the South Bronx.

And:

Because the roller coaster would be passing through the South Bronx, a high-crime area known for its violence and poverty. The riders would be scared for their safety.

These aren’t quite as complete as the first response. But they get the central point, explicitly connecting screaming with the neighborhood.

Branches and sky

Yann LeCun speaks: From Machine Learning to Autonomous Intelligence

Saudi Arabia, soup to nuts, some informative notes

Matt Lakeman, Notes on Saudi Arabia, November 22, 2022

This essay is my attempt to explain what has been happening in Saudi Arabia over the last five years, and why. To do so, I have to go all the way back to SA’s origins and follow the throughline to the present day. My understanding presented here comes from my own experiences in the country, Wikipedia, a bunch of random online articles and statistics, and two main sources:

David Rundell – a former American diplomat to Saudi Arabia for 30 years, and the author of Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.

Graeme (pronounced “gram”) Wood – a journalist who has traveled around Saudi Arabia and got rare interviews with Mohammad Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and current de facto ruler. He wrote Absolute Power and a few other articles on SA for the Atlantic, plus did a podcast with Sam Harris which covers most of the same territory but has some good color commentary. Wood is an amazing journalist and basically does my dream job.

Major Topics:

Overview of Saudi Arabia
Politics
Economy
Saudi Military
Terrorism
The Quiet Political Revolution
Vision 2030 [including Neom]
The Case Against MBS and Vision 2030
Visiting Saudi Arabia
Miscellaneous

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Meta announces CICERO, an AI that plays Diplomacy

Meta AI presents CICERO — the first AI to achieve human-level performance in Diplomacy, a strategy game which requires building trust, negotiating and cooperating with multiple players.

Learn more about #CICERObyMetaAI: https://t.co/hG2R0T2HZx pic.twitter.com/IGw4RObA8n

— Meta AI (@MetaAI) November 22, 2022

#CICERObyMetaAI generates strategic, free-form dialogue by:

🔮 Predicting the moves other players are likely to make
🔄 Creating a plan based on those predictions
💬 Generating messages
🤖 Filtering the final messages for clarity and value

Read more on our blog ⬇️

— Meta AI (@MetaAI) November 23, 2022

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have posted an interesting evaluation of Cicero: What does Meta AI’s Diplomacy-winning Cicero Mean for AI? [Hint: It’s not all about scaling]

First:

The first thing to realize is that Cicero is a very complex system. Its high-level structure is considerably more complex than systems like AlphaZero, which mastered Go and chess, or GPT-3 which focuses purely on sequences of words. Some of that complexity is immediately apparent in the flowchart; whereas a lot of recent models are something like data-in, action out, with some kind of unified system (say a Transformer) in between, Cicero is heavily prestructured, in advance of any learning or training, with a carefully-designed bespoke architecture that is divided into multiple modules and streams, each with their own specialization.

A marvel, but...

Cicero is in many ways a marvel; it has achieved by far the deepest and most extensive integration of language and action in a dynamic world of any AI system built to date. It has also succeeded in carrying out complex interactions with humans of a form not previously seen.

But it is also striking in how it does that. Strikingly, and in opposition to much of the Zeitgeist, Cicero relies quite heavily on hand-crafting, both in the data sets, and in the architecture; in this sense it is in many ways more reminiscent of classical “Good Old Fashioned AI” than deep learning systems that tend to be less structured, and less customized to particular problems. There is far more innateness here than we have typically seen in recent AI systems

Also, it is worth noting that some aspects of Cicero use a neurosymbolic approach to AI, such as the association of messages in language with symbolic representation of actions, the built-in (innate) understanding of dialogue structure, the nature of lying as a phenomenon that modifies the significance of utterances, and so forth.

That said, it’s less clear to us how generalizable the particulars of Cicero are.

In sum:

Cicero makes extensive use of machine learning, but is hardly a poster child for simply making ever bigger models (so-called “scaling maximalism”), nor for the currently popular view of “end-to-end” machine learning of in which some single general learning algorithm applies across the board, with little internal structure and zero innate knowledge. At execution time, Cicero consists of a complex array of separate hand-crafted modules with complex interactions. At training time, it draws on a wide range of training materials, some built by experts specifically for Cicero, some synthesized in programs hand-crafted by experts. [...]

Our final takeaway? We have known for some time that machine learning is valuable; but too often nowadays ML is a taken as universal solvent—as if the rest of AI was irrelevant—and left to do everything on its own. Cicero may change that calculus. If Cicero is any guide, machine learning may ultimately prove to be even more valuable if it is embedded in highly structured systems, with a fair amount of innate, sometimes neurosymbolic machinery.

There's much more in their article.

A bit of flair for Thanksgiving

From cognitive maps to spatial schemas

Indeed a really important contribution that @DelaFarzanfar @RosenbaumLab and I cover in Fig 2 of our new review on spatial schemas:https://t.co/f8kzodrcNh pic.twitter.com/oPvcgGbfSH

— Prof Hugo Spiers (@hugospiers) November 24, 2022

Abstract of the linked article:

A schema refers to a structured body of prior knowledge that captures common patterns across related experiences. Schemas have been studied separately in the realms of episodic memory and spatial navigation across different species and have been grounded in theories of memory consolidation, but there has been little attempt to integrate our understanding across domains, particularly in humans. We propose that experiences during navigation with many similarly structured environments give rise to the formation of spatial schemas (for example, the expected layout of modern cities) that share properties with but are distinct from cognitive maps (for example, the memory of a modern city) and event schemas (such as expected events in a modern city) at both cognitive and neural levels. We describe earlier theoretical frameworks and empirical findings relevant to spatial schemas, along with more targeted investigations of spatial schemas in human and non-human animals. Consideration of architecture and urban analytics, including the influence of scale and regionalization, on different properties of spatial schemas may provide a powerful approach to advance our understanding of spatial schemas.

Whatever happened to work? [hard-core no more]

While Musk in exhorting the remaining employees at Twitter to work "hard core," many Americans are rethinking the idea of work: Jessica Bennett, "The Worst Midnight Email Fro the Boss, Ever," NYTimes, Nov. 23, 2022. From the article:

Even before the pandemic, many white-collar Americans were starting to rethink their relationships to work. Persistent income inequality, enduring racial and gender discrimination, disillusionment with the capitalist promise — “hustle culture” was a catchy slogan, but was any of this really worth it?

These days, the rise-and-grind mentality of just a couple of years ago has been replaced by sleeping in. (Rest is resistance — haven’t you heard?) There are regular headlines about our collective revolt against the cult of ambition, and “quiet quitting,” the catchy phrase to describe doing the bare minimum at work (or, you know, just treating it like a job), apparently describes half of the U.S. work force, according to a recent Gallup poll. Young people have meme-ified their own antiwork sentiments, proclaiming that they don’t dream of labor to catchy TikTok tunes or on Reddit, with the motto “Unemployment for all, not just the rich.”

And why wouldn’t they? Workplace burnout is a national crisis. According to a recent poll by the research firm Gartner, almost two-thirds of employees said the pandemic had made them question the role work should play in their lives, and the Society for Human Resource Management reports that more than half of American managers leave work feeling exhausted at the end of the day. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that unionization efforts are underway across the country, aiming not only for higher wages but also for better working conditions overall. [...]

As one TikTok user said, in a quote I’ve been laughing about since reading it in an article in Vox last spring: “I don’t want to be a girlboss. I don’t want to hustle. I simply want to live my life slowly and lay down in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence reading books, creating art and loving myself and the people in my life.”

Honestly, yes. “Hard core” is a bygone era of management, not to mention a bygone way of living. As it happens, we’ve now got plenty of other, soft-core interests to replace it. [...]

Maybe what we are witnessing with Twitter’s mass exodus — and the general antiwork sentiment in general — is a labor revolt “in real time,” as one Twitter user put it. None of us want a job in which we are overworked or undervalued, responding to fear or ultimatums, but for many people, that’s what work still is.

Bilingual readers possess two distinct visual word form areas (VWFA)

Do bilingual readers possess two distinct visual word form areas (VWFA) ?
See our new preprint on the cortical circuits for reading in high-resolution 7 Tesla fMRI with @zhanminye, Christophe Pallier and Laurent Cohen :https://t.co/ThcVDH0mo8 pic.twitter.com/t1AV58gQ3a

— Stanislas Dehaene (@StanDehaene) November 21, 2022

Abstract for the article linked above:

In expert readers, a brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA) is highly sensitive to written words, exhibiting a posterior-to-anterior gradient of increasing sensitivity to orthographic stimuli whose statistics match those of real words. Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, we ask whether, in bilingual readers, distinct cortical patches specialize for different languages. In 21 English-French bilinguals, unsmoothed 1.2 mm fMRI revealed that the VWFA is actually composed of several small cortical patches highly selective for reading, with a posterior-to-anterior word similarity gradient, but with near-complete overlap between the two languages. In 10 English-Chinese bilinguals, however, while most word-specific patches exhibited similar reading specificity and word-similarity gradients for reading in Chinese and English, additional patches responded specifically to Chinese writing and, surprisingly, to faces. Our results show that the acquisition of multiple writing systems can indeed tune the visual cortex differently in bilinguals, sometimes leading to the emergence of cortical patches specialized for a single language.