> Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing are often trained to give narrower and more useful answers to their users. Some people think the vast potential of AI is stifled to be more appealing or commercially viable.
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> In late 2022, people began expressing this belief using a monster from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos — the shoggoth. The gross gelatinous monster represents AI's infinite ability to learn, change and adapt.
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> If an unleashed AI is a shoggoth, then what is its shackled chatbot version? A shoggoth with a tiny smiley face mask attached to it. When developers began altering chatbots using techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), AI enthusiasts likened it to slapping a happy face on an otherwise untamable beast.
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> This theory has since provided inspiration for plenty of shoggoth-themed AI art as well.
>ghoststrokes444 Where'd you get the idea for thus representation of gpt3?
>TetraspaceWest Lovecraftian outer things are like an existing trope that I can use to signal intelligence operating along totally different lines to humans, to contrast with the "understandable" in the original post.
>TetraspaceWest AI-as-outer-thing is a pre-existing trope, both the obvious powerful inhuman thing that kills you out of indifference and more recent AI aesthetics of creating arcane chants (“prompts”) to cajole it so I’m not the first to think of this though no specific source.
>ghoststrokes444 When you say "cajole" it, you mean manipulate, right? I've become somewhat concerned as of late as to the language being used to describe human interaction with these... "entities".
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> Also, do you have a favorite reference or author on such tropes, fiction or otherwise?
>lovetheusers I don’t think telling an inspiring and loving story via a prompt and asking a base model to predict what will happen next is manipulation. RLHF might be manipulation.
>jacyanthis Here's the latest iteration of the "techniques like RLHF are just putting superficial smiley faces on an opaque, alien, Shoggoth intelligence that we have no real control over" AI safety meme.