Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Vermeulen 1771 days ago
It's laggy since it needs to do speech to text, gpt3 text response, then text to speech. Not sure what adds the most latency actually.

They only allow gpt3 chatbots if the chatbot is designed to speak only about a specific subject, and literally never says anything bad/negative (and we have to keep logs to make sure this is the case). Which is insane. Their reasoning to me was literally a 'what if' the chatbot "advised on who to vote for in the election". As if a chatbot in the context of a video game saying who to vote for was somehow dangerous

I understand the need to keep GPT3 private. There is a lot of possibility for deception using it. But they are so scared of their chatbot saying a bad thing and the PR around that they've removed the possibility of doing anything useful with it. They need to take context more into account - a clearly labeled chatbot in a video game is different than a Twitter bot

3 comments

> But they are so scared of their chatbot saying a bad thing and the PR around that they've removed the possibility of doing anything useful with it.

It's not unreasonable to have checks-and-balances on AI content, and there should be.

However, in my testing of GPT-3's content filter when it was released (it could be improved now), it was very sensitive to the point that it had tons of false positives. Given that passing content filter checks is required for productionizing a GPT-3 app, it makes using the API too risky to use, and part of the reason I'm researching more with train-your-own GPT models.

Why should there be checks and balances on AI content? What most people label as "AI" today is literally just fancy statistics. Should there be checks and balances on the use of linear regression analysis and other statistical techniques? Where do we draw the line?
> Should there be checks and balances on the use of linear regression analysis and other statistical techniques?

That rhetorical question actually argues against your point: even in academic contexts, statistics can be used (intentionally or otherwise) to argue incorrect/misleading points, which is why reputable institutions have peer reviews/boards as a level of validation for papers.

The point I was making was more on general content moderation in response to user-generated content, which is required for every service that does so for legal reasons at minimum, as they're the ones who will get blamed if something goes wrong.

Ofcourse statistical techniques need checks and balances, hence peer reviewed academic papers, meta analysis, etc. statistics is a major tool for science these days. science needs checks and balances otherwise it's a pretty idle effort. Without checks and balances, you could just imagine any theory and believe it's the truth because you want to.
But what if it wasn't clearly labeled? I did my MSc thesis on fake reviews and discussed the phenomena known as "covert marketing" a bit. e.g. a guy you're talking to in a bar at some point steers the conversation to the excellent beer he is drinking and heavily recommends it to you. Good enough actors will be very convincing. "Influencers" are a somewhat more ethical alternative that takes advantage of humans' lemming-like nature.

I mean, quite a lot of people truly believe Hilary Clinton is the mastermind behind a DNC run pedophile ring. Yes, she is a problem, but that theory is completely schizophrenic. A NPC masquerading as a real person who spouts positive talking points about Tucker Carlson's respect for Hungary is quite reasonable compared to that and it will suck some people in.

So all it takes is some right wing developers for a not-entirely-just-a-game like Second Life or Minecraft to introduce a bug that allows certain instances of NPC to be unlabeled... or a mod to a game that drives a NPC... and an equivalent to GPT-3 funded by the Kochs or the Mercers...

Very hypothetical, very hand waving. But it is possible. So I can see the PR and legal departments flat out stopping this idea.

Eh, I could still see a clearly labeled chatbot on a video game causing a major PR scandal if it says something offensive. Not really worth the risk.

Pretty bad that they took so long to decide on this, though, pulling out the rug from under developers' feet.