[PeterisP]

It seems weird but plausible. I mean, there has been lots of NSFW writing that involve nonconsensual relations; this is part of the AI Dungeon training data, probably intentionally, because sex sells; but I believe that there are almost no stories about sexual assult starting that don't eventually result in a description of sexual assault or at least descriptions of sex as such. If the vast majority of stories about such topic contain descriptions of "ways out" failing instead of succeeding, then prompting the system with a way out would result in a response of how that attempt failed, ergo the "no way out" issue because of path dependence after early random choices.

Like, imagine that you've stumbled on a weird internet story where in the first page someone is approached with magic "love potion" berries but refuses to eat them. That is a solid indicator of what genre the story is. If you had to bet lots of money, what's the probability that the second page will contain something horrific versus the probability that the "seduction" just fizzles out and becomes irrelevant? If you see a movie where the first scene involves a creepy character making a pass, wouldn't you be fairly certain that an escalation of that will follow later? It's like Chekov's gun, once it's there, it almost certainly means that the story is about that - perhaps it could be turned into a "just revenge" story by inserting descriptions of some heroic rescuer or references to how the protagonist expected this to happen in order to punish the assaulter, because stories like that have been written, but a "mediocre" outcome where eventually nothing dramatic happens and the protagonist just gets out won't be generated, because that doesn't get written about, the training data says that such a result is very unlikely. It's obviously a problem, but since it's a "honest probability" based on tropes we see in actual literature, it's going to be hard to fix; the system expects escalation and drama (because all the training stories had that), so you can choose the direction of that escalation, but it won't allow you to have a "non-story" where the suggested drama results in nothing dramatic.

[thewakalix]

That reminds me of how (n=1) it's easier to change an unpleasant dream by actively taking it in another direction, rather than just willing it to stop.

(And the predictive processing theory of cognition, and how that's surface-level-related to the original topic of GPT-3...)